Review: Antsy McClain Makes the Most of Downtime With '15 Songs From Isolation'
It was bound to happen. When you take musicians who are used to being out on the road and stick them inside the same four walls under COVID-19 related lockdown, eventually some of them are going to use the time to record some new songs. Nashville-based songwriter Antsy McClain is in a better position than most for this, being an artist who has long used a very DIY process of recording and self-producing albums, sometimes with his band The Trailer Park Troubadours, but also frequently as an acoustic solo artist under his own name. It is in this vein that he has released his new digital-only album 15 Songs from Isolation.
McClain warns that this isn't a “normal” album for him, but instead is “what happens when a wildly creative mind when quarantined and left to his own devices.” There are certainly songs here that would likely never be released on a full McClain or Troubadours release, most notably the two under one minute single punchline songs “Tattoo of You”, about a man who is thankful that a too-long line at the parlor prevented him from getting his now ex-girlfriend's name permanently engraved on his ass and “Am I Drinking Because She Left Me?” which is the pretty darn good beginning of a country song parody, asking the philosophical question “am I drinking because she left me, or did she leave me 'cause I'm a drunk?”
But other songs on 15 Songs from Isolation will be familiar to McClain's long-time fans. The mix of subtle humor (a staple of his solo work, the more broad humor left to his Troubadours material) and wistful nostalgia that has anchored his songwriting for 25 years is present. Maybe a little less polished than a non-isolation album would be, but in some cases this “sitting in my garage with a guitar” feel enhances the song.
Such is the case with album highlight “An Old Friend From High School.” In it, the narrator talks of an old high school chum who calls to catch up and reminisce. For 20 minutes the two talk, each tentatively trying to recall the names that aren't coming up, while gamely pretending to be in the know. Eventually, the two admit to being clueless and discover it was a wrong number and the two had never gone to school in the same state, much less school. It's a simple concept at its core and one that could have been a quick laugh. Instead, it plays as a reminder that, in pretty much any suburban high school, we all have the same basic cliques, social encounters, and memorable occasions. The fog of time, especially for someone like the song's narrator who had changed greatly in the intervening years, blurs the memories so that two strangers are just as likely to stroll successfully down memory lane as someone you spent 4 years with three decades ago.
A similar, but more positive, concept of time fuzzing memory is “One Day Today Will Be the Good Old Days.” It's hard to believe that being quarantined for months at a time with little social interaction could ever be looked back fondly by anyone. But McClain pretty convincingly runs through history, noting that your grandparents has WWII and the Depression in what they called the “good old days” and your parents had Vietnam and the fight for civil rights in their “good old days.”
If you're looking for a slick commercial release, full of pop hooks and well-honed lyrical and instrumental content, 15 Songs From Isolation isn't the album for you. But then Antsy McClain probably isn't the artist for you either. While this album is definitely more scuffed than his usual output, it's not nearly as noticeable as it would be for an artist who spent more time in the studio. McClain's charm has always been in his organic approach and 15 Songs from Isolation is about as organic as an album gets.
As a digital-only release, the only place to get the album is on McClain's website.