Wayward Angel - Kasey Chambers
It’s interesting what details the mind will find itself focused on when tasked with comparing two similar things. When I think of what sets this album apart from others by Kasey Chambers, I think about its use of banjo (credited to Rod McCormack in the liner notes). Even though it only appears a few times, and never very centrally, the banjo’s presence does stand out to me.Normally associated in my culture with rustic or even uncivilized elements, here the banjo provides an ethereally beautiful sound for songs with a spiritual mood, in particular the title track, Wayward Angel.
The album opens with Pony, which uses old-west imagery to paint a child’s idyll of what adulthood is like: When I grow up I wanna pony / I’m gonna ride her from dusk ‘til dawn. It goes on to imagine adulthood as a mixture of old west imagery and romanticised gender stereotypes, and aptly captures the simplistic attitude children often have toward their view of the future: that once there are no grown-ups to tell them “no,” they will have what they want.. and then be happy. But Pony is not a blindly idealistic song. There is a darkness in the delivery that seems very self-aware, even sarcastic.
The songs that immediately follow, Hollywood and Stronger, drive a cruel wedge of disillusionment between fantasy and reality. Hollywood wistfully bemoans the discrepency between real life and the movies. This is not Hollywood / There is no camera in my room / This is not Hollywood / Flowers grow before they bloom. And of all the innumerated differences between movie-life and real-life, the biggest is that in movies, all the romances have happy endings: If I was in a movie I would never have let you get away. Stronger goes one further and deconstructs the very expectations set up in Pony. It realizes that even when one is older, wiser, stronger, braver, et cetera... well, things still don’t necessarily work out.
Other songs follow this trend of fantasy and disillusionment, but some are made of unbridled, unrelenting optimism and wonder. Mother describes genuine gratitude, and Like a River and Follow You Home describe equally devoted and admiring love. Paper Aeroplane, the only song in Kasey Chambers’s repertoir (that I can think of) with piano accompaniment, describes in understandably heartbreaking terms the kind of love many of us seek above all: the kind that lasts until and even survives after death.
More than the previous albums, this one seems a mixed bag of themes, styles, and moods. That makes it hard to make a suitable conclusion statement to encompass the whole thing.
Next: Carnival
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