Steve Grozier — All That’s Been Lost
Liner Notes
Written: Saturday August 5th, 2023
Time, especially of late, encircles us. Endlessly looping. Spinning. Familiar images repeating, old sounds re-emerging from the air. Caught in the midst of this life, rolling around us while we swim gradually towards that ever-present horizon. Things moving, progressing, sure, but somehow ever returning. Like a record on repeat.
I remember walking with a childhood friend toward the back rooms of my parents’ house. I remember that friend laughing. Coming to a stop and staring. I thought it was the radio, he said. I remember my brother’s face, guitar hanging, hand mid-air, fingers poised awaiting the strings.
I remember those same back rooms. I remember another guitar hanging, I remember placing my fingers on the fret board, forming the hieroglyph my brother had just taught me. That, and then this. This and then that. And then we were playing a song.
I remember sitting, listening, on the floor of that back room. Reading words, ink-jet-printered on page. Listening along. Learning the chords. Strumming along in my mind. Eventually strumming along upon a stage in a bar, too young to be there.
I remember so many songs from those back rooms. Time circling around.
***
And circling especially for me as this record spins. I remember Twenty-Third Street, but not as it appears here. When I first ventured down Twenty-Third Street it was in a ride in a Waitsian used-car. Hitting something, but not quite what was aimed for. Now the years have dug up that street and replaced it with something new. There is a wider diversity informing the neighbourhood now, different graffiti on the walls, but that old, long abandoned factory stink still hovers, that original spirit still lingers in the air. Familiar images, similar sounds, repeating, but progressing.
There is a swing to the song opening All That’s Been Lost, my brother’s debut album, now. It feels almost like a saunter down the street in question. But here is that Waits-like mirage; beautiful melodies telling us terrible things. There is no freedom here. No strutting. The protagonist lays in their room watching the snow fall, alone. Desperately watching the lights; of the moon, the cars, the marque-neon. Clutching toward sleep, and peace, wishing for company. Finding none. There is dirt on the marque lights. Nothing is clean nor clear. Every bright spot has a darkness splashed across it.
There is a setting of a theme for the record here. The struggle between the dark and the light. The light always somehow permeating through that darkness; creeping in whether wanted or not. It may appear as something unexpected, but that light, that hope, still creeps in.
The cracks that allow the light in are almost as important as the light itself. Track two, Blue and Gold, is a meditation on the importance of those fractures. A meditation on things broken, damaged or lost. The coffee stain on the wooden table that reminds you of the person now gone. The TV static and its white noise only emphasizing the silence of the room. The absence of welcome sound. The air is haunted here, but we reach out; “hold my hand, I’ll be here when the morning comes”.
Things, often, must break before we realise just how much we cherish them. We leave the varnish tainted to remind us of what we have lost, and what still remains. Sonically, Blue and Gold is constructed beautifully to haunt. The reverb lingering around the vocals. The deft touches of Scott Keenan’s piano. The choral backing vocals from Matthew Dickson & producer Roscoe Wilson.
That lush sound leading into the stripped-down beauty of Memories is a perfect transition. A clear-eyed love song carried softly along by Steve’s guitar and Nathan Golub’s double bass and smooth dobro. An ode to growing old with someone and the stories you write together. Memories is so clean and purely presented. It’s hard to write a love song without dropping into platitudes or cliché, but here the exacting details — the morning coffee, the leaves falling and counted years passing, the silver creeping into the hair — are so clearly particular, but so easy to cast onto your own life, exchanging one detail for another. “I will hold you when I’m old, my love, I’ll keep your memories safe”. What more can we ask from love?
