Mo Leverett: Autumn Years. Release 2020
Genre: Imminently listenable Chicory-Blues, Pirate Folk, Renegade Gospel, with small instrumental ensemble.
(This is a review of Autumn Years 2020, but I also reference an earlier work - Invisible Child 2016 - that I picked up at the same time.)
Spotify Link
Have you ever listened to an album 40 times in two weeks? For whatever reasons, Autumn Years by Mo Leverett fits my inner man like my favorite sneakers fit my feat. I wear them because they fit, they fit because I wear them.
I am at a strange place with respect to music. I have finally discovered that I can use Spotify to make lists, jump around and sample. And I have found not a few newbies of incredible talent and worth. But there are a handful of people who’ve cut such deep grooves in my soul that I am creased--like a bend in the knee. I want to live in everything they create. It is with some shame then, that I almost missed two albums by one of the people I claim as essential.
For the unacquainted Mo is a man of complex pedigree. Would-be football player turned inner city minister --turned pastor-- turned out on his ear. Gritty blues singer with taste for redemption, God’s righteousness, and quality tobacco. Dad. Would-be lover, left to stew. I don’t know where Mo is right now in relationship to relationships. Last I knew (some many years back) he was picking up in the wake of a downed marriage of substantial years. I joined him first in misery, then in joy as he celebrated the healing work of a new union. Then--Never touted loudly...A blind side. Two down.
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Creating music and albums in the midst of real life trauma is tricky business. In part, because it takes time to write and record music. By the time a tune is released it may no longer match where the artist is in life. When you sing of a love who is no longer part of your life, what do you do with the music? I am listening to both Invisible Child and Autumn Years in the fall of 2020, which is odd. Not only has this been the pinnacle year for all things blues...but I happen to know, from things I read on Facebook, that Mo has been through a ringer. And not just a punch but a pummel.
My quick guess. Invisible Child (2016) was largely created before the quiet collapse of Mo’s second marriage. It is weird to listen to in retrospect. It is like watching a movie for the second time, only this time you know what’s about to hit the fan.
Now I am listening to Autumn Years. I do not know where it falls as a production, against a more recent tragedy in life of the Leverett family. What I do know, Mo knows grief. He knows what it is like to see people he has cherished taken away. He knows the disorienting blows of a ravaged world. That “shell shock” haunts his music. You can listen to the larger catalogue of Mo music and know that he comes to his blues honestly.
And if that was all Mo was about, the world would have in its wreckage, another troubadour of misery.
What is strange about Autumn Years is its pervasive warmth and tranquility. Mo has taken a novel step of placing an instrumental track between each of his sung songs. Mo's voice and lyrics sometimes run dark. His guitar plays gentle and warm. Like an Indian summer. Like warm wheat bread. I am hearing instruments below the surface. Banjo. Yuke. Delightful Buddy Greene harmonica. I know too that Mo has been listening to Bruce Cockburn. (I know this because Mo has said so, and I too listen to Bruce.)
I don’t know what is different on production level, but I feel a greater sense of low notes? … It is almost as if the storm has passed, knocked the hell out of the landscape, downed power lines, and strewn wreckage. Then the sun comes up, and flowers poke through the shattered glass. Or something like that.
My sense. Mo is one of the “lucky” human beings who has had his whole sense of self worth so battered, that he has no place left to camp, but in God. He cannot feed you his past. It is sick. He can not sell you his religious credentials. They have been questioned. Or removed. He cannot give you the present. He is hemorrhaging beneath the smoke. He cannot sell you his virtue… He knows who he is.
And all that would be a terrible, terrible place to be, except for Christ who is our all in all, who lifts damaged souls, who breathes life into lungs filled with water.
And so it is that Mo, in his Autumn Years, continues to sing Mo themes. He sings songs for others getting married. He sings of the beautiful thorns. He sings of water and stars and the quality of light. He alludes to loss. All the while held securely in those powerful arms.
I do not know if it is purposeful, but when I listen to Autumn Years I take in the peace.
Here is a quick run down for me of highlights and thoughts.
The opening sung song--Riding out the Storm, establishes a theme for the album: perseverance in the face of trauma. Very recently I had occasion to listen to an audio version of “Their Eyes Were Watching God, by Zora Neal Hurston. TEWWG illustrates, among other things, what it means to weather a hurricane. (As if hurricanes can be weathered.) And so it is, that Mo has lived both his physical life (by virtue of where he has lived) and his inner life to the rhythm of seasonal bashing.
And with that, seasons of repair.
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The many instrumental inclusions on this album help push a subliminal theme that counters Mo’ predilections for grit. It is as if we are given the opportunity to breath, or sigh, or heal, between lamentation and emotional weight.
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Should you ask me my favorite songs on this album, three make that four stand out.
There is the rather crunchy, chain-gang chorus of Crown of Thorns, in which Mo sees beauty in the darkest places.
There is Blood on the Mountain--what could be an instrumental track for "To Kill a Mockingbird."
There is Shooting Star a song, of such melodic and visual beauty, that the whole thing lingers in my soul, long after the hearing.
Finally, there is “Slash” (a song that Mo told me was one of his favorites) This song cooks with gas on multiple levels. Poetry. Layered multi-voice choral production… and the foundational concept. The very same God who allows ravage (even permitting slash) also binds our wounds.
Or as sung by Mo
The till to the soil
Deep tracks left behind
Like scars on the earth
Like scars in my mind
But seedlings will grow
from from some other realm
And sunshine will sow
With clouds overwhelm
My heart learned this theme
still when I was a child
The bigger the dreams
the harder the trial
The harder the fall
the swifter embrace
The deeper the slash, profounder the grace….
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I have said this before, but say it again. There is an ethos inside of Autumn Years that is more than anyone song. It as if the collected whole speaks to a condition of
Divine Holding. Or Mo knows repose. And we sit with him on the porch in the fading light of an autumn eve, replete with chill and smoke and sturdy coffee.
Thank you Mo - a friend I have never met - for giving me this warm flannel shirt, these warm audio slippers, this soundtrack to live life in the waiting.
