John Grant

JohnGrant arrived at the studio to begin recording his fifth solo record, Boy from Michigan, on 1st March2020. “So, basically right at the beginning of the pandemic nightmare and allthroughout the Presidentialcampaign,” he says. For Grant, lockdown was largely academic. He is insular bynature and removed himself from his native America in 2011,  decamping toIceland. From afar, the US Presidential race loomed large, though, ignitingpotent memories of the country which shaped John Grant. 2020’stemporary destabilising of world order suits Boy from Michigan’s intent justfine. 

Somewherein the last decade, John Grant established himself as one of the great musicalchroniclers of the American Dream, angled mostly from its flipside. What ifeverything you were promised, if you worked hard, loved hard, played and prayedhard, it all turned to ash? “That’s where I was throughout this whole thing,”he notes. “These songs feel visceral to me. You end up marinating in the spiritof that place you grew up in. Some people really thrive in that.” Many don’t.Grant stopped being a boy in Michigan aged twelve, when his family moved toDenver, Colorado, shifting rust to bible belt, a further vantage point to watchcollective dreams unravel. “I quickly learned all about the American castesystem and where I fit in. Or didn’t,” he says. The repercussions of bothremain. 

Acompulsive over-sharer, Grant lays it all out for careful cross-examination inhis most biographical work. In a decade of making records by himself, he hasplayfully experimented with mood, texture and sound, all the better foractualizing the seriousness of his thoughts. At one end of his musical rainbow,he is the battle-scarred piano-man, at the other, a robust electronicauteur. Boy from Michigan seamlesslymarries both.

Grantis the misfit’s misfit: too weird to be mainstream, too mainstream to be weird;too sad to be happy, too sharp not to crack a mordant joke about it. Thedolorous ace in his song-writing pack is to gauge impressionistic childhoodexperiences against their amplified adult consequences. “The American Dream cancause scarring and some nasty bruising,” he sings in the opening, title song ofthe new record. “The American Dream is not for weak, soft-hearted fools,” itresolves. 

Boy from Michigan sets out its stall early in order to fan hislyrical deck wider. The record’s impressive reach builds toward conclusions,where once recriminations and questions lived. Grant knows America well enoughto document it in microscopic, painterly detail. The brittle intensity of theearly life experiences of a middle-aged man twist stealthily into a broadmetaphor for the state of the nation.

AJohn Grant album always feels like vignettes divined from a tart book ofpoetry. Boy from Michigan isthe author’s shaggy-dog story, a novelistic approach where songs are more likechapters in a leatherbound book bought from a favourite thrift store. “I guessI’m just thinking about where I came from,” he notes, “and what I went into.”

WithCate Le Bon in the production chair, Grant has pared back his zingers,maximising the emotional impact of the melodies, stripping the noise ofvaudeville and mood-enhancing a fruitful, spare, strangely orchestrated newworld for him to live in. A clarinet forms the bedrock of a song. Onepre-chorus feels lifted from vintage Human League. There is a saxophone solo.The record swings between ambient and progressive, calm and livid.

Grantfirst met Le Bon when they performed on the Park Stage at Glastonbury in 2013and they quickly became friends and fans of each other’s work. She subsequentlyduetted with Grant at the Royal Albert Hall in 2016 with John returning thefavour at Green Man in 2018. They often talked about Cate producing an albumfor him. “Cate and I are both very strong-willed people, which is excellent”,says Grant.  “Making a record is hard on a good day. The mounting stressof the election and the pandemic really started to get to us by late July andAugust. It was at times a very stressful process under the circumstances, butone which was also full of many incredible and joyful moments.” 

Withthe frenetic backdrop to its incubation playing out in the distance, thenarrative journey of Boy fromMichigan opens with Grant returning to his artistic prettiest. Itbegins with three songs drawn from his pre-Denver life: the title song, The Rusty Bull and County Fair. “It’s my Michigan Trilogy,”he says. Each draws the listener in to a specific sense of place, beforeuntangling its significance with a rich cast-list of local characters, oftensymbolizing the uncultivated faith of childhood. 