Power in the Light, to me, is the core of the album. It is the atmospheric centerpiece that brings the narrative of the record out and distills it to its purest form. There is a weight here, a depth. Wilson’s production, the warmth attained, and the choice of instrumentation — John Dunlop’s prominent bass, Wilson’s backwards guitar effects and gritty lead guitar cresting over Steve’s soft finger-picked acoustic — it all combines to plunge you into the world of the song. It is somehow only three minutes long, but you want to live in it, to swim in it. There is water everywhere in this record, ships leaving the shore, boats rocking in the harbour, rain slicked streets, and the production here offers the sensation of floating. Adrift, perhaps. Power is the struggle, the reaching, the grasping towards the light — the impossible. Hands grabbing at the moonlight reflecting on the swells of the sea at night. This track captures the loss and the hope. The moments we cling to and the moments we try desperately to move past. We are “wind swept but strong in the fight”. We tell ourselves we’re the “biggest game in town” because that, sometimes, is what we need to do to believe we can reach the light.
Sequentially you should flip the record at this point, but it is hard not to drop the needle back three minutes and swim once more.
Charlie’s Old Mustang/Graveyard is where I stop and appreciate the importance of good sequencing. It happens throughout here, but the switch from Power to Charlie’s is a wonderful example. Following Power is not an easy task, so you switch gears. Track 5 is a great country song. I recognize it as another old one from that back room, reimagined. A country shuffle with some delicate electric guitar and smooth lapsteel from Wilson, and a steady pulsing bass from Ali Begg. The imagery and the poetry are brilliant: “Long talons and silver back wings/It’s only shadows that are blowing in the wind”, “She opens her heart at the very break of day/Thunder cracks blowing them pale clouds away”. Steve is a brilliant, concise storyteller in his songs. You can picture the scene, you can fall for the characters in seconds. Charlie’s is the sheer, unvarnished joy of youth spitting in the face of death. The lightning storms don’t scare us now. This track is the youthful embrace of life, the careless chasing of love before the settled love, and settled life, that we meet in Memories.
When the Darkness Comes is a beautiful song and a great highlight of two of the many talented musicians who appear on the album (“send my best out to the boys in my band”). The mournful pedal steel of Tim Davidson and the perfect pleading harmonica of Anton O’Donnell. It’s another stunning country song. Stripped back and raw, worn down by that old Chicago wind. It is another song that balances on the edge of, well, darkness. It captures the gut-drop of depression and isolation. The narrator is both searching for something and hiding from it at once: “She comes to call, but I stay home”, “Here in these bars, it’s real easy to hide”. Sometimes you can’t escape yourself. Sometimes you accept the darkness, but just want some soft comfort to cling to in the dark — that rose-coloured sun.
Loss, as the title would suggest, hovers around this album. Sam, I Know You Tried is the most direct address to the topic of loss, and grief. It is gut wrenching. It is such a true, perfectly rendered image of grief and the process of loss. The confusion. The struggle. The cruelty. The desperate want to hold on for as long as you can; “I’ll burn that lamp down ’til its end”. It is too hard to write about this song. It is heartbreaking, but it is important, and it is a beautiful, a truly beautiful, memorial to those we have all lost.
The album closes with another consideration on the missing, the lost. I Miss My Friend is dedicated to the late Neal Casal and it is a perfect summation of what has come before. The struggle to carry on while losing so much. The search for some light in the darkness; “I miss the past so much that sometimes I see no future”. Perhaps the message in the song, maybe even the record as a whole, is how we document a life, whether in song, ours or theirs, or in preserving the marks they have made; the keeping safe of their memory, however we can. A lamp left burning to light their way home.
***
This album is personal to me, of course, but its themes and soul are universal. Growing old and growing up. And accepting that. Settling in with a loved one, and realising that you no longer tolerate the flaws; you love them, cherish them. Handling, and not handling the losses of life. And trying to comprehend how we are supposed to keep going through them all. Dealing with a life that was never quite what we wanted, but, in its own way, is its own kindness. Its own perfect struggle.
And it is the quest to be kind in the darkness. It is seeing the struggle, and not turning your back. It is remembering who you set out to be and repeating it to yourself. Over and over. To remember who you were. Who you are. Who you hope you will be. Time encircling us.
This record haunts because it reminds us of life and life’s struggles. But we do not turn our back. We remember all of what has been lost. And we ache. And we continue.
