Up-tempo rocker “Starts With You” comes with the sober admission, “Sad songs are the only thing that make me happy,” before celebrating a newfound perspective.īut the album’s biggest ovation comes with “The Luckier You Get,” a fist-pumping heartland arena anthem complete with handclaps. Barham’s vocals on the ballad “The Day I Learned to Lie to You” soar over honeyed brass and watery keys. “Brightleaf + Burley” shuffles from straightforward country into a psychedelic jam with backwards guitar and keys that echo the Doors’ “Riders on the Storm.”ĭespite the weighty themes, Lamentations isn’t a downer - even some of the bleakest moments are punctured by rays of hope. The music got more eclectic as the band started adding suggestions, and the experimental Laurel Canyon vibe carried over to the sessions.įrom the bones of “Me + Mine (Lamentations),” Jennings pushed the band to explore their outer limits on an extended “Pink Floyd explosion,” as Barham puts it. Those who drink drank, and those who smoke smoked, as Jennings spun records from Bob Dylan, Bruce Springsteen, David Bowie, and Roxy Music. On their first night in L.A., Jennings invited the band - Barham, guitarist Shane Boeker, bassist Alden Hedges, keyboardist Rhett Huffman, pedal steel player Neil Jones, and drummer Ryan Van Fleet-to his place to loosen up.
The band even stayed in storied Laurel Canyon, made famous by musicians like Joni Mitchell, Linda Ronstadt, Jim Morrison, and members of the Byrds and Eagles. The demos Barham sent Jennings resonated immediately, and instead of making a swampy Memphis record, they made a jangly, Heartbreakers-style album in Los Angeles. After Barham shook off a bout of self doubt, the band regrouped with Shooter Jennings, who was fresh off a Grammy win for Brandi Carlile’s By the Way, I Forgive You and Tanya Tucker’s comeback, While I’m Livin’. The band was set to record in Memphis last September, but the producer who signed on got cold feet and left them hanging just two weeks before they were to begin. The long road to getting Lamentations done was enough to test Barham. Not just in God, faith in humanity, faith in yourself.” Each song represents a different way that someone can be tested in their faith. “Financial ruin, the loss of a significant other, loss of a child, addiction, vices, divorce - all of these things appear on the record. “I wanted to write a record about the things that break us as human beings,” Barham says. Instead, he explores the lives of those who live on the margins, whose futures looked grim even before the COVID-19 pandemic sunk millions of jobs while killing tens of thousands of Americans.
Sequestered at home in North Carolina, Barham is articulate and endearingly self aware - recently he’s begun referring to his Instagram livestreams as “the sad sack revival.” But on Lamentations, humor is in short supply. If only the man who wrote those songs in 2019 could’ve known how deeply the sentiment would resonate in the new year.