The oilfield town where A.S. Wilson grew up, south of New Orleans, is disappearing. Not as metaphor — as fact. The land is sinking, the coastline receding, and the petrochemical industry that built its economy is still there, rusting into the swamp it helped poison. Wilson has built a life elsewhere; he's been away long enough to know he won't watch it go. But when he learned he was going to be a father, his relationship to home suddenly felt different: its erosion was more pressing, his separation from it more permanent, and altogether more tender than he expected.
Nowhere Songs, Wilson's second full-length fronting the Providence, RI rock outfit Convinced Friend, grew from that urgency. The record took shape around a literal due date — the room that served as Wilson’s home studio was about to become a nursery — and he treated the deadline with workmanlike seriousness. Where Convinced Friend’s self-titled debut found him making sense of faith and commitment, Wilson’s songwriting on Nowhere Songs reaches back further, to Houma, Louisiana, concerning itself with intimate portraits of the people Wilson grew up among. Wilson writes about them in first and second person — not gawking, but alongside, within. He was there. He left. He's not quite sure he earned the distinction.
“In some ways, I feel like I somehow got… I don’t want to say spared, that feels too strong, but – I got out and other people didn’t, and I don’t exactly know why,” says Wilson, noting that he’s one of two people from his graduating class to leave Louisiana – the other being a linebacker for Florida State. Wilson’s gaze holds Nowhere Songs’ characters with empathy, acknowledging the particular tension of a place people stay because either they’ve been othered into a corner or the world never quite got big enough to leave. "Robitussin,” a track almost completely absent of fictionalization, finds its narrator taking shelter in a shared hotel room during a hurricane evacuation, watching as a friend dissolves slowly into a DXM haze. Rather than exoticizing this detail, Wilson instead pivots to underscoring the pain his subject is escaping: “It was the summer when the hurricane would blow your house to the blocks / You had enough / Of the missionaries building you a new one / ‘Til you could barely stand to see their van roll up.”
Elsewhere, Wilson inhabits his characters, blurring the line between witness and subject. He strikingly sings in a native accent he’s since outgrown in conversation, stretching his vowels into a long, flat drawl, his delivery heavy under the weight of exhaustion. Hope is a temptation to be avoided in Nowhere Songs’ bitter circumstances, and its cast frequently chastises one another – or themselves – for falling prey. “You take a hammer / To all your longing / A busted feeling / To wear away,” opening track “Big Score” begins. One can easily imagine the speaker in “On Fire” gesturing to his ruined landscape with a wry smile, his tone near to taunting: “No one’s ever calling / to give all our rites a meaning… / You want a reason / Some holy garbage glistening.” Wilson says that the reading that fed the writing holds to similar terrain: poets Charles Wright and Robert Wood Lynn, the Jason Molina biography Riding with the Ghost; sources united by their shared understanding of place as something that persists in a person long after they’ve left it – or been pushed out.
Fittingly, the sessions to capture Nowhere Songs also carried the thematic pressure of borrowed time: the album was largely tracked live in a single day at Big Nice Studio in Lincoln, RI with returning producer Bradford Krieger (Horse Jumper of Love, Friendship) with only a few days of overdubs to follow. But the band was ready: where Convinced Friend’s debut was largely a product of Wilson as a solo artist, Nowhere Songs is a band record in the fullest sense, built out through months of rehearsal and live performance before the sessions. Guitarist and multi-instrumentalist Nate Halda, bassist Mike Dantowitz, and drummer Casey Belisle push Convinced Friend into a louder and more sharp-edged state than ever before, allowing the arrangements to further expand and undergird Wilson’s narratives. The band’s ragged energy is often an apt vessel for expressing the songs’ frustration, but also occasionally serves as an yearning emotional counterpoint to the record’s theme of resignation, insinuating that there may be more depth to these characters than their scorched-earth proclamations let on.
To that end, Wilson is perfect casting for portraying Nowhere Songs’ complexity. “I am in some ways very far from where I started, and in some ways I’m happy where I am. But I also feel exiled from where I grew up, and when I go back, I no longer belong there. That’s a complicated feeling,” he says. Nowhere Songs never resolves itself into an easy answer, but in Wilson’s insistence on his home’s meaning, its beauty, and its claim on its people, he’s constructed a place where that part of himself can live.