“TheAmerican dream is only about money,” he states baldly. After they initiallybecame friends, Le Bon encouraged Grant to read Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse Five. “He talks about howpoor people in the States have been made to feel ashamed of themselves. Ifyou’re not making millions of dollars, it’s because you are not trying, and youdon’t love yourself enough. You are a failure as a human being. And it’sfucking perverse.”

Tracksfour and five, Mike and Julie and The Cruise Room, are perhaps the mostaffecting of the record, plunging deep into Grant’s late teenage years inDenver. In the former, an atypical ambient swell, Grant is confronted by afriend who wants to be with him, a man he brick-walls by purposefullypositioning a mutual female friend in between as he cannot yet face his ownsexuality. “Mike was the first guy I had sex with. He went to our church andwas my best friend for years but I was never once able to talk to him aboutwhat happened between us.” In the latter, he revisits the untouched, fadedgrandeur of the Art Deco bar at Denver’s Oxford Hotel (“just fucking gorgeous”)for one last night as a young man before trying his luck in Germany, to see ifEurope is a better fit. Patsy Cline plays on the jukebox. Cassettes areswapped. Promise still exists.

Cementingthe mid-point of the record are a pair of skittish, scholarly dancetunes, Best in Me and Rhetorical Figure. The latter is builtin the lineage of his nascent electropop darlings, Devo, suggesting a formativeworld in which brains are regarded as horny as bodies. “Now, wouldn’t that be athing?” Dropping the pace, Just SoYou Know is the most familiar, John Grant-ian of his songs on therecord. It is meant as a song to comfort his nearest and dearest after he’sgone. 

Childhoodas a horror narrative returns on DandyStar, observing the tiny Grant watching the Mia Farrow horror movie See No Evil on the old family TVset in which a blind girl arrives back at her Aunt and Uncle’s home after adate and, after sleeping through the night, awakens in the morning only todiscover gradually that everyone has been murdered. Of course the killer comesback to finish the job. The song is a love letter to the girl’s horse, DandyStar,  who blinded and ultimately saved her character. “I was too young tobe watching that,” he says, “it was sort of blurry and it terrified me and Inever forgot about it. I searched for it for at least 25 years before finallyfinding it again.”

Thesenine songs are the tumescent prologue to his grand climax. The pure smutof Your Portfolio imaginesthe US economy rewritten as a throbbing libidinous cock. “It’s where we are nowin The States,” he says. “We worship money and any pretence that there’s anyworship of anything else going on – like a loving God, for example – is justpathetic. Character doesn’t matter. Intimacy doesn’t matter. Nothing elsematters. Wealth is sexualised. It’s a poem in honor of money. The song soundsfunny, but I think it’s probably one of the darkest and most serious on therecord.” Here lies another Grant signature song-writing move: you’re laughingnow but, honey, you’ll be crying by the way home.

In The Only Baby (for casual Grantsideliners: Boy From Michigan’s Glacier moment), he finally removeshis razor blade from a pocket to cleanly slit the throat of Trump’s America,authoring a scathing epitaph to an era of acute national exposition. Hepositions the very soon to be former president as the bastard child of thenation’s virgin mother: “Don’t look so glum/There’s no reason to be sad/Becausethat’s the only baby that bitch could ever have.” As a final coda, on Billy, he gets to the causation of allthis, a prevalent culture of hyper-machismo, one which fashioned us all forfailure.

“Thesesongs are about taking responsibility,” says John Grant. “On every one of myrecords I talk about a cruel truth of the world, that whatever happens to youin your first eighteen years, if you don’t go out and thrive and succeed,people say ‘What the hell is wrong with you?’ It doesn’t matter what was doneto you or how bad it was. You are responsible now for getting over it, having alife and figuring out how to thrive. And of course that’s the only way it canbe.”

Thefinal irony. In his own accidental, skewed manner, John Grant may just havenailed, if not the, then atleast an American Dream.Bruised and scarred he may be, but the boy from Michigan is no weak-heartedfool. Success has multiple weighing scales and measurements, not all pecuniary.

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