”When You Get Lost Inside Your Dream:” Richard Edwards’ Lemon Cotton Candy Sunset
I didn’t watch much of this year’s Grammys broadcast. I’ve always been pretty bad about keeping up with pop music, and have only gotten worse with time. There were a lot of new releases last year, some of which I heard or heard of — Lorde’s Melodrama, Fleet Foxes Crack-Up!, Father John Misty’s Pure Comedy, Nick Cave & the Bad Seeds’ Skeleton Tree, to name a few — and many more that I had not. In that spirit, I thought it fitting to write about one artist’s 2017 release that deserved a lot more attention — Lemon Cotton Candy Sunset by Richard Edwards.
I first became acquainted with Edwards’ music under the name of his old outfit, Margot and the Nuclear So and So’s. After multiple recommendations and seeing the music video for their song “Quiet as a Mouse,” I bought their debut album, The Dust of Retreat on CD at the end of 2011, nearly 6 years after its initial release in 2006. It became an immediate favorite. I loved the writing, the production, the instrumentation, all of it really. I was so smitten with it that I later wrote a long, gushing Amazon review saying exactly that, back in my naïve, brief phase as a self-appointed music critic for Amazon at the age of 17.
The Dust of Retreat was in semi-constant rotation on my iPod classic and CD player through most of the next year, when I soon after purchased three of the band’s other releases: Animal/Not Animal, and Buzzard. The band had moved to a major label, Epic, by the time of their follow-up to The Dust of Retreat, but there was one problem — the band wanted their album one way, and Epic another. So they went ahead and released them both; Animal, available as both a download and on vinyl, was the band’s preferred release (and they asked that you listen to it first), whereas Not Animal was Epic’s preference. Still, both albums retained a similar chamber pop style that had drawn me to the band initially.
Buzzard left the chamber pop behind for the buzzards, opting for a grungier pop sound that was no less enthralling. Buzzard retained the same quality writing I loved about the band’s earlier releases, now with a sharper, rougher, almost claustrophobic edge, stripping the sweeter melancholy of Dust and Animal for something rawer. Buzzard also marked Margot’s return to an independent label, Joyful Noise, which they started themselves.
As I quickly caught myself up on all of their releases, they went and got heavier, releasing the follow up to Buzzard, entitled Rot Gut, Domestic, in 2012. Forget the melancholy of Dust and Animal, or the loneliness of Buzzard, Rot Gut, Domestic pitches camp in the darkness and revels in it by comparison. It is Margot’s loudest release, with rollicking electric guitars that make Buzzard sound tame by comparison. In addition to Lemon Cotton Candy Sunset, I have found myself listening to Rot Gut, Domestic often throughout writing this piece, since it’s the Margot release I least fully understood at the time of its release. Upon my recent listens, particular stand-outs are “Books About Trains,” “A Journalist Falls in Love With Death Row Inmate #16,” and of course “The Devil.” The last of which has always been a particular favorite.
2014’s “Slingshot to Heaven” then, was another change in direction. While not quite Buzzard or Rot Gut unplugged, or a return to the Dust-y days of yore, Slingshot keeps it simple, stripped down, and sunnier. I was in college when this one came out, and I remember buying the deluxe edition that also came with a bonus DVD, the soundtrack of which — “Tell Me More About Evil,” would later be released in its own right as well. This soundtrack featured an even more intimate collection of takes on “Slingshot.” Often with just an acoustic guitar and some sound effects, to me, this version evoked a sense of warm, pastoral summer nights and camp fires.
And for a while that was the last I heard of Mr. Richard Edwards. Over the next few years, I’d follow him primarily through his social media profiles, curious about what he was up to and when the next Margot release would be. His postings were often just as much about the new songs he was working on as they were about his health, specifically on his struggle with C. Diff, which had previously caused Margot and the Nuclear So and So’s to cancel dates on their tour in promotion of Slingshot to Heaven. When he went through his boxes of old recordings from the Margot and pre-Margot days, I bought a copy of his first band’s album, Archer Avenue’s I Was An Astronaut, eager for more music from an artist I’d come to admire. He would also put something out on Soundcloud periodically, I assumed for the follow-up to “Slingshot” that he alluded to.
Then, in 2017, I heard the news — there wouldn’t be another Margot album, but a Richard Edwards solo album, Lemon Cotton Candy Sunset. OK, let’s see where this goes, I said to myself. I bought the CD the day it came out and had it shipped to my dorm room. Thankfully, I didn’t have to wait too long since it also came with a download.
