Portland – Everybody loves an album with a back-story; Bon Iver’s For Emma, Forever Ago emerging from Justin Vernon’s three months of post-breakup solitude in a snow-bound Wisconsin cabin, and John Coltrane, kicked out of Miles Davis’ group as a junkie, experiencing a life saving spiritual awakening and setting it to tape in the form of A Love Supreme.
Break Line The Musical doesn’t have anything quite as dramatic, but the back-story does have a certain appeal. Sometime around 2004, Yeasayer guitarist and vocalist Anand Wilder was jamming with one Maxwell Kardon on a front porch—it was a guitar and banjo dirge in D minor, we’re told—and they began experimenting with some inherited folk lyrics about Pennsylvania coal miners on strike. This sprouted an idea for a musical that, ten years later, has come to fruition in the form of an album, Breakline The Musical,out July 15 on Secretly Canadian. To be clear, though there are rumors of an actual stage show,Break Line The Musical currently exists only in recorded form, and so it might be more accurate to call it a concept album rather than a musical.
Musical, concept album, whatever you want to label it, Wilder and Kardon’s creation contains a narrative that unfolds as follows (spoiler alert ahead): In the Pennsylvania town of Greenbelt, a black apple-picker, Harvey Jackson, marries Ada Schmidt, a white woman from a family of miners. Soon after the nuptials, the miners go on strike, and the wicked Darwin Appleby cons Harvey’s family and others into breaking the picket line and laboring as scabs in the mine. Ada’s enraged brother, Charles Schmidt Jr., lights a bomb in the mineshaft to further the union cause, killing the strikebreakers, including Harvey’s family, though Harvey himself is spared because he is away with Ada at the time. Ada’s father, Charles Schmidt Sr., then takes the blame for the bombing and is sentenced to hang from the same sycamore tree under which Ada and Harvey were wed.
Hear the contentious trial scene in this clip of “I’m To Blame”:
To tell this tale, Wilder and Kardon assembled a crew of indie collaborators from disparate members of bands such as Dirty Projectors, Suckers, and Man Man, who pop in and out of the album like celebrities at a Brooklyn loft party. The sound they came up with is equally expansive, drawing on banjos, choirs, brass, a Mellotron, sound samples and some old fashioned electric guitar wailing to create something that is part Pete Seeger, part power ballad. “Opportunity,” one of the album’s highlights, features Yeasayer’s other voice, Chris Keating, as the conniving Darwin Appleby. It begins with the narrative drive and clever wordplay of a classic musical monologue then builds to a transcendent gospel-choir coda that sounds like something the Stones might have put on Beggars Banquet.
Like the concept albums of the seventies that Wilder and Kardon are obviously so fond of, Break Line The Musical requires a lyric sheet to be understood. It was only after several close listens with liner notes and pen in hand that I was able to piece together the details of the story. And, even then, there are some unanswered questions and jarring transitions. In the gorgeous post-bombing lament, “Fathers and Brothers,” Harvey seems to be in prison, but it is unclear why since he had no part in the bombing and in fact would have been a victim of it had he not been away with Ada. Similarly, Ryan Kattner of Man Man (who has a voice built for melodrama if ever there was one) appears and disappears so suddenly in the story that you’re left scrambling to figure out who exactly he was supposed to be.
These are the sort of kinks that may someday be worked out in a stage production. As a stand-alone album, Break Line The Musical is still an intriguing, ambitious indie project in the tradition of Sufjan Steven’s Illinois or The Decemberist’s The Hazards of Love. Its narrative foibles prevent it from maintaining the height of those albums, but it attains elevation again and again with a novel array of voices and moments of inspired songwriting. Wilder and Kardon aimed high from their seat on the front porch and created a song and story cycle worth engaging with.
Get a hold of an LP and some liner notes from Secretly Canadian here.
