Chris Eckman – The Land We Knew the Best

“One of America’s finest songwriters…emotional depths with an opalescent beauty.” — Americana UK

Chris Eckman is one of those songwriters with the alchemist’s touch. He’s proved it over the years as the songwriter of the Seattle rock-folk band The Walkabouts, as well as across a lauded six album solo career. His songs have been recorded by Townes Van Zandt, Steve Wynn, Willard Grant Conspiracy (and others), and his last album, the spare, haunted Where the Spirit Rests, won the prestigious German Record Critics Award (Preis der Deutschen Schallplattenkritik) in 2021. Three and a half years later he’s back with The Land We Knew the Best, and new stories to tell.

It all began to take shape in early 2022, when he settled in to start composing songs for the record.

“I don’t really write in fits and starts,” he explains. “I tend to have concentrated periods of writing. I was glad this didn’t take eight years to get going, like the last one. I’d found something of a different voice doing Where the Spirit Rests and it was still there when I picked up the guitar again.”

Yet this isn’t just a continuation, it’s not the same character. Time has passed, but maybe more importantly, the geography has altered. The songs on The Land We Knew the Best aren’t populated by the broken people and tumbledown, raw landscapes of the American West that has been the setting for much of his previous work. He’s lived in Ljubljana, Slovenia for many years, and it’s seeped into his consciousness. Not just the city, but also the mountainous and thickly forested nature that surrounds it. 

“I wanted that specific sense of place in these songs,” Eckman says. “I find a lot of solace and inspiration in the nature here. I walk a lot in the mountains and by now I have a strong connection to my adopted home. Place creates certain atmospheres and exploring that has always been important to my music.” 

That atmosphere is everywhere; in the “marshland fog” that envelops “The Cranes,” in the starlit mountaintops of “Running Hot” and in the dusk-tinged ridgelines of “Laments.” The Land We Knew the Best has its own distinctive landscape. Its own emotional geography. 

The change isn’t just apparent in the lyrics; it suffuses the music, too. Where the Spirit Rests was so sparse it stood almost naked. Here, the sound is fuller, warmer and more textured, creating a very different frame for the songs.

This is most evident in the lush, heartbreaking opener, “Genevieve,” which features plaintive piano figures and hushed backing vocals from Slovenian singer-songwriter Jana Beltran (who also sings on three other songs) and majestic strings courtesy of Belgian composer/instrumentalist Catherine Graindorge (Iggy Pop, Nick Cave). It is like a widescreen version of a Raymond Carver short story; distilled images from an upended life.  The seasons pass, but by the end, the narrator is still alone, the wish for Genevieve’s return unanswered. “Genevieve come home / I’ve been taking care / Finally got my act together.”

“There’s surely a sense of loss in the album, but it’s also about trying to take control of one’s life,” says Eckman. But like most things in his music, nothing is ever fully spelled-out. Everything remains deliciously ambiguous and unfolding.

“Haunted Nights” showcases Eckman’s love of country music and the rawer and darker side of that tradition. One can hear echoes of Kristofferson and Nelson, artist’s he has covered in the past years, and even the underappreciated melancholy of his fav 70’s country chanteuse, Sammie Smith. There’s Andraž Mazi’s sky-bound pedal steel and a captivating duet vocal from Beltran. There’s hope measured by time worn fatalism. What feels at first like a list of ways to start over, becomes more fragile by the end of the chorus: “And I’ll go headlong through the thick and thin / If I make it through these haunted nights again.”

For the recording sessions, which took place in and around Ljubljana, Eckman assembled a group of trusted collaborators. The rhythm section of Žiga Golob (contrabass) and BlaŽ Celarec (drums) have recorded and toured with him for years, and lay down a supple foundation. Most of the other musicians are friends from the local jazz and experimental music scenes including Ana Kravanja from the acclaimed Slovenian avant-garde folk trio Širom. Ex-Londoner and Ljubljana resident Alastair McNeill (Róisín Murphy, Kreda) was behind the board for Where the Spirit Rests and here he works his magic again, fashioning the album’s varied atmospherics as well as adding guitars, subtle keyboards and percussion to the mix.

Unlike his mostly subdued and acoustic previous release, flashes of electricity crackle across The Land We Knew the Best. It bursts through McNeill’s liquid guitar solo on “Town Lights Fade” and Eckman’s own controlled guitar feedback punctuating “Buttercup.” But it reaches a noisy, full-on climax with “Laments,” with its defiant tag line: “I’ll never ever / give you up.”

“The way we captured that energy on ‘Laments’ was intentional,” Eckman recalls. “We were set up like Neil Young and Crazy Horse in the studio, all in the same room, no isolation, with the vocals booming through a PA. Most everything on the album is live with the sounds all bleeding together. I’ve recorded that way a lot in the past decade. You have to throw away perfection and commit to the moment.”

There’s a rough-hewn and undeniable beauty in the varied sonic and emotional textures found on The Land We Knew the Best: dark ambiance, distorted crescendos, deep-voiced storytelling and moments of hard-earned stillness.

It is an album of memory and place; heart and hope. It is an immersive, vivid walk through the landscapes that Chris Eckman knows the best.