Sometimes you just know. From the first notes of “Lil Dead-Eyed,” I could tell that this album was something special. Combining the sunnier feel of Slingshot, the rougher edge of Buzzard, and layered arrangements worthy of Dust of Retreat and Animal/Not Animal, Lemon Cotton Candy Sunset blew its predecessors out of the water. Here was a beautiful, elegant, moving statement of anguish. There are 14 tracks, though two are more brief soundscapes than songs (“Beware the Golden Fang,” and “chakra khan,”).
If there’s a word for feeling like something is familiar, something akin to musical déjà vu without having actually experienced the thing before, the opening track “Lil Dead-Eyed” feels like that. Maybe it’s because it reminds of Led Zeppelin’s “Going to California,” though ironically the opening line finds Edwards declaring he’s bored of the Golden State, and New York City too. Bored as he may be, the song is a prelude filled with an undeniable sense of something coming around the corner. After all, boredom is certainly the start to a great adventure. All done with an acoustic guitar, some electric ornamentation, and a few well-timed vocal harmonies.
“Git Paid” goes electric. Lemon was recorded in Los Angeles, and you can hear that here. Somehow, as much as “Lil Dead-Eyed” feels like a perfect opener, listening to this song feels much more like the former is a prologue, and this is the album’s first proper chapter. Either way, it makes for a great soundtrack for sunset highway driving (this whole album does), and is also one of many showcases to come of Edwards’ beautifully sung falsetto. My first impression of “Fool” was that the opening guitar line reminded me of Radiohead’s “No Surprises,” before it gets a little heavier in the vein of Buzzard, though not for a moment does it lose the forward momentum that has been building over the course of the album thus far.
This momentum comes to a head in the fifth song and lead single, “Disappeared Planets.” This isn’t Margot anymore, but that’s OK. It is also worth listening to the demo, which Edwards posted on his Soundcloud, to hear how the song evolved from a lone acoustic guitar to a full band. It is a beautiful song about absence, as much of this album is. Also, yet another showcase of Edwards’ voice. I must have played this at least 20 times on repeat the first weekend the album was out.
“Management of Savagery,” starts slower, though it doesn’t stay so for long. The beginning alone, sans vocals, would be a terrific soundtrack or ambient piece, evoking the view of a sunset from the beach, and is of my absolute favorite musical moments on this album. Despite having played this song over and over again, I continue to love the musical painting that is created by its arrangement. Speaking of beaches, it also reminded me a little of the Neil Young’s classic song “On the Beach,” but with a restlessness that prevents Edwards from ever really settling into one place musically. It builds and builds, one piece at a time, until returning to a brief echo of that beautiful sunset-sounding beginning.
The more relaxed “When You Get Lost” laments how “when you get lost inside your dream/that’s when it all goes wrong.” “Lemon” is a faster, louder song that feels like it’s bursting at its seams with energy, and kick-starting the album’s last act. “Rollin’, Rollin’, Rollin’,” and “Pornographic Teens,” are two similarly up-tempo songs, sandwiching the slower, almost Beatles-like “Sister Wives.”
And then there’s “Moonwrapped,” ending the Lemon Cotton Candy journey with the lightest touch. I really can’t say too much about this one, other than there’s a haunting music video that goes along with it, since you should just give it a listen for yourself. “Moonwrapped” is a song that stops you dead in your tracks for its sheer authenticity and beauty. Edwards himself wrote in a longer piece for Talkhouse, how it was originally intended as a wedding present for his wife and reworked for the album after their divorce. It’s fitting that this is the concluding song on an album about absence, because nowhere on this record is absence felt more achingly than this one.
As I’ve listened to this album, I keep thinking about Bob Dylan’s Blood on the Tracks. In a 1975 interview, Dylan said to Mary Travers, “a lot of people tell me they enjoy that album. It’s hard for me to relate to that I mean…people enjoying that kind of pain?” Funnily enough, “You’re a Big Girl Now,” from Blood on the Tracks, appears on Edwards’ Spotify playlist of songs he listened to while recording the album. Edwards’ personal circumstances are fundamentally the DNA of this album, and he’s been quite upfront about this from the get-go; he himself wrote in the Talkhouse piece how “some records you make because it’s been a couple of years and you have some songs that you think are pretty good. Others burn a hole inside of you so hot that you’ll do anything to get them out.”
With a less capable songwriter, lyricist, producer, or performer, the sentiments here could easily come across as forced, melodramatic, or overly personal. They don’t. Much of the success of Lemon Cotton Candy Sunset is in the emotional honesty of both the performances and the songs themselves. In short, there are a myriad of ways that any single ingredient on this album could have gone wrong in one direction or another, but the stars aligned. Instead, the pain and absence is sincerely wrought throughout, making for a listen that has both catharsis and staying power.