—- Caleb Cordes
Nowhere Songs, Wilson's second full-length fronting the Providence, RI rock outfit Convinced Friend, grew from that urgency. The record took shape around a literal due date — the room that served as Wilson’s home studio was about to become a nursery — and he treated the deadline with workmanlike seriousness. Where Convinced Friend’s self-titled debut found him making sense of faith and commitment, Wilson’s songwriting on Nowhere Songs reaches back further, to Houma, Louisiana, concerning itself with intimate portraits of the people Wilson grew up among. Wilson writes about them in first and second person — not gawking, but alongside, within. He was there. He left. He's not quite sure he earned the distinction.
“In some ways, I feel like I somehow got… I don’t want to say spared, that feels too strong, but – I got out and other people didn’t, and I don’t exactly know why,” says Wilson, noting that he’s one of two people from his graduating class to leave Louisiana – the other being a linebacker for Florida State. Wilson’s gaze holds Nowhere Songs’ characters with empathy, acknowledging the particular tension of a place people stay because either they’ve been othered into a corner or the world never quite got big enough to leave. "Robitussin,” a track almost completely absent of fictionalization, finds its narrator taking shelter in a shared hotel room during a hurricane evacuation, watching as a friend dissolves slowly into a DXM haze. Rather than exoticizing this detail, Wilson instead pivots to underscoring the pain his subject is escaping: “It was the summer when the hurricane would blow your house to the blocks / You had enough / Of the missionaries building you a new one / ‘Til you could barely stand to see their van roll up.”
Elsewhere, Wilson inhabits his characters, blurring the line between witness and subject. He strikingly sings in a native accent he’s since outgrown in conversation, stretching his vowels into a long, flat drawl, his delivery heavy under the weight of exhaustion. Hope is a temptation to be avoided in Nowhere Songs’ bitter circumstances, and its cast frequently chastises one another – or themselves – for falling prey. “You take a hammer / To all your longing / A busted feeling / To wear away,” opening track “Big Score” begins. One can easily imagine the speaker in “On Fire” gesturing to his ruined landscape with a wry smile, his tone near to taunting: “No one’s ever calling / to give all our rites a meaning… / You want a reason / Some holy garbage glistening.” Wilson says that the reading that fed the writing holds to similar terrain: poets Charles Wright and Robert Wood Lynn, the Jason Molina biography Riding with the Ghost; sources united by their shared understanding of place as something that persists in a person long after they’ve left it – or been pushed out.
Fittingly, the sessions to capture Nowhere Songs also carried the thematic pressure of borrowed time: the album was largely tracked live in a single day at Big Nice Studio in Lincoln, RI with returning producer Bradford Krieger (Horse Jumper of Love, Friendship) with only a few days of overdubs to follow. But the band was ready: where Convinced Friend’s debut was largely a product of Wilson as a solo artist, Nowhere Songs is a band record in the fullest sense, built out through months of rehearsal and live performance before the sessions. Guitarist and multi-instrumentalist Nate Halda, bassist Mike Dantowitz, and drummer Casey Belisle push Convinced Friend into a louder and more sharp-edged state than ever before, allowing the arrangements to further expand and undergird Wilson’s narratives. The band’s ragged energy is often an apt vessel for expressing the songs’ frustration, but also occasionally serves as an yearning emotional counterpoint to the record’s theme of resignation, insinuating that there may be more depth to these characters than their scorched-earth proclamations let on.
To that end, Wilson is perfect casting for portraying Nowhere Songs’ complexity. “I am in some ways very far from where I started, and in some ways I’m happy where I am. But I also feel exiled from where I grew up, and when I go back, I no longer belong there. That’s a complicated feeling,” he says. Nowhere Songs never resolves itself into an easy answer, but in Wilson’s insistence on his home’s meaning, its beauty, and its claim on its people, he’s constructed a place where that part of himself can live.
—- Caleb Cordes
