Katie Buono - Down By The Riverside
Shall I compare thee to a summer's day?
Thou art more lovely and more temperate:
Rough winds do shake the darling buds of May,
And summer's lease hath all too short a date:
Sometime too hot the eye of heaven shines,
And often is his gold complexion dimmed,
And every fair from fair sometime declines,
By chance, or nature's changing course untrimmed:
But thy eternal summer shall not fade,
Nor lose possession of that fair thou ow'st,
Nor shall death brag thou wander'st in his shade,
When in eternal lines to time thou grow'st,
So long as men can breathe, or eyes can see,
So long lives this, and this gives life to thee. Sonnet 18, Shakespeare
A lazy breeze rustles the leaves of your old shade tree. You press your back into its trunk and observe the shifting patterns of light filtering onto the ground below. You set aside your book of sonnets. The sun is seemingly glued to the sky overhead, hidden by intermittent clouds. Along a branch, a squirrel strolls listlessly back and forth. You blink hard to soothe your word-wearied eyes. You fancy a nap.
"To sleep, perchance to dream," you say, closing your eyes.
The squirrel slips down the trunk opposite you, and as the breeze returns, you can hear, cooing softly in the distance, a berceuse...
Down By The Riverside opens with the balmy Daydreams, idling in a hypnagogic daze as "Darling" tumbles from Buono's lips like a post-lunch yawn. Daydreams lacks a driving bass line; instead, lurking beneath the acoustic strumming is a nebulous ambiance of grumbling electronics, which swell as the lyrics give way to a sleepy wordless melody, setting the stage for an albumful of bradycardic tunes and cryptic verses. Buono's music falls under the auspices of the folk genre, but her electronic infusions call to mind freak-folkers like Grizzly Bear and Dirty Projectors, and her unique sound stems from what she called a blend of "modern production techniques, simple instrumentation, and old school tape distortion." Backing this juxtaposition is an instrumental palette which includes bells, lap harp, assorted percussion, and tight vocal harmonies, resulting in just the sort of eclectic, experimental folk album you'd expect from an Oberliner. But whatever is happening underneath, a traditional chorus-verse song structure reigns throughout DbtR, and even the stark industrial throb of We Have Flown So Far Away accompanies an anodyne melody and AABB rhyme scheme. One might say that Buono's commandeering of the haggard gospel song "Down By The Riverside" is a bit cheeky–-audacious even–-but the album's short-and-sweet title track does have a particularly addictive hook.
One look at her website reveals a rather prolific hodgepodge of artistic projects, and Down By The Riverside reflects this ambitious DIY ethic. Buono composes, markets, and performs solo, with just a guitar and perhaps a stray drummer. Most of the time on record, the electronics seem more supplemental than integral to her acoustic singer-songwriter aesthetic, and through it all resonates a personal, home-video quality, from Hide and Seek's faith-shaken diary inscription to the second-person invectives in Of All the Things We Are, and, not to mention, My Baby's Mama, a timeworn cassette assembled piecemeal from a tune written by Buono's 9-year-old self.
Buono's breathy, over-enunciated singing shimmers with bedroom intimacy, as if delivered directly from lips to ear, and sometimes sounding more like toned speech than outright singing. The rub is that in spite of such cozy communion, her lyrics can suffer from over-poeticism, such that the more I dig into them, the more I feel teased but ultimately unconsummated. Following Daydreams, the album slips into a cycle of even more illusory dream-scenes. As far as I can tell, the storybookish Something in the Air alludes tangentially to Jack and the Beanstalk (replete with rattling beans) and it's distorted, broadway-style Reprise two tracks later has me giving a narrow-eyed look at Sondheim's fairy-tale musical Into The Woods. References to sleep and dreams pop up here and there throughout the album: "So far away, a faded dream/When we awake, what will it mean?," "I'm dreaming of the riverside," "Red fleshy film shades my eyes from the daylight/Pull back the skin just in time for the dark night," just to name a few. And by the time So Many Days rolls around, after having dreamt the afternoon away, Buono sings of the day coming to a close.
My poetic inspiration is mostly nature, our connection to nature, and feeling a need to strengthen that connection. I feel like I'm longing for the past, earlier times when that connection was more integral in human culture; and at the same time reaching for a better future. These songs have some (very) hidden criticisms about modern society, but mostly I was trying to ruminate on possibility and hope, in various scenarios. I think a lot about community, being at peace with each other, and being in sync within ourselves. I think about this in relation to patterns in nature, and little messages from outside of ourselves.
Even through our limited email correspondence, I quickly became aware of Buono's sensitivity, compassion, and commitment to truthful expression. For better or worse, commercial success doesn't appear to be very important to her at this point. Having recently relocated cross-country, Buono can be found serenading locals on the banks of a new river. Or ocean, rather. If you're in the San Diego area and come across her name on a flyer, I invite you to paddle on over, grab a drink and kick back to Buono and her silver sound.