March 14th, 2021
The reality of the pandemic settled into my heart 365 days ago this morning, every slice of information I can find promising this virus would be worse than we feared. The sudden onset of a break – schools closed, world slowed – held nearly no peace, no promise of the good kind of quiet that time away from a job provides.
I miss those before-times, yeah, but were they ever really better? Do I want a resurrection of the past?
Here now, under the yoke of almost-spring’s lost innocence, the bliss of rebirth begins to feel like hope again. More often than not words still fail me, my mind best engaged in passing time – video games, novels, bingewatching. Maybe much of that time is truly and deeply a wasted thing, a thing without much value but a temporary escape, the connection and recognition offered by shared screens. It is, in the truest sense, a kind of collective hypnosis.
But isn’t it human to be hypnotized?
When I write that I miss live music, I think I might mean that I miss sharing the world with people. I miss rock and roll, but losing the crowd-crush beauty, living in the same emotion – that’s a loss that beggared me.
On March 14th, 2020, we still had one last show. One last time to live in the same emotion together.
Clubs had canceled shows most of the week, or at the least offered returns on tickets. A real shutdown loomed, the kind that could break this slice of the world (and maybe today, a year later, it has; it’s not my place to say).
When we find ourselves in times of crisis, we inevitably seek out others, community, in search of camaraderie and friendship, of the good loves and the good truths that define what it means to be a human. We look for the places where familiar faces – known and not-known – smile in time with us, raise our voices together, and stave off the shadows with whatever incandescence we can muster, together.
And so, in the wake of this uncontainable storm, with our futures as uncertain as they’d ever been, we scrubbed our shoes along some familiar pavement, waving at Scott through the windows, saying hello to the last musicians we’ll see in-person for the better part of months, maybe a year. It bears repeating again and again and again that Scott and Jean Vieth are among the most gracious humans alive, champions of the scene, and just genuinely filled with unbridled kindness. Their home – intermittently known as Club 603 – is my favorite music venue, full stop, and it’s in no small part because of their own awesomeness (as much as their well-curated tastes).
Which brings me back to a time before March 14th, 2020. For a few years prior, Scott had repeatedly told me to listen deeply to Hallelujah the Hills, and true-to-my-own-form, I took years to actually listen. Somewhere in the beginning of 2019, I started spinning their albums on my walks through the woods, streaming them straight to my hearing aids. And then I started sitting down at my laptop reading the lyrics while listening. And then I started writing my favorite lines in the margins of my notes during meetings at work. And then I’m You came out in November 2019 and all of a sudden, I became more than just a fan of the music, but a fan of the ideas, the cavernous things that exist underneath the sounds, inside the words, that become a kind of livable reality.
I felt like I knew the band already, but the awkwardness of the event, of the night and times in general, made for a strange kind of greeting. Everyone bumped elbows or kicked toes to say, “Hello”, and if that didn’t augur our new dystopia, what even could?
But we laughed and we smiled because that’s all we can ever do.
This is going to be about more than music because it has to be. I’m sorry if I offend anyone’s sensibilities, but I’m not sorry if you’re wrong.
One of my closest friends in the world, another brother to me, has worked on the frontlines of the coronavirus battlefield for more than a year now – and make no mistake, the metaphor is necessarily apt – strolling into his emergency department every fucking morning wearing gowns, masks, and robes as his body armor. People like him saved lives, but so many never took it seriously, even denied its existence; pointed to conspiracies built on rotten stilts of racism; asserted that nothing was wrong, that the hundreds of thousands who died died because of something else.
It’s not political to say we should behave in such a way as to show we care about other people.
Ryan Walsh is one of America’s best songwriters, full-stop. Hallelujah the Hills has existed since 2005, as far as I can tell, but really popped onto the national radar – well, nationalish, I guess, because they’re not as famous as they should be – with Collective Psychosis Begone, a record title as apt for almost any time in history. It feels prescient, but that’s because every decade, we undergo collective insanity. Written in the wake of the Bush Jr. regime and free speech zones, absurdity became true and hysteria communicable.
