Self and World: On Inara George’s “What Keeps You Up at Night”
The skill, the gift, the blessing, the genius of Inara George — something I don’t think any other singer-songwriter I’ve heard possesses to such a degree — is that her words and her music don’t just “complement” each other. Listening to George, you don’t just hear a tale melodically told, or a melody enhanced by the syllables shaped to sing it. Instead, music and words entwine as one idea. No other words you could imagine could possibly be sung to these tunes, and no other tunes you could imagine could possibly fit these words.
In this way, George’s songs stitch themselves into your memory almost from the first listen. They become objects in the world — things to marvel at, things to circle around, pieces of her self that also have the magical power to become pieces of each listener’s self.
And her voice! She doesn’t just sing like an angel; she sings like the angel the other angels take singing lessons from. Her voice swoops, soars, rising into falsetto or plunging into a brief rasp from which melody momentarily departs, leaving only breath. And through it all, always conversational, always engaging, always human, never grandstanding or grandiose.
What Keeps You Up at Night, her fifth solo album (counting a collaboration with Van Dyke Parks) and the second to be released on her own label, Release Me Records (which has also put out the two most recent albums from her longtime project with Greg Kurstin, the bird and the bee) may be the strongest testament yet to her talents. George paints us scenes of geographical and emotional roots; of love; of journeys made, sometimes simple, sometimes mysterious; of taking risks in the face of aging; even of — most breathtakingly — the history of the land and the universe.
The love songs (“Sensitive Man,” “For Even Just a Minute,” and “ILYM”), to consider these first, seem to deal, very specifically, with very specific individuals: in each, the object of affection is also the object of George’s focused attention. The viewpoint in each sounds delighted and celebratory, and the love expressed feels unconditional: in fact, in “ILYM,” there is a refrain so unconditional that you might expect it to be sung painfully, or defensively, but which instead brims with pride and devotion: “I love you more than you love me, and I’ll love you for as long as you let me.” In another of the love songs, the attention paid to its subject inspires the sudden realization that it’s reciprocated: “What I see in you is what you see in me too.” All three tracks inspire smiles, even as their delicacy and precision can also bring (happy) tears.
These three songs are followed by a quite different one. Inspired by Ursula K. LeGuin’s 1976 essay “The Space Crone,” it’s the monologue of a woman, past childbearing, who wants to be sent into outer space to “represent mankind” (to natives of another planet, according to LeGuin). The woman addresses herself alternately to the sort of men who see women primarily as sexual beings and to the sort of women who, in ignoring the profound transformations and opportunities that menopause has brought to their lives, have effectively resigned themselves to being like men, who experience no such biological changes. The wonderful thing about the lyrics of this song is that George grants the character all of this knowledge and more, while in the essay most of it is in LeGuin’s own voice, and instead LeGuin’s fictional “crone” has to be encouraged to become Earth’s planetary representative because she thinks she’s not important enough. It’s a lovely twist, accentuated by the gentle but assertive Tropicália vibe of the vocal and the music.
After “Space Crone” comes possibly one of George’s all-time greatest songs: “America,” again a monologue, this time of a very real person on a very earthbound voyage: driving with her son into Arizona where, seemingly on a whim, they stop at the Grand Canyon (“ ’cause it’s something that you’ve got to see”) and even have their photos taken there (“ ’cause that’s how we make memories”). But while the speaker here seems to praise the traditional sense of liberation that comes from being out on the open road, some things are also troubling her: first, that “all this land we’re on was stolen,” and then the presence of “an eagle that’s flying above me, reminding me how I am not really free.” And this sense of trouble seems to persist when she later stops in a place where “the flags by the mailboxes are standing their ground.” In this one line, George seems to capture both the kind of aggressive patriotism represented by those flags and the almost two-thirds of the U.S. that has “stand-your-ground” statutes on the books — the bizarre laws by which some of us can legally do violence to others merely because we claim to feel threatened by those others. It’s a chilling, heart-stopping moment in a song full of perceptive observations, sung to stately, almost elegiac piano accompaniment played by Larry Goldings, joined after the first verse by Bukka Allen on melancholic accordion.
Next up is a cover of Jackson Browne’s 1973 song “For Everyman,” in which Browne contrasted his friends’ desire to escape a dysfunctional America with his own plans to stay and be part of a larger community that would work on the country’s problems from within. George’s version is minimal and haunting, sung to acoustic guitar, stand-up bass, and droning strings, and accompanied on the choruses by the beautiful background vocals of Amir Yaghmai. And George’s voice puts an indelible personal stamp on the song with her utterly individual emphases and phrasing.
Six amazing tracks — should be enough, right? But there are two more I haven’t mentioned yet, which bookend these six and might even be the most amazing tracks on the album. And each of the two speaks passionately to the other. In “Ventura Blvd,” the opening track, George presents some details of her parents’ and grandparents’ lives in Los Angeles, the city where she too makes her home. In the days when her grandfather had hunted ducks near it (she sings), Ventura Boulevard was “two dirt roads as far as you want to go,” but now those roads are unrecognizable beneath the “asphalt and industry” of the city and its freeway system. All the speaker has left of that world are her memories, and the presence of a bird knocking outside her window (indicated on the track, heartbreakingly, by Gabe Noel’s bouzouki). “We all sprung from the water,” George sings, “and crawled up to the land. And then began our history of the sins of man.” Then, this crushing assertion: “To have so much, and then for what? Just covered up until it’s unrecognizable.” The bird might offer comfort, an alternative, in the face of this, but maybe not — the way George sings “just covered up” is devastating.
The album closes with “Singularity,” George’s extraordinary setting of a poem of the same name by Marie Howe. The poem allows George to revisit some of the themes from “Ventura Blvd” in more apocalyptic but no less gorgeous terms. Howe sees “the singularity we once were . . . a tiny tiny dot brimming with is” as having been destroyed by humans’ willful separation from it:
(Incidentally, the instrumentation in the concluding section of this song uncannily recalls parts of The Velvet Underground & Nico, and there’s something inexplicably wondrous in the thought of Moe, John, and the ghosts of Lou and Sterling being ambassadors for singularity.)
Ending the album with the Howe setting also allows What Keeps You Up at Night to circle back on itself: the poem’s last word, “home,” returns us to thoughts of George’s home, below the freeway’s rush, so lovingly depicted and mourned in “Ventura Blvd.”
See? There is nothing predictable about an Inara George song — nothing. And yet we hear that each song is exactly as it should be. I don’t know how she does it. I’m not sure how anyone could do it. But I’m so glad and grateful that she does.
