Americana artist John Calvin’s single “Austin Chalk” is out today, from his upcoming Texas-centric album Greener Fields & Fairer Seas that he wrote over four years while living in Dallas. The Bluegrass Situation wrote that it's "thoughtful and intentional Americana."
The pedal steel-centric and geologic “Austin Chalk” ruminates on our oldest human mythology, the flood, while feeling just as timeless. The Austin Chalk is a massive and ancient outcropping of limestone that travels, like Calvin’s troubadourian guitar strums, from Dallas, to Austin, to San Antonio. The bed of underground rock would cause flooding from the Trinity River in certain areas of South Dallas, which have always been separated by racial and economic lines. Lush green spaces intermingled with poverty. The song lives in a mellow Khruangbin-esque drizzle before exploding like a thunderclap on the chorus, all while evoking wet ground previously tread in Stevie Ray Vaughan’s “Texas Flood.”
“I was sitting on my patio playing that rolling intro on my J-50 when it started to rain,” says Calvin. “I’d play louder to keep up with the noise of the storm, then quiet down when there was a lull. Then out of nowhere, someone yelled, ‘Hey, we got a flood on our hands!’ I started thinking about the 4.5 billion year-old Earth versus the 200,000 years us humans have had. Our short time on this planet was a big orienting principle. We’re only here for the blink of an eye.”
New LP Greener Fields & Fairer Seas (out Jan. 24) is a bold statement that no matter how bad things get, a silver lining always follows. Poetic lyrics weave through a rich tapestry of folk (and occasionally overdriven) guitars, organs, orchestral strings and gospel backing vocals, reminding us to pay attention to the world around us and to choose kindness in our daily lives. It’s an album that delves into the horrors of the pandemic years, while projecting hope through building a family, fatherhood and Texas. This is an album about growing up.
The tongue-in-cheek irony of the title Greener Fields & Fairer Seas isn’t lost on Calvin. “I have a wonderful life, wife and kids,” says Calvin. “I have a lot to be thankful for, but there’s always something more to strive for. Stumbling from bar to bar in my past life was fun, but having people in my life who believe in me inspires me to be a better person.”
Written while Calvin was in the throes of COVID in the early days of the 2020 pandemic, the album kicks off with the uplifting “Rest of My Roads.” Piano and organ peek out before building into its cacophonous orchestral chorus. Eric DeFade’s wailing saxophone solo cuts through the maelstrom in this song about coming to terms with one’s mortality. It has the musical complexity and emotional resonance of The Band while utilizing the loud-quite-loud ebb and flow of the Pixies. The uncertainty of the time is lyrically emphasized in the well-worn metaphor of, “We’re sowing those seeds / Just to watch ‘em grow.”
“I was shivering and sweating,” says Calvin. “I was looking out the window at the leaves and the shadows they were casting. It was a strange, Pink Floyd, psychedelic experience. The grocery stores were out of food and paper. I was eating the same Campbell’s soup every night, until I just stopped eating. People were dying and we didn’t know what was going to happen. It was scary knowing that my kids were relying on me for their safety. I made a promise to myself and my family to not take things for granted.”
The Tom Petty meets Wilco sincerity of “I Can Make Your Heart Mine” emphasizes being the best parent you can possibly be, while attempting to minimize inherited trauma. “What I can’t leave behind / I’ll have to carry on / But I can make your heart mine / I can hold you close and let you go,” Calvin sings as his honest vocals trade off with bass, drums and Rhodes organ in this stripped-bare song of empathy. A phantom guitar is implied through its beautiful, Chick Corea-eque melancholic vibe that crescendos with cinematic strings.
“It’s important to see things from a child’s perspective,” says Calvin. “I use empathy to help my children grow. Your wins will be my wins. Your losses are my losses. You’re worthy of that. We make mistakes and that’s okay. Be accepting of what you can’t control. Listening to the case they’re making will get you 90% there. If you did your job right, your kid will be able to walk away as a mostly unscathed adult.”
The acoustic “Hazel or Blue” is an ode to Calvin’s late grandmother and the family mythology that she passed along. Calvin’s finger-picked guitar dances with the pedal steel as DeFade’s ethereal flute flitters and fades in and out of existence. “The kids in our family either had hazel or blue eyes,” says Calvin, “and the story went you had to worry about the kids with blue eyes.” It’s a song about not making the same mistakes as your parents, or passing them on to your own children.
Similarly to "Austin Chalk," the wondrous post-grunge song “Gravity” takes on the weight of the world and the crushing inescapability of time. “All the heroes are ground to dust / Just to pave the street / As we waltz along endlessly / To a tune we call time,” he sings.
