Caught in the Carousel

Jacob Golden

By Alex Green

"No more tears now; I will think about revenge."
—Mary, Queen of Scots

"I took out my revenge/I wrote a chorus"
—Jacob Golden ("Revenge Song")

Jacob Golden

Nothing occupies the mind quite like revenge.

It seeps into the blood and swells; it goes around your head like a refrain, a chorus, a thing whose loop envelops you until all you can think about is getting even. The taste for it is dizzying—Homer once likened it to being sweeter than flowing honey—and dominating, leaving little room for anything else. When someone breaks your heart it shatters big and jagged somewhere in your chest and those shards stick into you like puzzle pieces made of knives, leaving you too sick to eat, too tired to sleep and too stunned to do anything but watch the world slant into pointlessness.

And all you want is to get even. Or even a little bit ahead. But we'll get to revenge in a minute. For now, heartbreak:

Thanks to the crushing impact of unrequited love, love gone bad, or one's heart not given back to them in its original condition, we have great plays and paintings and novels and poems and operas. And pop songs. We've got a lot of those. And let's face it: those are the best ones: Sam Cooke's "Bring It On Home To Me" ("If you ever/Change your mind/About leaving/Leaving me behind"), R.E.M.'s "So. Central Rain (I'm Sorry)" ("Did you never call/I waited for your call") and Patty Griffin's "Moses" ("But he never ever asks a single thing about me/If I die he'd hear about it eventually") are all examples of how a broken heart sounds in the framework of a pop song. And the weird thing is, a broken heart always sounds so good. Songs about getting married, or having kids or taking a vacation in Hawaii in 1986 all have their place (though I'm not exactly sure where), but they rarely endure.

And now, revenge:

Broken hearts reside on barren beaches amidst craggy rocks and choppy waters and circling sharks, the sting of salt in the air, searching for a wound to land in.

It's a rough, grey place. The dominating need for revenge, for a kind of emotional score-settling is a losing battle because all of the ideas you get amidst the post-apocalyptia of fresh heartbreak are kind of stupid: a perfectly calibrated mix CD, an aching epistle delivered on a doorstep, a walk past their house with someone new—none of that works and you know it. But to sublimate both the trauma and the yearning for reprisal into something artistic, is a painful, but cleansing way to get past it all. And when you're done, you're left steps closer to feeling better, sure, but you're also left with a shivering, spiky and fevered memorial for an open wound. Years later you can say, I was pretty fucked up, I lost fifteen pounds, I didn't leave the house for three weeks, and people might get a hazy idea as to what you mean, or you can pick up the guitar, bring out the poem, point to the painting and the exact dimensions of your wound and the distance back from it can be measured.

Singer/songwriter Jacob Golden must know these numbers down the last decimal point.

Jacob Golden

Born in Sacramento, Golden relocated to Portland and while he worked a 9-5 job he wrote most of the numbers that make up his debut album Revenge Songs. Recorded in living rooms, bathrooms and car parks, Golden built on the organic creation of his album by playing shows in living rooms across the country to small, but fervent crowds, sometimes numbering around only forty people. "…You make an unbelievable, lifelong connection with those people," Golden says in the press release to Revenge Songs. "…The foundation of my musicality," he continues, "and what enchants me in music generally is atmosphere. A good record is a document of an experience, of people playing and listening in a room."

Revenge Songs glides right in with all the dark and elegant immediacy of a descending fog or a slow moving fever. Soaked with heartbreak, humor and poignancy, it's an album of gently churning ballads that finds the gut faster than any album in recent memory. And not just the part of your gut that aches and longs, the part that brings you to your knees, dissolves you with a simple flick of its wrist. Varying from the hushed intimacy of Simon and Garfunkel ("Shine A Light") and Elliot Smith ("On A Saturday" and "Revenge Songs") to the slow simmer of Remy Zero ("Out Come The Wolves") Revenge Songs is a steady-handed eleven song elegy that moves as elegantly as smoke and cuts as deeply as a hot blade.

When asked why his songs always sound so sad, Ron Sexsmith once said that in his head they didn't sound that way at all, but when he laid them down in the studio they just came out like that. It's hard not to think that Golden has a similar condition, because although there are plenty of crushing moments (the wrenching "Love You" or the devastating burn of "Zero Integrity") it's not that these numbers are without their humor ("There was a girl in Ohio/And my feelings were pure/Still I got kicked off the tour") and ironic lyrical witticisms ("A sellout doesn't value his own songs"), and yet they all sound so sad. Golden is such an accurate reporter for the forlorn, the scorned and the bummed, that his dispatches come across with a laconic and cutting grace—like the slow-motion swing of a switchblade underwater, or a sword drawn in zero gravity.

