“Nothing lesser than emancipation!” Grant-Lee Phillips exclaims at the start of the chorus of “Little Men”, the first track on his 12th solo album, In the Hour of Dust. He manages to rhyme that line with “little men who want to rule like Caesar”, whose name sounds suspiciously like “Satan” in Phillips‘s characteristically torqued enunciation and phrasing. If “Trump” is what your ears hear, though, surely that’s at least partly the intent.
Those “little men … can’t hold the tide off for long”, Phillips vows on behalf of an aggrieved populace that extends beyond America. “All over the world, it’s quaking”—the revolution, that is—and we won’t stop until we’ve “slip[ped] the last shackle”. With a jaunty backing track driven by Phillips’s lively acoustic guitar, abetted by Jay Bellerose’s town-parade drumming and eventually joined by a swelling string section, it’s three rousing minutes of jingoistic jubilee, an old-fashioned protest song.
Not so fast—literally. “Little Men” goes on for more than half a minute longer, and its coda is slowed to half-time, with Phillips cooing wordless “ah-aah-ahs” as if to sing us off to sleep. “Little Men” doesn’t augur a collection of protest songs. It’s an opening fanfare for what is primarily an album of lullabies. Phillips is not here to roar on behalf of the body politic, or even to throw a few quick punches at the meanies of the moment (as he did on 2018’s Widdershins), but to breathe a little of our accumulated dust away and place a poultice on the national rash.
That is not out of character. Phillips’ ability to bellow and wail was fully audible all the way back in the 1990s when he fronted Grant Lee Buffalo. For that potent but underappreciated band, he did indeed write protest songs—garrulously oblique ones, appealingly stuffed and scuffed by bassist Paul Kimble’s idiosyncratic production.
Yet Phillips’ natural voice was that of a crooner, and his longstanding stint as the town troubadour of Gilmore Girls further gentled him. He has mostly abandoned Grant Lee Buffalo’s métier of sprawling art-cinema alt-country set pieces and “homespun violent sound” (to quote the lead track from 1996’s Copperopolis). However, he hasn’t lost his intuitive feel for a dreamy sort of Western and Southern American mythopoeia.
After “Little Men”, In the Hour of Dust settles into a slow-and-slower lope. The effect is lulling, not rousing, and if you can’t spell “croon” without C-O-R-N, well, that’s also part of American mythopoeia (vide Bruce Springsteen). Even when Phillips announces, in the chorus of the album’s second track (“Did You Make It Through the Night Okay”), that “strange days have begun” and prophesies an apocalyptic vision of the moon leaping out of the heavens and the sea swallowing the sun, he nonetheless reassures us that he “choos[es] not to sing of doom” because he “like[s] a cheerful tune”.
Seven songs later, he suggests that we don’t need to worry about these incipient strange days because “I can see it now / In days to come / All of those dark ages behind us”. As we ponder with him both the coming of a catastrophe and a later time when that catastrophe is past, we’re left to dwell uncomfortably in our very uncertain present—presumably, the titular “hour of dust”, i.e., hazy gloaming, in which America now finds itself, with the ominous intimation that the sun may soon set on our empire.
On the album’s third track, “Closer Tonight”, Phillips lets some of his anxiety leak out. The “fire that keeps a nation warm” could also be “its undoing”, he worries, and even though we have wonderful things like “driverless cars on Market Street… what is to stop us from turning on each other?”—as if we haven’t turned on each other already. Still, “we are closer tonight, closer than ever”, Phillips concludes. If he means “we” as in “we the people”, the notion that we’re closer than ever can be refuted with two words (“Charlie Kirk”).
Nor does it seem alert for Phillips to plead with us repeatedly on the next track, “Bullies”, that we “just can’t give in to them”. The bullies are currently in charge, having taken America’s lunch money, laid claim to the Hill, and generally terrorized the citizenry and vandalized the collective locker over the last decade. As if to drive this unspoken point home, Bellerose’s drums, dominant in the mix, thud away at bone-bruising depth.