Maybe it has again. Sure feels like it. All I have to do is talk about the terrors of the coronavirus with someone who gets previously state-sponsored news and they still, today, think the flu is worse. Insanity, communicated by screens, dollar signs, and vitriol.
I didn’t hear it when I came out. Like I wrote above, I’m a decade and change behind. But the music blogs of the time latched onto Hallelujah the Hills and that bit of press, that attention, meant pretty close to everything in the making of the band. Pitchfork liked them well enough, its perpetual lukewarm state of criticism applied with a broad brush and a few specific comments, but nothing terribly much.
And they toured and toured, making friends along the way – Titus Andronicus, one of the best punk (I guess?) bands around – carrying that kind of almost-sundered existentialism, that eccentricity of thought and sound, that wild sense of confluence that inhabits the songs.
It’s the record that suckered me into the band, though it’s not the one I’d probably call my favorite.
Scott and Jean’s living room, usually arranged with the accoutrements of living (I’d suppose) and (I would assume) aesthetically pleasing (as befits an architect). I wouldn’t know, though, having only seen its warm hardwoods bared or covered by a sea of matched and mismatched chairs, a place for a band or a singer in front of the windows (and once, in front of the fireplace).
Hallelujah the Hills had set up by the windows, five of them close and the sixth ultimately in the audience itself.
The funny thing about space is that people can always make room.
The merch (erstwhile dining) table housed t-shirts, books, patches, stickers, records, CDs, and printed lyrics (thanks for that). Later in the night, Ryan would stand behind that table and hold court alongside Brian Rutledge (trumpet, keys, backup vox). I’d buy a book, a shirt, and we’d joke briefly about the plague.
In the middle of a late night when I couldn’t sleep, I watched the film “Hallelujah the Hills” by Adolfas Mekas, an earnestly humorous and honest comedy on becoming an adult with a best friend beside you, about holding out hope that you’ll never quite grow up. Or at least, maybe.
I remember reading that it was actually supposed to be called “Hallelujah the Woods”, but a misreading resulted in a name change that stuck, becoming alliterative and referential.
I think the film explains much about the band’s music. A touch surreal, always smiling wryly, and deeply felt.
Hallelujah the Hills brought Boston Cream to begin the night, featuring three shared members on the night – Ryan Connelly, Nicholas Ward, and Joseph Marrett (or maybe their identical twins)- as well as bandleaders Melanie Bernier and Peach Goodrich (formerly of The Barbazons), each of whom danced and sang in synchronicity throughout the set. Mel implored the audience to shake out their anxieties, sharing that dancing works for her.
Theirs is a sound threaded through with disco and fuzzed indie rock, but at its core, it’s strung together with the faith that moving together is a way through the apocalypse.
Ryan’s songs hover somewhere on the edge of reality, with specific details and hallucinatory truths, abstractions and big ideas woven into the peaks and valleys, the plains and hills of every song. I think, for me, it’s the sketches of people in places, the almost-dreamscapes that feel just real enough, that make these songs resonate and become something more than songs.
The band around him – I’ve forgotten to name them all, so let me remedy that – David Michael Curry (violin), Ryan Connelly (drums, vox), Brian Rutledge (horns, keys, vox), Joseph Marrett (guitar, vox), Nick Ward (bass, vox) – grow the songs to the point of explosion, making catharsis a real thing, however brief.
And that catharsis was just about everything.
I find it easier to navigate the hours and days when the anxieties are familiar, the reasons for anhedonia recognizable. In the wake of the pandemic, the treatment for these things becomes less about how to reduce the impact and more about how to weather it. To be less like sand and more like stone. We’ll change, but more slowly, over time.
I don’t meant to say that changing quickly is bad. I just mean to say that it scares me.
House shows have a set of unique promises rarely (maybe never) matched by club shows: the bands take all (or almost all) of the income and the audience gets the gift of realizing these are humans. The dividers are down – no barriers, no tall stages. Just some holiday lights strewn like stars across the woodgrained floor.
An odd air hung over the affair, a suffusion of joy dampened by the hovering not-yet-realized loss. But still.
Hallelujah the Hills brings a constant raucousness to their shows, a nonstop thread of energy and exultation that cannot help but filter through all the noise, to break right into the moment and carry an entire audience on their sonic shoulders.