Revenge Songs is a fragile little album, wounded and hobbled, but it's anything but tentative. Or little. In fact, it's so sure of its vulnerability, it is, in effect, one of the most emotionally exact collections around. And at the core of each of the numbers that make up this album, you're sure to find your own trembling self, the self that was annihilated by someone who didn't love you back, someone who was careless with your heart, snatched if from you and popped it like a balloon right in front of your eyes and tossed the rubber halves into the street.

So what of revenge?

Jacob Golden

"Life being what it is, one dreams of revenge," Paul Gauguin once wrote. In other words, we travel a rickety path, and sometimes things go horribly wrong, so why wouldn't one always keep the company of the impulse for vengeance? But of this, Charlotte Bronte once opined, "Something of vengeance I had tasted for the first time; as aromatic wine it seemed, on swallowing, warm and racy: its after-flavor, metallic and corroding, gave me a sensation as if I had been poisoned."

In other words, a poem or a painting or a pop song is more sensible than ill will, and it's probably the fastest way to get better. "I know Revenge sounds like a negative concept," Golden writes in the biography for his album, "but for me it represents the idea of accepting your inner struggle, standing tall in the face of doubt and failure. The driving force of my music is my attempt to rise above my circumstances."

From his home in Portland, the former Californian lists his favorite things about his adopted hometown.

Jacob Golden's Consummate Top Ten Things About Portland:

I moved to Portland, Oregon after living in England for a couple years. This is where the seeds of my album began. It's still my home when I am not touring—which is a lot these days!

1. Everyday Music
When I actually have a place to set up my record player, which is rare these days, I really enjoy spending lazy evenings listening to crackly old vinyl. For me it's still the most romantic medium for listening to music. This record store has a huge vinyl section and you can pick up classic stuff for super cheap!

2. Powell's Books
Maybe the greatest bookstore in the States?! Four stories high of new and used books. A great place to get lost in. Also they have a separate store for all their technical books, which, for a geek like me is great fun.

3. Stumptown Coffee
I'm a real coffee snob. It's almost impossible to get a decent cup in England and everyone says Seattle is the place for coffee, but in my opinion Stumptown really holds the torch for obsessively great coffee. It's a little on the narcotic side, so great fuel for those marathon recording and mixing sessions.

4. Voodoo Donuts
This is definitely the strangest of all donut shops. There's a tiny loft where bands play, they do punk rock weddings and there's a shrine dedicated to Issac Hayes on a velvet painting. Oh yeah, then there's the donuts. The specialties being The Cock and Balls (crème filled of course) The Pepto (yes Pepto Bismol) and the crown has to be the Bacon Maple which is a maple bar with two strips of crispy bacon on the top. Yum!

5. The Bins
This is the source for a lot of the collectors in Portland. It's basically the last stop before the landfill. It smells, it's best if you wear gloves but you can find crazy stuff here, rare musical instruments, antiques, out of print books and records. The trade off is you have to dig, which for some is a full time job...these people are known as "diggers".

6. Laurelhurst Theatre
One of my favorite movie theatres. Only $3 to get in and they serve great micro brew beers and pizza by the slice and they play everything from new movies to classics in all genres with themes like cheesy'80s or '60s sci-fi. Makes for a great date.

7. The Crystal Ballroom
Haven't had the pleasure of playing here yet. It's a really fun and very classy venue infamous for it's bouncy floor, which makes for good dancing. I saw Blonde Redhead there and everyone was bouncing around!

8. Movie Madness
The best physical place to rent movies. All the classics, plus really amazing music, documentaries, horror, sci-fi, foreign films. It makes Netflix feel so cold!

9. The Magic Closet
A great recording studio some of my friends set up. I had the honor of being the first to record there when they were just getting set up. Run by musicians and full of great gear.

10. Old Town Music
I'm always on the hunt for old school guitar pedals and this place carries some amazing classic instruments, amps, guitars—not your everyday generic guitar shop.

Jacob Golden's Revenge Songs is out now on The Echo Label.

Internet
www.jacobgolden.com
www.myspace.com/themusicofjacobgolden