Skip to main content

The Wailers – I’m Gonna Put It On (1965)

If you are like me, and Bob Marley’s biggest hits are too familiar to sound splendid, at least not very often, only on particular occasions, when the sunlight’s at a particular and easygoing angle, then instead your June may benefit, as mine has, from the earliest of Marley’s material, from back when reggae had more doo-wop in it, and rinky-dink piano, and the Wailers were like a summerier Ink Spots, tenderly crooning, lovingly consoling, passionfruit-sour, calling out their thank-yous for every carefree day.

<iframe width="100%" height="315" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/O8VBJoBiwRg" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen=""></iframe>

Jake Nicoll – My Friends (2016)

Perhaps Jake Nicoll would be more famous if he threw away everything that makes him special. If he moved away from St. John’s, where he plays in his friends’ bands and runs a small recording studio. If he produced records for Martha Wainwright and Patrick Watson instead of Hard Ticket and All The Wiles. If he spent less time making art and more time selling it, hustling his songs to prime-time TV’s music supervisors. If Nicoll did all this, maybe he would already be playing bigger rooms in Vancouver, Ottawa and Edmonton. Maybe he would have a typical deal with one of the country’s overextended record labels. Maybe he’d have more money. I can almost imagine it: a version of Nicoll living in an Ossington condo, with robust grant funding and an active Twitter account, writing songs that are emptied-out and meaningless.

Good music is made in the big city. It’s made with grant money on overextended labels, by middle-class musicians with soundtrack credits. But it’s also made by people who have cleaved other paths, privileging different values. Working alone or with friends, Nicoll, who is still young, has released at least a dozen albums – including a new double LP – in relative obscurity. These records are collections of experiments – trials and errors, treasures and discoveries, made by someone who feels the freedom to explore. They feel like gifts. When Nicoll e-mailed me to say I might like these, he admitted that most of the music from his scene “doesn’t find the mainland.”

“The isolation [in Newfoundland] is part of what makes it feel like such a creative Never Never Land,” he wrote, “though of course [that] is a double-edged sword.”

The finest of the musician’s recent experiments is the shatteringly gorgeous My Friends. This song recalls the best work of Sufjan Stevens – cyclic, meditative – but with a lo-fi fuzziness which Stevens polished away long ago. That word, “fuzziness,” might suggest coziness, comfort. No: I mean the live-wire buzz of guitar fuzz, DIY rock. The way deep feelings, old loves, can come edged with something menacing. With its swaying falsetto and out-of-phase electric guitars, Nicoll’s My Friends seems like a rebuttal to the LCD Soundsystem song of a similar name. That track was ascendant, gently triumphant: Nicoll’s is warier, at home with the uneasy feeling of staring at your soul-sucking phone, scrolling through all those hundreds of names.

Sean Michaels received the 2014 Scotiabank Giller Prize for his novel Us Conductors. He is the editor of the music blog Said the Gramophone.