Steve Gunn’s new album is called Music for Writers, and I’m listening to it right now because I’m a writer who’s writing something. What does Gunn, who emerged as a low-key guitar hero in the early 2010s by bringing a bit of avant-garde flair to roots music, envision as writerly music? Largely ambient, it turns out. These compositions feature lots of drones that float softly in the air around you, lots of instruments that dissipate into vapor, and lots of negative space to fit whatever environmental noises you might hear while listening. For me those noises have included the sound of passing cars muffled by noise-canceling earpods and the white noise of coffeehouse chatter, but right now, as I’m writing this very sentence, it consists almost entirely of the resigned shrumpfs and schnorfles of a dog stretching out on the couch beside me. Music for Writers is background music that mingles with whatever is in your foreground, which is one of the defining qualities of ambient music.
But the album aspires to be much more. It aims to inspire creativity and reflection, to ignite synapses, to spur you along in whatever writerly endeavor you might be undertaking. It’s meant to exist somewhere between atmospheric and meditative; in a statement, Gunn writes that he hopes the music will be “a ground for thought, a companion for work, daydreaming, grief, happiness, sadness, or simply a place to rest.” That makes it something new in Gunn’s catalog.
Music for Writers is the Brooklyn-based musician’s first fully instrumental album, the first that does not make use of his measured vocals or lyrics about movement and travel. So it’s also his first that’s grounded not in storytelling, but in scene-setting and evocation; it’s all about vibe. Finally, this is his first experimental album under his own name, a departure from his established folk/rock sound that doesn’t involve a collaboration of some sort. Interspersed among his solo albums are pairings with David Moore of Bing & Ruth, Mike Cooper, the Black Twig Pickers, and Hiss Golden Messenger. They’ve all allowed him to explore different corners of his world or to chase random ideas from electronica to folk revival. Here he chases them by himself.
Because solitude is so crucial to the record—Gunn played all the instruments himself during sessions in Brooklyn, Berlin, and Latvia—his palette is minimal: electric and acoustic guitars, synthesizers, some field recordings, and lots and lots of reverb. He strips away the building blocks of his sound, including the spidery fretwork that has become his signature, and replaces them with new sounds and new techniques. “Cat” contains the figure that most resembles a melody or riff, but even that dissolves into a kind of stream-of-conscious picking, as though the cat itself were dictating the notes. A repeating keyboard theme puts a little bob and bounce into “Slow Singers on the Hill,” even as it seems to change shape constantly—almost like saying a word over and over until it loses meaning.
The most interesting textures involve a guitar or a stringed instrument of some kind. On “Mossy Stump,” Gunn drapes some scrapings and strummings of what sounds like a mandolin—nothing that approaches an actual riff, but an earthy element to balance the airy synths. Gunn never really fit into the Fahey school of folk guitar, but he joins some of those players–such as William Tyler, Daniel Bachman, and Chuck Johnson–in his turn toward drone, ambience, and noise. While never quite as daring as them, he devises a palette that lends texture and personality to Music for Writers. Still, not every composition stands out—“Pedvale Sunrise” sounds like someone noodling in a cloud—but even the ones that drift by in the background at the very least don’t rip you out of your writerly headspace.
Music for Writers is weirdly comforting, as though Gunn intends the music to provide an antidote to all the fear and anxiety that accompany the act of setting words down on a blank page. But really, it’s awfully presumptuous of me to assume that prose stylists are the only kind of writer the title refers to. Perhaps Gunn means songwriters or even screenwriters. Perhaps he means people who write code or emails or user reviews or personal checks. Perhaps the secret to this curious album is the way it turns everyone who might listen to it into some kind of writer. Especially at a moment when AI threatens to suck all the humanity out of writing and leave us with nothing but anxiety over non-blank pages of slop, it’s an idea as reassuring as it is profound.
