"It's gonna come down in fire / It's gonna come down in waves / It's gonna feel like you're dying / It's gonna feel like you're saved." These words from the title track of Joseph Cutshall's Stay Close are dancing with paradox: fire and water, death and deliverance. It's being unable to identify what the good news is and what the bad news is. What feels like a tragedy might ultimately be a blessing or an invitation into something better than you could've imagined. Maybe it's a calling that you're tempted to run from. Jonah, where's that boat going? This tension animates Cutshall's debut album: eleven songs written during the 2020 quarantine, which was (in his own words) "a deep season of self-doubt and personal reckoning."
Musically, this album feels right at home with indie singer/songwriter contemporaries, but I feel like I'm not all that familiar with some of the older influences that Cutshall might be pulling from. That being said, some of the aesthetic inclinations here remind me of when I would help my dad with car repairs listening to classic rock on the garage radio, although it pushes much further into the atmospheric and expansive. Come to think of it, there are moments where it conjures the vaguely nostalgic euphoria I feel when I listen to Bon Iver's "Beth/Rest." Cutshall performed and recorded everything on the album except for the excellent drumming by Tyler Cuchiara, which is quite astounding considering the lushness and complexity of the arrangements, beautifully mixed by Dave Wilton at Coalesce Audio.
As I mentioned earlier, the themes of spiritual reckoning here bear an acute resonance with my story, and as someone who recently released an album exploring similar subject matter, it's inspiring to observe how someone in a completely different life stage processed his doubt and pain through music. Among the common threads here is this idea that life will eventually break you open and your meaning-making system will no longer be able to contain all that you've experienced. When this happens, you're confronted with a choice: Do you knuckle down and stay the course? Do you force yourself into believing what you think you're supposed to believe? Do you abandon it entirely? Or do you find another way to deal with the dissonance?
God has seemed silent to me my whole life. I think that's why the title track on Stay Close cuts deep, where Cutshall recounts quiet mornings spent in spiritual discipline that never seem to amount to anything. For certain folks in religious circles, it's a common experience - that feeling of futility, beating your fist to a pulp on a door that rarely opens, with no sign of reciprocation for the devotion. "If you'd die just to reach me / What are you waiting for?"
Cutshall sings about a bleaker instance of God's silence on "South of West," which reads like a modern psalm mourning the loss of a loved one: "What I'd say if I could reach you / Wouldn't put a d*mn thing right / There's snow on the horizon now." It's that overwhelming sense of helplessness and abandonment where one almost hopes that, if there is a god, he's merely powerless rather than being cruel or indifferent. The cold settles in.
While there's a lot of soul-searching here, there's also a strong familial undercurrent. For instance, "Bury Me Deeper" is an indie folk love song, but it's the kind of love song that could only be written by someone who has experienced the depth of sticking with another person through hardship, "Press into my arms like the roots of the pines / Growing deeper to carry the earth." The first track, the soulful heartland rocker "You Will Find," is addressed to Cutshall's daughter, singing about the strange cocktail of joy and trepidation that comes with bringing new life into a brutal world.
This is where the heart of Stay Close lies: trying to reconcile the harsh reality of life's often abject cruelty with a God who is supposed to provide some kind of balm or sense of meaning. And make no mistake, there aren't any answers here; there is, however, a prevailing faith that hope is worthwhile. There are moments where Cutshall seems to be trying to convince himself that this is true, repeating "Do not fear / For the light will come" like a mantra. Ultimately, maybe that faith is more of a constant choice than anything rooted in some kind of unwavering belief. The desire to control uncontrollable things will only steal whatever joy is left.
"There's a current in this river / Something I could never hold / And there is beauty in resistance / But there is strength in letting go." This excerpt from "Breaking at the Bones" reminds me of something Wendell Berry wrote, which I've kept close ever since a friend shared it with me earlier this year: "It may be that when we no longer know what to do, we have come to our real work and when we no longer know which way to go, we have begun our real journey. The mind that is not baffled is not employed. The impeded stream is the one that sings."
A couple years ago, I was in limbo. I still am, but the difference is that I've made peace with living there. It's sort of nice this time of the year, actually.
- Review date: 12/29/23, written by Nick Webber for Jesusfreakhideout.com
Record Label: None
Album length: 11 tracks: 51 minutes, 21 seconds
Street Date: October 27, 2023
Buy It: AmazonMP3
Buy It: Bandcamp
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