For the longest time, some music has had this ineffable quality to just make me feel a certain way, to almost change my life, if only for a moment.
Miles Gannett’s Meridian did this to me. I first listened to it as I walked around a just-blooming saucer magnolia grove, in that time and space when the vibe of a song is more important than its ideas; I found myself stepping around daffodils a little differently, half-dancing, half-swaying; the song’s sonic hooks twisted into bluegrass. Maybe I hummed aloud as my feet quickened. The sun still hung low, the sky impossibly blue, and by the end of “Maria Sabina”, I just sat down and listened again.
This is, I think, the most we can ask of a record.
Gannett’s music pays homage to the history of his current home (Baltimore), where bluegrass’s roots are as deep as Maryland’s white oaks, at the same time as blazing different trails. When I spoke to my wife about the record, I called it country psychgrass, which is a reductive way of saying Meridian is both genreless and slotted into its own genre. His previous (maybe still current?) projects include Fractal Cat (a psychedelic rock band) and Shroom Pickers (a psychedelic bluegrass band), and while Meridian very much exists apart from them, their influences are certainly felt.
As far as the writing, Gannett writes songs steeped in simple truths and built around the ebbing and flowing of time. Nostalgia soaks the lyrics of “The Lucky Ones”, its reminiscences about the time before high-speed internet and constant connectedness (distinct, I think, from interconnectedness). “Let’s Have Each Other for A While” is a kind of love song calling for focusing on the present moment, extolling the importance of enjoying right now over a more amorphous future. And “Long Burning Bridge” is a reminder that we can’t live in the past and have to keep moving forward, looking to the present and the future.
While he traffics in the existential plenty, Gannett still makes a point to let loose. “Short Haired Willie” is a rocking bio-song of everyone’s favorite redheaded stranger, a song for singing along and moving along. “Spores on Grass” celebrates (with a wink or two) the near-holy fusion of humanity and hallucinogens, telling a brief history of the losing (finding) our minds and reasons to believe, all over a barroom country sound that will surely move audiences (I, for one, really can’t wait to catch this one live). “Thunder River, Tumbling Down” fuses the excitement of bluegrass with the aforementioned existentialism, with Ron Stewart’s banjo tumbling the song forward. Gannett wrote the lyrics after hearing the melody and some of the words in a dream, pondering what happens when we die, and the song takes on a kind of easy familiarity, settling into a territory occupied by standards.
And throughout the rest of the album, psychedelia plays against country and mountain music, with pedal steel frequently sending the songs into a wide-open space. Gannett assembled a band of stellar local musicians, including members of The Seldom Scene (genuinely can use the word “legends” to describe them), Dave Hadley (on pedal steel), Eric Selby (drums), and a host of other players. Additionally, he wrote “Dark Time” with his wife Arielle Lambert, which also features some gentle purring from their recently passed cat, Bear; it’s a song that begins like a haunting and ends full of hope.
Album closer “Maria Sabina” is probably the song I loved most almost immediately. I grew up on 70s music, inhale human stories as often as I can, and have a healthy disdain for the negative impacts of commodification and the institutions that other people. Maria Sabina was a Mazatec “Wise Woman” who held healing rituals (veladas) that included the use of psilocybin, and is – as far as I can tell – the first to allow outsiders to participate in the ritual. An enthnomycologist discovered her, ultimately shared her information, and a whole bunch of mostly american hippies and scientists besieged her community. She initially welcomed all, but it became clear that the traditions and values of the ritual were not respected, but rather the value of the “magic mushrooms” were; eventually, her community ostracized Maria Sabina, though after Americans and others were kept out, the community returned to a kind of normal.
“Maria Sabina” the song tells her story and decries the influence of Wasson (the first American that opened the floodgates), at the same time as featuring tight and beautiful instrumentation all throughout. It is, in its way, an epic, calling to mind many of the classic longform stories told in song during the 60s and 70s. It has sections that feel like movements, and by the time it ends, I want to hear the story again.
And maybe, again, that’s the thing about this record. I want to keep listening, and I hope you do, too.
Gannett has a livestream show coming up tomorrow @ The Creative Alliance. We encourage you to listen the songs and then buy a ticket or a record, if you’re so inclined. He is also hosting a free live stream hosting at Old Line Spirits, one of best distilleries around.
