All My CDs, pt 18: The Captain

The Captain - Kasey Chambers

It may not be obvious to the casual observer, but I’m actually very fond of travel. For a while in my late teens I was actually more at home in a Greyhound bus station than in my own house, taking solo expeditions to visit relatives before I had my driver’s license. Once I was driving, I relished the chance to spend hours on the highway with only some handwritten directions and an unhealthy amount of caffeinated drinks. One of the highlights of my young adulthood involved the post-midnight decision to join two friends on a twenty-four-hour round-trip to Philadelphia in search of specialized materials for a wedding dress.

 Nowadays my work schedule and other responsibilities tend to keep me relatively homebound, but the wanderlust is starting to settle in and I’ve been taking daytrips to places like Canton and Ravenna, where dwell folks whose only flaw is that they didn’t have the good sense to live in the Cleveland area.

Without a doubt, the best album I’ve encountered to accompany these days spent in transit is The Captain by Kasey Chambers. There is something about folk rock and country that lends itself especially to long highway drives, but it also helps that The Captain actually contains two songs explicitly about travel (Don’t Talk Back and Mr. Baylis) and two about homesickness (These Pines and Southern Kind of Life). A few others contain more oblique references to travel, such as Last Hard Bible and You Got the Car. Lastly, We’re All Gonna Die Someday wraps up the album with the kind of “life’s short, act recklessly” sentiment that often accompanies youthful journeying. I’m not sure if these common threads qualify The Captain as a concept album, but it’s close enough for me.

Compared to Barricades & Brickwalls, which I reviewed last time, The Captain is much more upbeat, but sad songs are still one of Chambers’s strong suits. This is especially evident in Don’t Go, which I must have cried along with at least once each time I’ve been dumped. You Got the Car sounds like the same narrator after a year’s worth of bitterness has still failed to heal those wounds. Other songs will fool you; Cry Like A Baby sounds like the title of a sad country song but is actually rather optimistic, and describes the persistence of childlike enthusiasm. Like Barricades & Brickwalls, I find this album to be especially useful for cheering an unhappy soul.

It is quite impossible to choose a favorite song on this album, because I love several for very different reasons. With some effort, I have chosen two that you should check out even if you’re not usually into country: Don’t Talk Back, as the best travel song I’ve ever encountered, and We’re All Gonna Die Someday, for anyone who has ever said “YOLO” or “Carpe Diem” or “F it all.”

Next: Wayward Angel