Kai Crowe-Getty used to rock out when he fronted the band Lord Nelson, but he’s more introspective on his solo debut album, The Wreckage. Oh, he still rocks out, just not as much, and he is far removed from being a sensitive singer-songwriter. His music more closely resembles that of Neil Young’s country rock period of the mid-1970s or Tom Petty‘s solo work during the 1990s. Think American Stars ‘n’ Bars and Wildflowers as sonic touchstones.
The Wreckage doesn’t copy the tropes of these artists as much as share their use of an electric guitar and confessional lyrics to express personal pain without melodrama or grandiose statements. Life is hard. The open road goes nowhere. Love fades. So it goes, but it’s not all bad.
Songs such as “A South East State” and “Whole Damn World” acknowledge the pleasure and pain of the healing process. The wailing of feedback provides solace even as it conveys experiential ache. Growing pains don’t stop even when one is old enough to be better, and then there is always sex and drugs, not to mention something good on the radio—even if the best times are more of a memory than a current reality.
Crowe-Getty looks around small-town America and sees a country full of ghosts and dollar stores. As the title tune tells us, we are living in “The Wreckage” and find ourselves “Dancing on a Razor’s Edge”. Young and Petty’s classic albums reflected their times in a way analogous to this one. Some things may seem timeless, such as the generational feelings that life is getting worse and that the future seems bleak, but the particulars matter. “We’re broken and we’re damaged, and we’re cursed / The best of us can push against the worst”, he sings in a matter-of-fact voice on “Heavy as Heaven”. The devil may be in the details, but so is God. There’s no reason to despair, and maybe even a reason to hope.
While calling Crowe-Getty an optimist may be an overstatement, his songs share a throbbing beat that suggests that as long as we exist, we can keep moving forward. And as long as we don’t stop, who knows what might happen. On cuts like “Forks of Buffalo” and “American Radio”, he preaches the importance of going forward. Staying still is its own punishment.
That’s even true on the album’s most depressing track, “No One Breaks a Heart Like You”. The song might be about the end of a relationship that could have lasted, but the fact that the narrator still bitterly feels the hurt suggests the healing has begun. It’s a sign of progress as compared with feeling numb.
You don’t have to be Bob Dylan to know which way the wind blows. We live in stressful times. We have always and probably will continue to do so. This ten-song record ends with 30 seconds of Kai Crowe-Getty strumming his guitar and singing repeatedly, “Don’t let it get you down.” These are words to live by, even if we are just crawling out of the wreckage.