Sounding 009 — The Low Red Hour
Warm, offhand American music, taken up across a single August — the sound of the year leaning over, of late summer beginning its slow combustion into autumn.
All August I have moved through J.J. Cale the way the month itself moved — slowly, without urgency, the light already thinning at its edges, the whole season tilting toward the fall. Naturally, Okie, Number 10, Stay Around: I took them one after another, in no hurry, because hurry is the one thing this music will not permit. He is the opposite of nearly everything I love — warm where I go cold, plain where I turn strange. Cale came out of Tulsa, the quiet progenitor of a whole unhurried sound, a man who wrote the songs that made other men famous and remained, by his own arrangement, almost unseen.
What I love first is that it moves like talk. On Crying Eyes, the song that closes that first record, neither the guitar nor the voice is ever raised; they lean toward one another and murmur, trading lines the way two people trade them late in the evening, when the fire has burned down and there is nothing left to prove. His singing is barely singing at all — half-spoken, half-swallowed, thrown away almost before it is offered, as though he were confiding something in passing that he would afterward deny having said. It is the most unhurried music I know, and the most precise.
And the sound itself carries the warmth of a bonfire — not the blaze but the after-hours of one, the low red hour when the flames have sunk to embers and the heat reaches only as far as the ring of faces around it. Everything glows close and dim. The drums are hollow and soft, held far back in the dark, more a pulse felt through the ground than a thing struck — a heartbeat in an adjoining room. Nothing brightens, nothing lifts its voice, nothing reaches for you. And yet every placement is exact, set down with the certainty of a man who has done this a thousand times and needs no one to notice. That is what I cannot get past: the labour it takes to arrive at something this effortless, the care folded invisibly into the careless.
Perhaps that is why he came to me now, at the hinge of the year, as the warmth begins to go out of the days. There is an autumn already inside this music — unhurried, unbothered, a little gold and a little spent, the sound of a man who long ago stopped hurrying, and found that everything he needed had been waiting in the slowness all along.
