In Search of the Epistolary Album

Port O’ Brien’s latest release, Threadbare, is an album in epistolary form. Its success in capturing the genre –  with its poignant and sometimes hysterical mix of the intimate and the confessional –  sent me on a quest to find more albums of a correspondent character.

I expected to encounter at least a few – there are epistolary poems, after all, and epistolary songs (Leonard Cohen’s Famous Blue Raincoat; Emmy the Great’s Gabriel). There are album dedications, liner-note shoutouts, and even epistolary album titles (Dear Science). But even among the singles there was a lack; they were invariably one-sided – letters without answer, or letters never sent. (“Dear God,” Sincerely sing M.O.F. “I’ve been trying hard to reach you”). Two exceptions: Bob Dylan’s Boots of Spanish Leather and Eminem’s Stan are both multivocal songs by one vocalist, which is to say, dialogic songs — what I would consider truly epistolary.  But epistolary albums? Just Port O’Brien, and maybe, just maybe, Blood on the Tracks.

What I mean by an epistolary album is this: songs written as letters by a particular speaker, responsive to song-letters by another. A particularly striking example on Threadbare is the back to back lineup of the songs Threadbare and Calm Me Down.

I have wrote to you 7 different times, but of late my Heart so much misgave me that I knew not how to hold my pen … When you think of those you have left behind you, you know where to find them, but I have been wandering from Sea to Sea and from Shoar to Shoar not knowing where to rest.

- Abigail Adams [letter to John Adams, Jun. 18 1778]

Port O’Brien is particularly well-equipped to produce this work, as the band has two vocalists well acquainted with the practice of love over distance – with each other. Thematically, Threadbare hits the same notes as Dostoevsky’s Poor Folk and the Adams’ correspondence (prompting the question of why estranged lovers are so prone to worrying about money…). The album also expands on the band’s longtime maritime influences, pulling cues from the the lore of sailors and widow’s walks.

Dear Reader, I am loath to think that the moment for the epistolary album has passed us by without more — that we are to live in a topographically uni-media musical world, where  telephone conversation is King and instantaneous communications have displaced the joy and the agony of the written letter. If you know of musical correspondences I have neglected, please do let us know. HELLO HELLO HELLO HELLO HELLO HELLO HELLO HELLO HELLO HELLO LOVE AND KISSES HYDRA.