That defined the show, that sense. If you want, you can hear it (and hopefully feel it) if you find the recording from the night before in DC – Rock and Roll Improved My Chemistry – their last club show of 2020. They also released a bootleg of a duo show with Ryan and Nick together from January, a little less raucous, but every bit as exultant.
Four of the first five songs at 603 came from the new record (and ultimately seven caromed off the living room walls) – I’m You – an unrelenting and glorious burst of catchy rock and roll with touches of noise, discordance, and replete with endless anthems. I challenge you to listen and count the number of times your brain prompts you to raise a fist. Maybe don’t fight that urge.
Our night began with, “I’m gonna spend the rest of my life telling this story ain’t I?” and it worked toward a familiar kind of ending, a slow and gradual reveal of a mission statement. Music can help you, you can’t always win, everybody matters, and maybe obsession is dangerous. Through it all, they blast a wall of reverb-drenched noise, and every little word Ryan sings feels real and true.
After “I’m You”, Ryan welcomed the audience to this final show of The Social Distancing Tour and the band rippled into “Running Hot with Fate”, with its resonant one-liner stories ending in the slowed down (and frankly, funny) ending of “Hot fate” repeated again and again and again, but slower and lower each time, the band descending with their voices.
I can keep just writing about how I remember the show, song-to-song, but I think it’s more helpful to write about the little moments that make live music matter. The smiles on brothers’ faces as their shared favorite song starts off. The dancer who traveled all the way from Greensboro, North Carolina just to see the show in DC, met Scott and Jean, and stayed an extra day to come to Baltimore. She sang every word and danced to every beat, smiling wildly throughout.
Or maybe tell you about all the wonderful and gently funny things Ryan said throughout the show. He called 603 the best ”concert venue (and home) in Baltimore”, and I swear to you, I could hear the parentheses. The pandemic’s specter certainly haunted – even compared to how it felt in the wake of 9/11 – but we poked fun at it and made jokes because little humors make terror more palatable.
I mentioned it already, but Hallelujah the Hills have been releasing music on Bandcamp throughout the pandemic. A few live recordings, and just last week, two brand new releases: Songs for NPR Segues (kind of exactly what it sounds like, but maybe for Kinda-Weird NPR?) and Ryan’s solo Public Domain EP. Both a surprise and neither heralded by the band, they fill different spaces in my brain. When I need static and smiles and soundtracks, the Segues deliver; but when I need humanity and a reminder that life is worth living, I will pick Public Domain. I listened for the first time in a dark part of the morning, wandering sleeplessly the day after it released, and “Hard Year” sat me down on the hardwoods. It’s a new almost-punk prayer for 2021,
And blessed be the fuck ups
And mercy to the rough cuts
Just keep me in your heart for awhile
I swear, I’ll leave it better than I found it
Hey look / I know / you’ve had / a hard year
Hey look / I know / we’ve had / a hard year
If I can recommend anything to you, maybe it’s to find the art that helps you feel less lonely.
Some moments stand out in my memory, musically, including the aforementioned first two songs. “It Still Floors Me” is already an all-time favorite, but they also played some of my other favorites: “Classic Tapes”, “Hallelujah the Hills”, and special set-closer “To All My Scientist Colleagues I Bid You Farewell.” For that last one, Ryan unplugged his guitar, “going commando”, and stepped into the audience to play with us around him. It felt a little truer, even though it stings to know we live in a country where science is a dirty word to almost half the population.
And then the night-ending second encore, a request from the audience, Ryan wearing his glasses, the band tore through the entirely too appropriately prescient “People Keep Dying (And No One Can Stop It)”, as loud and fast and brash as they’ve ever been before.
They have all of their albums and some miscellaneous goodies on Bandcamp (I regret not getting the “Good Morning Comrade” mug). Buy the music on Bandcamp Friday, the first Friday of every month for the recent past and foreseeable future.
Please, please go buy their music. And buy Ryan’s book, too, Astral Weeks: A Secret History of 1968. I could devote another 2,000 words to it, but I think I’ve taken enough space for now.
Please, though, listen. Stay safe and smart. And just be kind, folks. There’s no sense in unkindness.