The plaintive "Saint Innocent" is about coping with the loss of his wife’s best friend. The title is taken from a pinot noir they’d all drink together, while winking at its religious implications. It ruminates on dealing with loss in unhealthy ways. Calvin’s grief can be felt through his primal vocals and impassioned guitar work. Pete Freeman’s furious pedal steel wails and Kelsey Jumper’s sorrowful backing vocals carry the emotional resonance of Joe Cocker’s “With A Little Help From My Friends.”
“Ellen and my wife were peas in a pod,” says Calvin. “We thought we’d spend our lives with her. She’d do firework shows professionally around Michigan. She loved it. She’d have a beer and just watch the fireworks. She was one of those people who just wanted to bring you something lovely and unexpected. Her love and dedication to fireworks was great. I sing, ‘paint those starry skies for me,’ and every time I see fireworks I still think about her.”
The gentle and touching “She Might Be a Song" is also about Ellen, and her succumbing to cancer. Calvin’s lyrical imagery and metaphors of cells dividing, ultraviolet light and “a summer dress of lead” is heartbreaking. Its threadbare intimacy is an alchemical portal into Calvin’s soul, like he’s whispering psychedelic secret truths to each of us listeners individually. It's incredibly personal yet we all have to deal with the universality of death. It’s tragic and touching, all while feeling like we’re absorbing ancient wisdom in his anguish.
The washed out and trippy "High is My Favorite Height" comes from an off-handed quip from Calvin’s son when he was five years old and staring out of a car window at Texas overpasses shooting into the sky. It’s about seeing things from unique perspectives and opening your mind to the world around you. It calls to the listener to embrace childlike innocence and wonder through its mind-bending space echo. “It took the purple one to rein me in / And the green to settle down again,” Calvin sings, reminiscent of the Hunter S. Thompson Fear and Loathing quote “[we had] a whole galaxy of multi-colored uppers, downers, laughers, screamers…”
Calvin attended the University of Virginia in Charlottesville, and his song “Our Souls Have Broken Chains” is about Heather Heyer who was fatally injured during the white supremist Unite the Right rally there. It’s a song of frustration at injustice that rolls in like a thunderstorm. The musical tension echoes the fear we all feel from the people who deem us different from them, enemies — people who might kill us because of that feeling. The pandemic years brought these feelings to the forefront through unnecessary violent deaths. George Floyd. Trayvon Martin. Freddie Gray. The song explodes in swirling strings and a near-screaming outro. Calvin's demand for respect and kindness is like screaming into the void — into a wind that refuses to carry his words to those who need to hear them most.
“I thought that we could come together as a country and hold people accountable,” says Calvin, “that we could change the system. A woman doing the right thing. She's just protesting. We all should have a right to protest, and she gets run down by an idiot in a Charger. It just broke my heart. We need to stop that primal instinct to think of another person as ‘other,’ to the point that you’d kill them. As a people, we need to find ways to defuse that powder keg.”
“Ode to Denis Johnson” is a love letter to the author, perhaps most known for the short story collection Jesus’ Son. Like the author, this song is fun and harrowing, particularly with it’s opening line of “Kill yourself / In the company of strangers.” It’s California gothic meets Velvet Underground New York skeeze.
“He’s this Raymond Carver type character,” says Calvin. “I was raised Catholic, and his views on Catholicism resonated. The church is for people who’ve made mistakes and are trying to deal with them. People who aren’t visible to the rest of society. Whose trials and tribulations are close to the ideals of Catholicism. The meek inheriting the earth. The Beatitudes, Sermon on the Mount is much more in line with the type of people that Jesus hung out with. It’s about being kind and understanding to the people among us who are struggling most. Denis Johnson got that and turned it into awesome books. There's also an undercurrent of self sacrifice in Dennis Johnson that’s less healthy. There’s a religious theory that says Jesus was God so he could’ve saved himself. It’s a perspective that can’t be gained by living a simple life.”
The fingerstyle guitar, bossa nova percussion, and loungy organ of “Sturgeon Moon” brings a carefree spirit to this song that embraces the freedom of New York City living. His poetic lyrics take nothing for granted while embracing a beautiful day, moving through trains, or sitting at a cafe sipping on coffee and wine. The ‘60s chunky-pop, Phil Spector wall of sound “Garden State Variety” swirls and swoons as a poignant and soulful love-at-first-sight song.
Album closer “Shenandoah” is a traditional folk song that Calvin performs with sludgy, overdriven guitars and a four-on-the-floor dirge of percussion. Imagine Springsteen, Pete Seegar and Pearl Jam on a camping trip, singing this around a fire with amps up to eleven. This is an album that’s captured a specific time and place in America, and “Shenandoah” is the perfect sendoff in the vein of Woody Guthrie’s “This Land is Your Land.”
Calvin’s story begins two generations ago with his finger-picking grandfather’s Gibson J-50 named Jumbo. He passed away when Calvin was eight years old and it sat unplayed in an attic. Years later, his step-grandmother found out he was playing guitar and bequeathed Jumbo to him. Jumbo and Calvin forged a relationship that has culminated in this new album.
