On his 1994 debut album,
Bloomed,
Richard Buckner built a memorable song around the line “This is where things start goin’ bad,” but Buckner made that notion the overriding theme of his second full-length release, 1997’s
Devotion + Doubt. Written and recorded in the wake of the collapse of Buckner’s first marriage,
Devotion + Doubt abandons the largely acoustic, string-band-influenced approach of
Bloomed in favor of a stark, dusty sound that suggests a sleepless night in a motel room in the Arizona desert.
J. D. Foster’s production and the accompaniment from
Calexico founders
Joey Burns and
John Convertino is often as spare as a whisper in the dark, but the production is a perfect match for the deep insinuations of Buckner’s textured voice and the artful, impressionistic heartache of the lyrics, and this is a significantly more ambitious and accomplished effort than
Bloomed, as fine as that album was. With the exception of “A Goodbye Rye” (which in the context of this album sounds like a hit single, though it’s hard to imagine what radio format would embrace its high lonesome Americana),
Devotion + Doubt is defined by its open spaces, a fitting metaphor for the sense of absence that comes with divorce, and if this album is subtle, the dynamics allow the tough emotions at play to connect with a force that’s somehow more powerful for the gentleness of its touch.
Bloomed announced to the world that Richard Buckner was a gifted singer/songwriter with tremendous potential;
Devotion + Doubt was a creative left turn that more than lived up to the promise of the debut, and remains one of his most compelling works. (Mark Deming,
AllMusic)
Men aren’t supposed to brood about dying relationships as much as women, but, of course, some of us do. Sensitive guys don’t have to be eunuchs though. We come in a rich array of shades and styles. Even the crudest typology would have to distinguish between the passionate, enigmatic guy-with-a-guitar and the cloying composer of love letters. One would be hard pressed to find a better example of the former than
Richard Buckner, whose 1997 sophomore LP,
Devotion + Doubt, stands as an enduring monument to post-breakup male angst.
The most cohesive and accomplished record in a distinguished catalog,
Devotion + Doubt chronicles the artist’s divorce from his first wife, and, as such, it doesn’t dance particularly well. It is, even by Buckner’s standard, an eminently subdued affair. Though “A Goodbye Rye,” the LP’s lone alt-country rocker, does presage his somewhat livelier follow-up,
Since; most of the tracks on
Devotion + Doubt are delicate and spare. The arrangements are shot through with silences and empty spaces, leaving room for atmospheric instrumental touches and, more importantly, serve to showcase Buckner’s smoky baritone, which alternates between an unapologetic twang and a haunting whisper.
The lyrics on
Devotion + Doubt are among the strongest and most tantalizingly cryptic, of Buckner’s career. Lines like “I looked inside the ring we wear / and read myself to sleep,” which presumably refers to an inscription on the inside of a wedding band, elicit and comfortably accommodate multiple interpretations. When Buckner notes that “vows abound in infidels” at the end of “Ed’s Song,” he underscores the irony that infidelity is, partly, a product of the vows it transgresses. On “4 A.M.,” he embraces contradiction and, indeed, seems to delight in his own ambivalence: “I thought I was cured of any last chance. / Unfastened and floored / now all I want is just a little nothing more.” This sort of exegesis may well be misguided, however, for as Buckner observes in the wonderfully wistful “Figure,” “the words are done / and the silence just smokes on through.” However deconstructed, lines likes these reflect Buckner’s writerly approach to song craft, and their obscurity ultimately makes the occasional moments of clarity on the album all the more exhilarating.
