Waiting for You: Kristin Mueller’s Ports of Call
by Andrew Spencer Goldman

3 Beatles* 

If there were some kind of ranking system for life’s joys, the pleasure of observing someone doing what they love to do would rate pretty high—maybe just above cooking a great meal and just below being winked at by the looker walking past you.  You may know the joy I’m talking about if you’ve had the chance to witness Kristin Mueller’s restrained-but-exuberant drumming with any of the many bands she has played with over the last few years around NYC (most frequently with Gloria Deluxe).  She can’t help but make audiences smile along with her.

And she apparently can’t help making great records, either.  

With an impeccable group of musicians backing Mueller’s nimble guitar and banjo playing and her unusually dusky voice, Ports of Call (Dren Records) is an unequivocal triumph, a debut record that fills the listener with delight.  There are eight songs on the album, each with magic of its own.  Songs of longing in all of its forms.  Songs of wishing, of wistfulness, of nostalgia, of desire, of yearning, of dreaming.  Mueller’s lyrics reveal a woman working on these distinct feelings, as if pondering their relationship to each other but more interested in the unique qualities of each.   

“Domesticity Song,” the album opener, does not so much announce itself as tiptoe in through your speaker under gentle pizzicato strings, shades of clarinet and a hazy viola line before Mueller’s gravelly contralto (perhaps even tenor?) voice matches the words to the song’s tone: “Oh in the days I woke beside you/Held in the sunlight coming through/Planning my day all around you/Waiting for you.”  As the title suggests, the lyrics paint a portrait of domestic life, wherein the narrator sings of “Making the eggs and the coffee/Just like the way you taught me to/Planning our days out forever/Waiting for you.”  

Sounds quite lovely.  But while the listener has been nestling cozily into Mueller’s rosy picture, the strings and clarinet have been slyly lingering around the edges, periodically improvising subtle dissonances that hint at melancholia and instability.  And sure enough, the song reveals its true meaning in the bridge, as Karen Waltuch plays an achingly mournful viola line while Mueller sings: “But it’s cold now in the city/When your only love is gone/Yeah it’s cold out in the city/When it’s all said and done,” yanking the song out of a world of fairy-tale romance.  The song ends with the pizzicato that it entered with, and as Mueller repeatedly sings, “Waiting for you…waiting for you…” well, it’s just about the loneliest thing you’ll ever hear.

That’s just the first song.

There’s a whole album here every bit as subtle and thoughtful, as sensitive and as warm as the work of Gillian Welch or Lucinda Williams, but thankfully with less of an insistence upon adhering to the often overly strict codes of folk or alt-country.  In “Five Cents,” a lazy Southern-breeze of a song that glides along on Waltuch’s glissandoing strings and Richard Morris’s non-pedal steel, Mueller reminisces of the past, a dream of idleness and indulgence: “Five cents and dollar bills/Nights that squandered up in those hills/High as an angel’s fall/Sweet as a rose.”  Several minutes into the song, though, the song turns sharply and impossibly dark, a sudden storm that completely interrupts the nostalgia. Quite unexpectedly (but pleasantly) the listener finds himself in territory more closely associated with the noirish work of The Black Heart Procession or Neko Case.  Harrison Cannon’s upright bass becomes ten times heavier, like boots plodding through thick mud.  The strings tense up.  Brian Cantor’s tasteful and nearly hidden drumming grows more turbulent, the sticks cracking down harder on the snare.  Mueller sings over and over: “I’m so glad that you woke me up from my dream…”  

It’s a perplexing line, one that as in “Domesticity Song” seems to flip the entire track upside down.  Was the nostalgia that we heard a few minutes earlier a true representation of the past?  Or is the narrator of the song happy to be rid of those days?  Was she remembering the time with fondness, or is she remembering it as a period of waste and abuse?  As the song descends to its darkest point, it snaps back to the verse chord progression just as soon as it fell out of it, and we are left with nothing but a vague sense of unease.  

Lyric and musical complexity certainly isn’t the primary stamp of Mueller’s work, though the little forays that she takes into worlds beyond the comfort zone (hers or the listener’s) are undoubtedly the most pleasing.  There is of course nothing wrong with other songs on the album that walk a more conservative alt-country line; “Sweet Love,” “Liberty State Park” and “Wash-a-Shore” are all quite striking listens.  It’s hard to find fault with expertly written and played songs, and many people could die happy listening to Kristin’s voice and guitar weaving through pedal (or non-pedal) steel, upright bass and brushed drums.  

But listen to “Hopefully,” the album’s stunning closer, and it’s hard to accept anything less.  The song’s instrumentation (banjo, mandolin, non-pedal steel, keys, and vocals) doesn’t differ much from any of the other songs, but their union is somehow much more breathtaking—five minutes of shimmering country-inflected pop that lands somewhere between Nebraska-era Springsteen and Eno-produced U2. The song is a coup for the production team of Mueller, Christian Hanlon (who also mixed the album) and Richard Morris.  Banjo and mandolin, reverbed just slightly, pluck eighth-notes steadily over top of the organ’s whole notes, and it lends the song a feel of being unattached, unencumbered by worry, while Mueller floats these lines over top:  “Cause my love is so sweet/And my love can be so kind/My feels so alive/My love you’d understand, you’d understand.”

Listen, you’ll understand.

*Editors Note: To score albums or concert performances, LostWriters has adopted the Beatle System. The number of “Beatles” an artist receives correlates to the number of Beatles that would show up at a party hosted by the artist in question. The ratings are as follows:

1 Beatle: Ringo will come to your party because, hell, Ringo will go anywhere he’s actually invited. If an artist gets the dreaded “Half-Beatle,” Ringo will still show up to the party, but he’ll have sex with the lead singer’s spouse and possibly his or her children.
2 Beatles: Ringo will persuade Paul to join him at the band’s party by reminding Paul of the incriminating photos he still has from Paul's “I just want to dress like a wee girl phase.” If an artist receives 1.5 beatles, Paul will not be able to attend, but he will send a lovely fruit basket and several photos of himself. (Additional fees required for autographed photos.)
3 Beatles: Not only will Ringo and Paul come, but George Harrison will use his mystical powers to reincarnate himself from the dead just to attend this artist’s fete. If an artist receives 2.5 Beatles, George won’t be able to make it, but he’ll telepathically contact Ravi Shanker and ask him to go in his stead. For an extra fee, Ravi can teach the entire band how to play the sitar.
4 Beatles: You get the full quartet. This rating is reserved for works of true artistic genius, because it means Yoko has to let John out of that attic she’s been keeping him in all these years, and he’s going to be pretty surprised to find out there wasn’t a nuclear holocaust. If an artist receives 3.5 Beatles, Yoko will send Sean Lennon and two kilos of blow instead.      

You can purchase Kristin Mueller’s Ports of Call (Dren Records, 2006) at www.kristinmueller.com

Andrew Spencer Goldman is a musician and a writer living in Brooklyn.  You can find him at fultonlights.com.  

August 11, 2006