“Jumbo isn’t set up right,” says Calvin, “but I love its sound. I always kept this guitar near me, and it always got played. It has this Neil Young mid-range, and I learned as many of his songs as I could. I was writing songs on this guitar my whole life, but it wasn’t until I got laid off in 2008 that I got serious about it.”
Calvin grew up a military brat, and continues a nomadic lifestyle where the only constant of home is his heirloom guitar Jumbo. Born at Fort Benning, Georgia, Calvin moved nearly every two years of his childhood: up and down the East Coast, to South Korea, to Germany, to living near the Pentagon for high school. He attended UVA in Charlottesville. From there he spent four Burning-Man-attending years in San Francisco and Oakland before settling down in New York City where he met his wife and started his family. Work moved him and his family to Dallas where he put out his debut album Masquerade Monday (2018), and wrote the lion’s share of Greener Fields & Fairer Seas. Now Calvin’s started a new South Florida life with his family in Boca Raton.
Very much a New York City album, the songs that made up Masquerade Monday dealt with frustration and loss — the emotional transition of losing his job and the stability that provided, and the loss of a long-term relationship before he met his wife. This primal scream of an album is epitomized in the vivid imagery of songs like “Beautiful & Wasted,” about cautiously watching the cocaine decline of a friend during his more wild NYC days, and the dark, Nick Cave-esque, finger-picked “Run,” which feels like a nightmare where you’re being chased by a faceless entity — where you know that there’s respite ahead, as long as you don’t stop moving.
“I felt like everything was falling apart at that time in my life,” says Calvin. “I was walking with a limp. It had taken a physical toll. I had a friend in Pittsburgh who offered to record the album for me, and that was the first time I worked with Nate Campisi. He heard things in my songs and brought in additional musicians to build this really full sound. It was that experience that inspired me to musically keep going.”
Working with Campisi inspired new songs in Calvin. He loved the recording process and wanted to work with the same people for the next album. Where Masquerade Monday had a loose, hangout feel with yawning tempos, Calvin wanted to do it again with more precision. For years, he’d grab his J-50 and fly from Miami to Pittsburgh every couple of months.
“To carry-on my guitar,” says Calvin, “I had to practically become a paralegal to wrestle with the gate agent every time. I’d stay walking distance to the studio. We did two weeks with drummer Pat Coyle to lock in the base elements. Every subsequent trip was to refine and record the other musicians. I did that for three years. I believe in allowing a song to be organic. To breathe. To allow the song to be human. Embracing flaws as features.”
The time spent to craft this record was well worth it. This is an audiophile’s album. Calvin and Campisi emphasize instruments in specific moments, building complexity and depth in its production and arrangements. It’s an engaging listening experience reminiscent of Tom Waits’ Mule Variations or Leonard Cohen’s early work. Where Masquerade Monday was about loss, Greener Fields & Fairer Seas is about better times now and in the future.
TRACK LIST:
01 - Rest of My Roads
02 - I Can Make Your Heart Mine
03 - Austin Chalk
04 - Gravity
05 - Saint Innocent
06 - She Might Be a Song
07 - Sturgeon Moon
08 - Garden State Variety
09 - High is My Favorite Height
10 - Hazel or Blue
11- Our Souls Have Broken Chains
12- Ode to Denis Johnson
13 - Shenandoah
"AUSTIN CHALK" SINGLE CREDITS:
John Calvin: vocals, acoustic guitar
Greg DeCarolis: piano, bass, electric guitar, OB-8 synth
Pat Coyle: drums, percussion
James Hart: pedal steel
Eric DeFade: alto, tenor, baritone sax
Robert Matchett: trombone
Joe Herndon: trumpet
David Bernabo: brass arrangements
ALBUM CREDITS:
All songs written by John Calvin except “Shenandoah”
Produced by Nate Campisi
John Calvin: acoustic guitar, vocals
Greg DeCarolis: guitar, bass, piano, Hammond organ, Rhodes, glockenspiel
Pat Coyle: drums, percussion, backing vocals
Kelsey Jumper: backing vocals
Eric DeFade: sax, flute, brass arrangements
Robert Matchett: trombone
Joe Herndon: trumpet
James Hart: pedal steel
Pete Freeman: pedal steel
David Bernabo: brass and string arrangements, Rhodes
Nadine Sherman: cello
Sandro Leal-Santiesteban: violin
Ashley Freeburn: violin
Jason Hohn: viola
Ricardo Cortés: art & art direction
John Fusco: photography
Recorded and mixed by Nate Campisi at Mr Smalls Recording Studio, Pittsburgh, PA
Mastered by Reuben Cohen at Lurssen Mastering, Burbank, CA
