The Albums That Matter: Big Bad Luv

Joe runs through every album on his iPod, mostly in alphabetical order, and offers some brief thoughts. Check out previous columns HERE.

Big Bad Luv

John Moreland

2017

I don't think anyone is interpreting Big Bad Luv as necessarily "important" in the grand scheme of things. Does it really matter, when these small exercises in Americana songwriting can be found for a dime a dozen all over the cultural landscape? No, not in the long run. But Big Bad Luv is important to me. It matters to me. Out of all the generic Americana LPs released in the past three years, this is one of the few that made it to my ears, and made an impression on me for whatever reason. I could try to parse through those reasons, but ultimately it's going to boil down to coincidence—somehow, I started listening to Big Bad Luv, and due to circumstance and luck, it stuck with me.

If I were to make some general statement about the quality of Moreland's music, I might be inclined to say it comes down to his voice. The vocal performance is in the great tradition of the whiskey-strained, and of the tears of a cowboy. Mix that with the not-sure-if-this-is-actually-a-thing-I-should-say tradition of fat men having the most soulful voices. John Moreland's mass allows his voice to have the same gravity. You're literally pulled toward what you can only assume is the honest gospel of Moreland. When he says something like "Don't you think truth / comes at the price of youth?" you believe him.

If I were to present you with an either/or option as to whether you are going to like Big Bad Luv (say, maybe, you were offended by my "fat man" generalization and wish me to say it another way), then it probably comes down to whether you like the genre of "Americana," which is the genre tag we affix to those country songs that sound more "authentic" than the Brooksian pop-country that shows up on my parents' Alexa. Do you like dusty country ballads and honky tonk stompers from the true cowboys (whether literally, or, in this case, in spirit)? Then sure, throw Big Bad Luv in the pile. If you don't, there's nothing to see here.

I get it. All this honesty and emotional heft can be a little much for me sometimes, especially in the context of a rural world I've never know personally. That's why I tend to consider Americana a musical genre that works more on a surface level than anything else. I could sift through Moreland's lyrics here, and discover some pain and some yearning... if I wanted to.

But instead, I'm content to use something like "It Don't Suit Me (like Before)" and its rambling steel-pedal shuffle as a soundtrack to a chill morning hang on a back porch. I don't really need to know John Moreland's motivation because I can't imagine it's all that different from any other Americana artist working today. Is "Latchkey Kid" any more meaningful then any soulful nostalgia that Jason Isbell could pump out? Probably not. But it's nice to sit back and relax and just let it happen to you, instead of investing in it.

But ultimately, yeah, I don't fucking know. John Moreland's Big Bad Luv is just another one of my albums that I can listen to at any time and continue to appreciate as time marches forward. If I continued to use this framework for The Albums That Matter, then the column wouldn't really amount to much. But sometimes, that's really all there is. I have no pretense that I'll be able to convince you to listen to this album, or to hear it for anything deeper than what it is. All I know is that I like it, and in a world where thousands of hours of music are released upon an unsuspecting world every week, it's a wonder that this particular album was able to cut through and to remain in my life. That's what makes it important. That's what makes it matter, ultimately. It matters to me, anyway.

~~~~~~~~~

If this album sounds interesting, then try this song: "Lies I Chose to Believe"

~~~~~~~~~

Stray Observations

• As always, it's interesting to read some interviews with and some features on today's featured artist from around the time the album was released. I did that today. I don't want you to think I phoned it in. It's just, sometimes I struggle with finding a personal connection with the music, but even so, I can still find it "important." Albums can be important as a work of art rather than an exercise in self-reflection. But now I'm just going in circles.
• Back to the interviews: a few thoughts. I enjoyed this interview with The Boot, in which Moreland talks about the joys of creating music with other people. I guess his last three album were all created solo, i.e. Moreland played every instrument himself. I cannot personally imagine doing something like that. In a hypothetical universe in which I am creating music instead of simply consuming it, I have to assume I would need the energy of others to create something I really truly liked. I hope Moreland found that in the social aspects of Big Bad Luv's creation. If he did, then that joy is certainly personified in certain aspects of this album.
• I also enjoyed this feature from the New Yorker, in which Moreland talks about growing up on punk music. It's always fascinating to me how an artists' listening habits are either reflected or contrasted in the music they create. How does a love of punk music translate into making Big Bad Luv? I have no clue, but I think it's interesting.
• Also, Moreland states in that feature that he wasn't really even into this type of music (country, Americana, whatever you wanna call it) until he saw Steve Earle perform on television. I only know Earle from his supporting role in The Wire, but he's been on my mind lately because his son, Justin Townsend Earle, recently passed away from a drug overdose. JTE, also a country blues singer, has an album called Harlem River Blues that I've been getting into since he died. I have to say that it's hitting me the same way that Big Bad Luv did when I first heard it.
• Unfortunately, I've been struggling with LP5, Moreland's Big Bad Luv follow-up. It came out this year, and it's a lot slower than BBL. From reading all these interviews, it appears that Big Bad Luv might be the exception in Moreland's discography, and that most of them are slow country ballads. I respect it, but I don't have much motivation to explore the rest of the catalog because of it.
• ALBUM COVER: If we're talking about how Moreland's music is "honest," then I can't imagine anything more honest than a cover that says "I drive a piece of shit car," especially because the good ol' boys in the country love their shiny trucks. Moreland is not of that tradition, he is merely commenting on it. This is what I get from a picture of a car on an album cover.
• ALBUM NAME: There's a movie called Big Bad Love. I've never seen it, and might possible never will, so I do not know if this is a reference to it or not. A quick look through the Wikipedia page says no, they are not connected in any way.
• PREVIOUSLY ON PoYB: "Amen, So Be It" was the 17th best song of 2017. It didn't make the Top 20 Albums list, but would've made a Top 30, I'm sure.
• As noted in the Best Songs of 2017 description, there are some song descriptors that are just too accurate to forget.

NEXT TIME: Big Echo by POP ETC (I think... it's been a while since I've listened to it, and there's a chance that I'll discover it's not an "album that matters," but we'll see.)