There’s something about the twang and drawl of country music that feels particularly well suited to the way we like to tell the American narrative. Country began as a rural genre, born in isolated Southern enclaves; its first stars yodelled or sang their way out of obscurity, then revelled in relating the tale, disclosing everything they’d gained and lost along the way. Country musicians have shouldered much of the work of establishing a national identity in song. Gratitude, pride, and swashbuckling self-determination synchronize nicely with pedal steel. So does a deeply embedded sense of grief.
John Moreland, a songwriter from Tulsa, Oklahoma, is not only a country artist—his work is just as indebted to folk and rock music—but he seems to draw from the same winsome, melancholic well as Hank Williams, who, in 1949, wrote “I’m So Lonesome I Could Cry,” still the high-water mark for spiritually ruinous country anthems. (Elvis Presley, in his “Aloha from Hawaii” TV special, in 1973, referred to it as “the saddest song I’ve ever heard in my life.”) Moreland, like Williams, writes easy, sauntering melodies that evoke the sensation of drifting downstream in a ramshackle skiff. Yet he imbues them with moments of deep compunction. The dissonance in Moreland’s songs lies not in their structure—there are no hard angles or jagged bits—but in the ruefulness in his voice and the stories he tells.
Moreland was born in 1985 in Longview, Texas. His family relocated to northern Kentucky when he was young, and he grew up near the Ohio River, not far from Cincinnati. Northern Kentucky’s regional identity is not quite Southern and not quite Midwestern; instead, it’s blankly pleasant in a way that makes all futures seem possible. It is a place from which anything or anyone could credibly come.
Moreland grew up on punk and hardcore records, and internalized a strong do-it-yourself ethos early on. “When you’re eighteen and your favorite bands are eighties hardcore bands, how do you find somebody like Guy Clark? It’s kind of a complicated path,” he told American Songwriter, in 2015. His father introduced him to folk and country music, though he didn’t become a fan of those genres until he caught Steve Earle’s video for “Rich Man’s War,” a protest song, on television.
Moreland released his first record, “Endless Oklahoma Sky,” which he made with the Black Gold Band, in 2008; “Big Bad Luv,” which was released this spring on 4AD, is his seventh. Moreland’s decision to sign with an independent label known for issuing albums by underground bands like the Cocteau Twins and the Pixies seems like an acknowledgment of his punk-rock youth—a deliberate and willful disregard for expectations. Musically, Moreland mostly forgoes punk’s antagonism. Rather than struggling against heartache, his best tracks are almost shrugging. (One is titled “Amen, So Be It.”) He appears less plainly aggrieved about his pain than many of his peers are; musicians like Sturgill Simpson, Jason Isbell, and Chris Stapleton draw from comparable sources but write more vexed and obviously cathartic songs. Moreland doesn’t buck against anything. He takes sadness, surveys it, and puts it aside.
Yet Moreland is still fiercely present in his work. It is as if, just by listening to him, a person is taken into his confidence. That trust—the negligible distance between what Moreland feels and what he sings—can create a beguiling intimacy. He is confessing, but expects no absolution. This quality makes him an obvious descendant of Townes Van Zandt, who was equally resigned to a certain amount of suffering. At times, he also reminds me of Bruce Springsteen—they share the same gruffness of tone, warmth, and knack for making a straightforward song into something revelatory.
Moreland is expert at leading a full band. “Sallisaw Blue,” which opens “Big Bad Luv,” is a rollicking, honky-tonk song, heavy on piano and harmonica; it feels destined for roadhouse jukeboxes, where it will play in perpetuity while patrons order more beers. But he does something singular when he’s alone with an acoustic guitar. “Break My Heart Sweetly,” from his 2013 album, “In the Throes,” is a devastating ballad about not knowing how to get over someone. “I guess I can’t let go ’til you wreck me completely, break my heart sweetly, drape me in blue,” he sings, strumming along. He performed the song on “The Late Show with Stephen Colbert” in 2016, wearing a crimson T-shirt, glasses, and a scraggly beard. His voice slipped and splintered a little each time he sang the word “heart.” For performers accustomed to dark and cramped rock clubs, network-television performances can elicit a funny stiffness, but Moreland—who barely looked up as he played—was so arresting that, when he finished, you could practically hear the audience exhale.
As a lyricist, Moreland is uninterested in indictments; there are no heroes or villains, he suggests, just folks making their way through the world the best they can. (“You’ve been falling short of golden, I’ve been every kind of wrong,” he admits, on “Every Kind of Wrong.”) The question that nags him isn’t so much how to reason through the grand mystery of human relations—“I don’t own anything, you don’t know shit,” he sings on “Sallisaw Blue,” dispensing with the idea of a neat resolution—but how to make peace with the fact that people usually muck things up in the end. Navigating heartbreak can feel a little like being mired in quicksand—the more you struggle, the deeper you sink—which makes Moreland’s approach to healing feel kind. Don’t worry about it, he seems to say; it’s going to hurt no matter what you do. “It’s no use,” he sings. “God bless these blues.”
The title of Moreland’s new record is a tweak of “Big Bad Love,” a collection of short stories, from 1990, by the Mississippi-born writer Larry Brown. Brown’s narrators are lonesome, uncompanionable types, yet they yearn for more. “This can’t be living,” one says. “I drink too much Old Milwaukee and wake up in the morning and it tastes like old bread crusts in my mouth.” They lurch down country roads, fishing lukewarm cans of beer from front-seat coolers, worrying about money or never finding the best person to love. Such is the price of seeking. “There’s a neon sign that says ‘Big Bad Love,’ ” Moreland sings. “And a noose hanging down from the heavens above.” If you want one, expect the other.
“Big Bad Luv,” much like Brown’s book, is about wanting. Moreland’s songs are populated by figures in comparable states of tumult: broken men metabolizing loss, trying to figure out what love means and how much anyone can reasonably expect of it. Moreland seems to regard this existential duress almost fondly. It is, at least, fodder for the work, enabling, as he puts it, “the living I have earned on love gone wrong.”
There is something gloriously American about turning pain into business—in the end, everything is grist for the mill. “If we don’t bleed, it don’t feel like a song,” he offers, on “Old Wounds.” The idea is to take your hits and keep going—don’t slow down to survey the damage. “Slumming I-40 with American songs,” Moreland whoops. “They can bury our bodies in American wrongs.” The only unforgivable American sin, it seems, is to give up on yourself.
This is Moreland’s first release since getting married, and he can be defensive, in interviews, about being labelled a hopeless depressive. “I’m a real person who is sad sometimes, and happy other times, and that’s how it is,” he told Rolling Stone, earlier this year. But even the most sanguine moments on “Big Bad Luv”—“Love ain’t a sickness, though I once thought it was,” he sings on “Lies I Chose to Believe,” nodding toward explicit growth—betray the battles it took for him to get there. ♦
