“It’s hard to remember how joy used to feel,” Erik Walters sings on one of the stand-out tracks of his second album as Silver Torches, Let It Be A Dream. “Staring at the ceiling dreaming, pretending happiness is real.” When Walters sings it, though, the song isn’t quite a muck of despair, like it reads on the page. It is, as Stereogum called it, a “synth-powered Americana,” hinging on the kind of dark verses that require a bright, bleary chorus of hope. As the song title suggests, the reach comes through, and if a palm can impart joy again, then perhaps, here, it does.
Of course, I can think of a thousand times in my life I’ve felt the way those first lines go, –as most people reading this probably can. There are moments when you get so caught up in the dark cycle of everyday life, whether it be injustice, grief, trauma, hatred, or numbness, that the moments of joy and happiness seem impossibly far away, like a dream, even. But the crux of the song is an unexpected connection, a brief attempt to connect, even hypothetical, can jolt you out the dark. The bright, bleary chorus is always a possibility, no matter how thick the gloom seems.
Let It Be A Dream deals again and again in gloom and brightness, not a hot and sweet shine, like sunlight, but slow and silver like moonbeams on water. If you’re new to Walters’ work, start with “Keep The Car Running,” not an Arcade Fire take, but a circular, gentle hum, with Greg Leisz (of Springsteen and Joni Mitchell fame) adding pedal steel like a trace of honey in a cup of warm tea. Sometimes I think the best folk albums feel like tea, warm and mellow in your hand, but all the difference as a temporary barrier against the cold or the night.
All cross Let It Be A Dream‘s brief nine tracks, Walters offers a small comfort, within his tender songwriting and golden melodies, simple and sometimes sad, grappling with despair but never succumbing, dictating pain but telling about love.”I wrote Let It Be A Dream from the perspective of someone claimed by the honeytrap of the American Dream,” he said of the album. “It’s a lonely admittance to settling with what cards you’ve been dealt knowing it’s near impossible to climb your way out from the bottom of a glass-walled well.”
As far as personal context for that quote, Walters is a member of the touring band for both David Bezan and Perfume Genius, songwriters who operate in the same milieu as him but have, markedly, had more solo success to date. Perhaps touring behind the heart-bred songs of someone else can feel a bit like being at the bottom of a well and still feeling thirsty. In that case, Let It Be A Dream is a cool glass of water, or all the proof the world needs that Walters writes songs worthy of throwing his formidable touring powers behind.
“I’m not living, I’m just treading water to stay afloat,” he sings on “Nothing To Show,” accompanied on the duet by Courtney Marie Andrews, though the song itself belies the lyrical message. Anyone capable of writing a song that raw is very much alive, treading water never sounds like a song that could bleed if cut.
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This is his second album, following up a debut, 2016’s Heatherfield, but it sounds as refined and polished as any seven-or-eight-albums-in musician. Wherever or however Walters has been sharpening his formidable skill, it’s definitely as real as any of the excellent folk albums I’ve heard in 2017, balancing synth, piano, and harmonies with sinewy songwriting and Walters’ airy tenor.
Even if the spotlight hasn’t burned as bright on Silver Torches, despite its rather bleak foundation, this record has plenty of warmth, and a host of slow-whispery anthems that stand heads and shoulders above most songwriting this sad, particularly in the folk world. On the title track he sums ups his loneliness and depression: “Nothing lately makes me happy, all I do is watch TV / All it does is make me angry, but it keeps me company… Let it be a dream.”
But it’s not — this is America in 2017. And, as much as it hurts, sometimes facing down the reality is more comforting than pretending it’s not lurking there, anyway. So crank this up for the long ride home, and face down your fears in a comforting, existential folk album. If it gets to be too much, keep the car running. Joy can’t be that far away, I remember how it felt; it wasn’t just a dream. Stream the album below.
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Let It Be A Dream is out now, get it here.
