COUNTLESS BRANCHES

Seymour, the eldest of the precocious Glass family children who are the subject of most of J.D.Salinger’s short novels and stories, is clever, strange, and benign. According to one of his brothers, he was a ‘mukta’, a God-knower, an enlightened man. Seymour’s sensibility, like those of the siblings he so deeply influenced, was much influenced by his study of spiritual texts, and there are constant references throughout the Glass stories to Buddhism, Advaita Vedanta, classical Taoism, and Christianity. Nevertheless, Seymour was a troubled soul. After a brief period of marriage to a much younger wife, he took his own life.

Years after I first read them as a young adult, the Glass stories remain important to me because they were entertaining, helpful and instructive at a particular time in my life, and I recall them with affection. But as Seymour points out in ‘Raise High the Roof Beam, Carpenters’, ‘we are being sentimental when we give to a thing more tenderness than God gives to it’, and I concede that my feelings towards the Salinger stories may be too sympathetic, coloured by fond nostalgia. It is not coincidental that Salinger’s writing has itself been accused of sentimentality; although sharp and funny, particularly in their dialogue, his stories are unusually soft-hearted and benevolent. His style and way of thinking, which had detractors when the stories were published, are perhaps even less liked today. Salinger’s books are often considered earnest, self-conscious, and pretentious; like Hermann Hesse’s, they're dismissed as the kind of novels that mainly appeal to over-sensitive young people. 

Seymour’s definition of sentimentality, which I have often found useful to remember, came to mind as I listened to Bill Fay’s new record, ‘Countless Branches’. Fay is an intriguing musician and something of an outsider. In the early 1970s he made two albums for Deram, Decca’s label for its more experimental releases; the first, ‘Bill Fay’, was personal, fragile, and lavishly orchestrated, while the second, ‘Time of the Last Persecution’, was troubled and stark. Neither was successful, and he was soon dropped by the record company. Relatively unambitious as well as temperamentally inclined towards privacy (his absence from the music world coincidentally caused him to be called ‘Britain’s musical Salinger’), Fay took up other jobs but continued to write and record music on his own. He felt deeply out of place in the contemporary world, coming to believe that spiritual values, prominent in the counterculture of the 1960s and subsequently forgotten or ignored, were all that mattered. He also found meaning and solace in nature, which remains a deep source of inspiration.

Bill Fay’s music has been intermittently championed in the intervening years - by David Tibet, Jim O’Rourke, Jeff Tweedy, and Nick Cave, among others - but it was about a decade ago that his career unexpectedly flourished. The music producer Joshua Henry, whose late father had ‘Time of the Last Persecution’ in his collection, sought him out, attracted by the record’s mix of apocalyptic despondency and resolute hopefulness. The outcome of their eventual collaboration was a new album, ‘Life is People’, which was released in 2012 and followed three years later by another, ‘Who is the Sender’. Both sold well enough to justify the third and current release.    

Although musically unexceptional and blatantly out of step with fashionable taste, ‘Countless Branches’ has been surprisingly well received. Fay’s simple lyrics are heartfelt and most of his melodies are memorable; together they resonate with emotional authenticity, and this appears to be at the core of the record’s warm reception. One reviewer said that the songs seem to be the fruit of a lifetime overcoming despair; another remarked that the record is infused by melancholy, but ‘the knowing sadness of a long life, not youthful depression’, while a third  described it as ‘tender, forgiving, and wonderstruck’. ‘Countless Branches’ is  a moving record, in some respects reminiscent of the lived-in profundity of Johnny Cash’s last work and the vulnerability of Gil Scott-Heron’s final albums, but lacking their darkness and gloom.  Fay’s music is close to being sentimental, at least in Salinger’s sense of the word. Unashamedly, its aim is to gladden and uplift.

I recently described and praised ‘Countless Branches’ to a musician friend who is somewhat younger than me, and after a moment’s thought he wondered if it might be a record that especially appeals to an older generation. This may be so, just as it is probably true of Leonard Cohen’s last albums. Fay’s feelings are those of a person who, like Seymour Glass, has found living in materialistic contemporary culture unusually difficult and disenchanting. More profoundly, it is clear that he has also been touched by suffering and pain, both his own and that of the world around him. Nonetheless, he seems to have risen above it. Fay's music suggests that life may not be an inevitable descent into gloom or despair but an ongoing process of creation and rebirth in which our capacity for love can grow and strengthen. In that respect - and sometimes musically, as in the band version of 'How Long, How Long' - it recalls George Harrison's solo work.


https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wFvKnwrVSQE
https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/bill-fay-countless-branches/
https://www.allmusic.com/album/countless-branches-mw0003335569
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eV_astp3BjM
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JWnUItw1ElU
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GckXmRkPQqw&list=OLAK5uy_mCLUlJks2QLwyWZnmXU17_p9tojvoqg5c&index=4