Devotion + Doubt is a famously intimate record, but it is the veiled, almost oblique, quality of the confessions it contains, rather than their candor, that makes it such an interesting personal document. The album’s emotional landscape is complex and not particularly well-lit, and Buckner’s elusiveness on this terrain allows him to be vulnerable and sympathetic while never seeming emasculated or wholly defeated. All of this helps to make
Devotion + Doubt absolutely essential listening for anyone who appreciates serious and, yes, dark songwriting. (Jim David,
https://www.tinymixtapes.com/music-review/richard-buckner-devotion-doubt)In the liner notes to
Devotion & Doubt, Richard Buckner says he originally wrote “Song of 27,” the album’s final track, “as a theme of sorts for an album I wanted to make based on my own family’s characters. I abandoned the project due to the overuse of expletives.” It’s just as well. Instead,
Devotion & Doubt ended up being about whatever you want it to be. It can be about a trip across the country, across time, across your soul. It can be about the slow and painful process of going crazy, or the equally slow and painful process of going sane again. It can be about the one that got away, or the one that still remains, or the one that never showed up. To me, it’s mostly something I can smell. That’s what I remember vividly, about that moment, that place, that feeling. In the faint glow of the hours approaching the dawn—not dusk, but the darkness leading just to the edge of it—that smell still hangs in the air, returning all semblance of reality to a reckoning point. There were brightest highs and bleakest lows, and it happened so fast that sometimes I wonder if it even happened at all. And then I hear “Song of 27” and understand all too well that, yes, it was me in that moving picture, though the flickering projector now casts an empty light upon the wall, the film long since finished, the tape going click-click-click as it spins off the reel, the definitive sound of “over.” And yet there is that smell, lingering, haunting, confirming that even the endings really have no end. Brushes dragged lazily in a circle upon a snare. Echoes of a fading voice as it backs away from the mike on the last line. The resolute twang of acoustic guitar strings nudged, strummed, caressed, buzzed. Salty tears running down the russet neck of a steel guitar. Crickets cutting through the silence of Arizona, whir-buzzing a rhythm track to the desert moon. Strains of an accordion—pushing, pulling, leading, retreating, wanting, waning. “If I had your little two-time figure close just one last time. . .” “Never tell them where it hurts / Keep your bullet safe inside.” “Now all I want is just a little nothin’ more.” Ah yes, the words. Don’t come looking for logic and linear thinking, they are not welcome here. Nor verse-chorus-verse-chorus-bridge-verse-chorus. Nor promises, proclamations, declarations or divinations. All that remains, once the paint has peeled away, is devotion, and doubt. But words, without sound, are mere skeletons. It’s the voice that brings Buckner’s music to flesh; he is, above all else, a singer. It’s a smooth, melodious croon, by nature, but imbued with such a warm, bittersweet darkness that the sound seems to ooze from the speakers in richly layered browntones with every careful cadence. “I saw such light in you,” he wails on “Fater,” to the accompaniment of absolutely nothing, save the betrayed despair of one left behind as the other leaves and travels well. “Of course I’ll choke / Of course I’ll fire,” is his guarantee in “Pull,” as his voice does just that. “Do you want smoke or just a spark?” is the mystery of “Roll,” delivered in a deathly hushed whisper that would serve to fan the flame. And then there’s “Little Wallet Picture,” a snapshot from 1985, a day never to be forgotten, and a vision of a highway that winds alongside the boundaries of the imagination, heat mirages reflecting off the asphalt for miles and miles of desert floor. “This stretch of 99 takes so many lives, and one of them was mine.” Last night I dreamed I was driving down the wrong side of the road on 99 and got slammed head-on by a pickup truck. I have no idea what that means, but somehow my subconsciousness insisted it had something to do with Townes Van Zandt. Then again, Richard Buckner has been known to introduce his song “22” as a song he wrote after listening to too much Townes. So maybe the ghost was just making the rounds last night. “Here in the house of spirits there’s a ghost with a drink,” Buckner confirms in the record’s opening moments. To be sure, ghosts are all over
Devotion & Doubt. Ghosts of highways, postcards and cool-ass shows. Ghosts of 4 a.m., of Kate Rose and Polly, of a goodbye rye. Ghosts of sleepy little dreamers and weepy little ragers. Ghosts of images etched indelibly in the corners of the mind, of souls trapped forever on a single slab of silver-laced film. “Underspent, and too young too / I stumbled onto a picture of you.” But there are no little wallet pictures to trigger that lingering memory. Only the smell remains. . . (Peter Blackstock,
http://nodepression.com/album-review/richard-buckner-devotion-doubt)Another insightful review of this album can be found here:
https://books.google.com/books?id=xbtTqjWx8FsC&lpg=PP1&pg=PA154#v=onepage&q&f=false