Yet “Bullies” is about politics only by association. The tune really is about playground bullies, and how our grade-school fear of them slows down our experience of time, which is “liquid and cruel when you’re young” (a great line, and a reminder that Phillips can be as good a songpoet as any). Phillips is at heart a dreamy romantic with nostalgic tendencies and a penchant for the mantic arts—not for nothing did his Grant Lee Buffalo lyrics invoke voodoo and astrology.
He’s here to sing us comforting bedtime stories, even if “Stories We Tell” counsels that those “stories we tell to ourselves / Are stories, nothing else.” Therefore, “don’t be afraid” because “none of this is writ in stone”. Today, there may be bullies in that schoolyard, but take heart, because eventually you will find a real friend, “Someone / Who hurts like you do”, which Phillips tells us will happen in “Someone”—essentially R.E.M.‘s “Everybody Hurts” reworked for The Muppet Show. (You can practically hear Kermit the Frog singing it.)
Yes, some of this is plain hokum. There are two earnest but gushy love songs (“She Knows Me” and “No Mistaking”) as additional evidence—Grant Lee Buffalo fans will find themselves cueing up Phillips’s weightier and more lovelorn tunes, like “Honey Don’t Think” and “The Bridge”. Phillips’ self-production on In the Hour of Dust is seasoned and accomplished, but can at times grow too lush for what is essentially acoustic campfire music. The tempos get draggy (Bellerose’s artisanal drumming mainly provides ornament and mood, not propulsion). The backing band he has assembled is excellent, but sometimes renders him an ungainly cross between Tom Waits and a different Phillips (Sam).
There’s some subtle but slick Hollywood airbrushing over a fair amount of this putative dust; there’s too much driving around in cars (because LA); and the problem with too many lullabies is that they can lead to “America Snoring”, in the titular indictment of an early Grant Lee Buffalo track, where we slumber oblivious to broad-daylight violence on the streets where we live and the systematic gutting of our individual liberties. If there were ever a time when we could use more protest songs, it’s right now.
Yet to carp about all this is to miss something important about Grant-Lee Phillips: he is very, very good at what he does. He’s warm as a nightlight, a generous and consummate craftsman, a gracious melodist, and whether his fulsome croon works for you or doesn’t, it works on its own terms. He’s earned that vocal affect over the last 30-plus years, and he knows how to use it.
If you are in the right mood—a little lonely and tender, perhaps, a touch beset by personal doubt and wearied by worldly worries at day’s end—his commonplaces, overreaches, and sugaring don’t grate. Instead, they gather and invite. There’s room in these songs for all those vulnerable emotions and forlorn dreams you keep quiet and concealed in your daily rounds.
“American Lions”, the album’s penultimate track, is its showpiece. It’s a big Grant Lee Buffalo-style epic in which Phillips imagines prehistory, when lions roamed what is now Los Angeles, and complains that seeing today’s caged lions in the zoo “isn’t the same”. That’s a bit maudlin, you can’t help thinking, and when he connects the La Brea tar pits to his own young-lion prehistory as a “shirtless and brown” roofer (before his music career took off) tossing tar shingles to the ground, it isn’t clear where this extended and possibly jumbled metaphor is going. Is the MGM lion going to make an appearance?
Nor does the last verse, in which Phillips and his carmate (wife?) drive up to a ridge outside the city, telling each other’s fortunes with tarot cards and “making up songs” together while gazing on the valley lights from afar and deciding that “the city still roars” after all, quite succeed in bringing us to the hoped-for “Last Corner of the Earth”—the title of the album’s last song.
Something powerful does come together, though, in the warm and slow outro of “American Lions”, as Grant-Lee Phillips’s languorous “oohs” float over Jennifer Condos’s heart-filling, sliding bass part. You have been transported to an undreamed, almost hypnagogic place, and you couldn’t have arrived here without the five minutes that have led to it. It’s like falling slowly through a sinkhole, or even a tar pit, and emerging into another world at once deeply familiar yet never before encountered.
You can see that although we may not be closer tonight, the bullies are more brutish than ever, our emancipation is perilously endangered, and the American lion is extinct; nonetheless, something within or without has changed, or is changing, or will change, and that is lullaby enough.