Bandcamp | Smartlink
Genres: Rock, Power pop, Jangle, Indie
RIYL: Big Star, Paul McCartney, Elvis Costello, the Byrds
a true devotee of pop songwriting, crafting jangly gems at the intersection of power pop, baroque pop, and vintage AM radio rock - Under the Radar
a dreamy album chock full of vivid imagery and delightfully enchanting soundscapes full of wonder and joy. - Across the Margin, Best of 2020
"an intoxicating classic rock groove and breakdown that would make The Rolling Stones proud." - Atwood Magazine
"a playful, complex album full of nuance and heart. " - Americana UK
Hi all - Really psyched to be sharing this album of jangly, power pop hits from Charlie Kaplan, one of the sweetest guys around, and a hell of a songwriter.
The other really fascinating angle on his new album is that it's present Charlie duetting with past Charlie, going back and finishing songs he started in a completely different phase of his life. You can hear the different eras of narrator interrupting and arguing with one another at times.
Today we're sharing third and final single "Rockaway" - which Under the Radar praised for its "accessible melodic gleam" and final "dizzying blaze of guitar licks and upbeat percussion."
To me, “Country Life in America” is an album about how growing up feels while you’re doing it; it’s like taking the train into the city knowing you’ll have to catch the last one out later. “Rockaway” is about straining to find your way in, straining against the starched collar, straining against the uncertainty of beginning again. I’m very proud of the contributions made to the instrumental breakdown, where Jason Burger’s percussion, Matt Lipkins’s synths, and especially Ian Wayne’s lead guitar jump to life like a child’s toy box suddenly animated by a magic spell.
ABOUT THE LP
New York City singer-songwriter Charlie Kaplan’s releases play like tours through a musical memory palace. The Office Culture bassist’s guitar-based songs are overrun with ear-catching gestures redolent of classic rock radio hits, Americana standards, baroque pop micro-symphonies, and more—music that shaped him personally and artistically at a formative age. Ten years ago—during a time when the logistics of making an album seemed impossible—Kaplan began to catalog his acoustic phone demos around themes, feels, and personal associations. Eventually, he created a roadmap for an entire imagined discography. His new LP, Country Life in America, contains the earliest entries into this canon, painting a picture of a young man bursting with ideas, not certain where to channel his energy and not overly worried about it.
Functioning as a prequel to the breezy jam-rock of Kaplan’s first full-length—2020’s Sunday—the sharp, focused, and sometimes whimsical compositions on Country Life mix youthful exuberance with ambivalence. Written mostly in one burst directly following college graduation, they grasp at large themes within the confines of compact structures, evidencing Kaplan’s devotion to Mount Rushmore rock stylists like Bruce Springsteen and Elvis Costello. Images of listlessness, bewilderment, and dysmorphia are threaded through these songs—memorably in lightly folksy, Pavement-esque highlight “Gas Station Bathroom” (“I look good in a gas station bathroom/But I'm a bag of bones when I'm out too late/And I'm fat as a science rat when I finally get time to contemplate”).
After any move to plumb existential depths, however, Kaplan moves to poke fun at both his own self-seriousness and the writing process itself (“Ask the neighbors/Will I ever finish this song?” “I can't explain what I really mean,” “I still don't know what this song is about”) and changes of lyrical perspectives within couplets (“Shut the fuck up/You can lean on my shoulder”). Why not? As naggingly familiar as these songs can often sound, their governing principle is eccentricity—a type that will be immediately recognizable for fans of Kaplan’s previous releases.
There are moments of incidental collage and quotation here: a chord progression redolent of Big Star to open “I Got It,” the AM-rock power chorus in lead single “Talkin’ French,” and so on. Kaplan implants memories of non-existent hits you’d swear you’d heard countless times: Cavern-Club-ready early Beatles standard “I Was Doing Alright,” lost surf rock radio hit—or Jonathan Richman rave-up—“Rockaway,” and turn-of-the-’00s buzzsaw-guitar rocker “She Will Stop at Nothing.” What ties the songs together—and distinguishes them from their points of inspiration—is the sense of play in the song structures and arrangements. Kaplan has a way of delivering unexpected moments of catharsis. “I Got It” builds to an improbable and colossal wall of sound, comprised of latticed guitars, horns, and backing vocal chorales; the phantasmagoric percussion break and wayward bridge in “Rockaway” constitute one of the album’s most singular moments.
The most striking hairpin turn on the album, though, is the interplanetary ambient-jazz piano break in “Talkin’ French,” which transforms the track from one of the album’s most unapologetic pop songs into something inward and richly personal. Kaplan’s songs are littered with beautiful non-sequiturs like these—flourishes that feel like they emerge from somewhere beyond the margins of the songs themselves. Country Life plays out like a collection of imagined Top 40 hits, each played by a different invented band, which creates a psychedelic effect. At turns, Kaplan seems to point our attention to a protagonist out of frame who is dreaming up and free-associating between these microworlds.
The fact that, ten years later, Kaplan is still keeping promises he made to a younger, wider-eyed version of himself is a testament to a holistic love of pop music that has found endless ways to keep replenishing itself. Each Charlie Kaplan release—from Sunday to his more recent EPs —represents a season of his life, inevitably fraught, carefree, or both at the same time. On Country Life, he re-accesses the spark from which the first infectious refrains he ever wrote emerged and—with newfound wisdom and acumen as a bandleader and arranger—trusts that the ideas are strong enough for us to access it as well. Reveling in ambiguity, oxymoron, and earnest wonder, these taut and clever songs beeline straight for our pop music pleasure centers.
July 13 - "Talkin' French" Single + LP Announce
My wife’s first language was French, and I’ve always felt a little like the Gomez to her Morticia. When this song came together, I was incredulous it was about her: I’d never written a love song before for fear it’d fall short of my feelings. But with her as the slender verse, me as the smitten chorus, and the bridge as the life we escape to together, I finally feel like I got it. Of particular note is Winston Cook-Wilson’s gorgeous, out-of-time passage, recorded at the piano in my childhood home, where he is momentarily relieved of the song’s jangling gravity before falling back to earth and into form.
August 9 - "Gas Station Bathroom" Single
My dad left me his busted old 97 CR-V when he died and I drove it until pieces started falling out of the bottom of the car onto the highway. The long, mostly solitary hours I spent tracing I-95 up and down the coast over those years were a sometimes maddening, sometimes revealing stage for examining where my life was going in the wake of that loss. Without knowing where to find terra firma, I was unmoored, untethered, and lost, always moving. I love the performances on this song, and particularly relish the way Andrew Daly Frank’s wistful, winding guitar licks lead into the song’s solo section.
August 30 - "Rockaway" Single
To me, “Country Life in America” is an album about how growing up feels while you’re doing it; it’s like taking the train into the city knowing you’ll have to catch the last one out later. “Rockaway” is about straining to find your way in, straining against the starched collar, straining against the uncertainty of beginning again. I’m very proud of the contributions made to the instrumental breakdown, where Jason Burger’s percussion, Matt Lipkins’s synths, and especially Ian Wayne’s lead guitar jump to life like a child’s toy box suddenly animated by a magic spell.
September 15 - Album Street
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