Throughout the 2000s, Ted Leo invited us to rally around his heart of oak. At a time when everything was starting to feel ephemeral and imperiled, Leo’s politically enraged, personally engaged, Lizzy-kissed pick-me-ups offered refuge and reassurance. He was the pillar we could lean on when times got tough, a totem of industriousness and perseverance to which we could all aspire. When the better, kinder world we dreamed of seemed to fade out of view—i.e., right around the time George W. Bush won his second term—Leo simply assured us, “There’s a whole lot of walking to do,” and led the way forward.
But the conditions Leo endured after 2010’s The Brutalist Bricks, in both his personal and professional life, nearly pushed him to the breaking point. As the title of his first proper album in seven years ominously suggests, his proverbial oak has come to represent less a wellspring of life than a convenient place to throw up a noose—not for himself, per se, but for the life he once knew, and for the future he imagined.
The Hanged Man was recorded by Leo primarily at his house in Wakefield, R.I., where the longtime New Yorker recently decamped after waving the white flag on the Big Apple and its astronomical cost of living. The physical upheaval followed a series of emotional ones. As he recounted in a recent, soul-baring Stereogum feature, declining record sales and diminishing crowds forced this DIY lifer to seriously consider packing it in. At that career crossroads, Leo was waylaid by tragedy: In 2011, the baby he and his wife were expecting succumbed to a late-term miscarriage. In the wake of all that, one of indie rock’s most impassioned and outspoken voices all but went silent for a couple of years.
Leo’s low-key, winsome collaboration with Aimee Mann as the Both would reintroduce him to the public realm in 2014—a pleasant diversion that helped restore his confidence. But The Hanged Man is where Leo truly unleashes all the pain, anger, fear, and disappointment he’d been harboring over the past half-decade. For the first time, he’s billing himself without his redoubtable band, the Pharmacists; its drummer, Chris Wilson, backs him up on several tracks, but he’s in service of a dramatically different vision than Leo’s typical ampheta-mod anthems. Here, Leo is less rocker than auteur, crafting the most expansive, experimental, and emotionally devastating music of his career (and mostly on his own, save for a handful of strategically deployed guests).
Like the signature state-of-the-union address he delivered 13 years ago, The Hanged Man arrives at a flash point in U.S. politics, though this isn’t exactly Shake the Sheets II: Electric Trumpaloo—much of the material predates last November’s presidential election. But the outcome adds an extra layer of black-cloud coverage to what was already shaping up to be an intensely introspective album. The opening “Moon Out of Phase” wasn’t just written in the election’s aftermath, it actually depicts the Wednesday morning after, with a dejected Leo summoning the will to “barely make it into clothes” as “the creeping and the menace grows.” In sharp contrast to his usual adrenalized modes, the song is a hulking monolith built on a sludgy, droning, one-chord riff that effectively heralds Leo’s first foray into doom metal. Despite the tantalizing rattle of a tambourine, the drums never kick in to push the song forward, as Leo opts to wallow in the muck of America’s “straight white pigpen.” At the same time, you can sense Leo finding strength in the song’s unrelenting ugliness, like a fallen superhero reconnecting with dormant powers.
The Hanged Man continues to project a bold, subversive spirit even after that introductory blast of static clears. “Used to Believe” is an ebullient jangle-pop aria about losing all hope; when Leo sings, “I used to believe we’d be comfortably settled by now,” the sentimental strings feel almost like an act of cruelty, putting a soft-focus patina on a domestic dream that’s fading out of view. And on “Can’t Go Back,” Leo laments his fading fortunes over a jaunty “Mr. Blue Sky” bounce, while Jean Grae’s cheery, Motown-style backing vocals prod him with a velvet-gloved touch.
Clocking in at over an hour, The Hanged Man isn’t always so willing to mask its disillusioned lyrics in pretty dressing: “The Nazarene” subjects a mournful, McCartney-esque piano serenade to the “I Want You (She’s So Heavy)” treatment, building its repeated chords into a queasy, slow-motion cyclone. But even as its musical terrain turns more treacherous (like on the overburdened orchestro-electro elegy “Gray Havens”), Leo includes just enough of his patented windmill-powered rave-ups to keep the momentum rolling—and forcefully exorcise the demons plaguing him. “The Future (Is Learning to Wait Around for Things You Didn’t Know You Wanted to Wait For)” crafts the album’s most rousing chorus out of its wordiest title; Leo’s acquiescence turns to rage in the hammering final minute, as if he can’t bring himself to accept his own song’s sanguine, everything-happens-for-a-reason philosophy. The album hits its frenetic peak with “You’re Like Me,” a bloody-knuckled power-pop confessional that obliquely references recent revelations of the sexual abuse he experienced as a child by assuring fellow survivors that they’re not alone.
The latter track forms the first part of a closing triptych that stands as the most lyrically harrowing music of Leo’s career. It’s completed by two songs that unflinchingly address the loss of the baby girl he never got to welcome into the world. With the solitary electric-folk strummer “Lonsdale Avenue,” he tries to find the light in his darkest hour: “She taught me better love that I might love again,” he admits. By contrast, on The Hanged Man’s crushing piano-ballad finale, “Let’s Stay on the Moon,” Leo’s personal journey orbits back to the despair of the album’s similarly lunar-themed opener. “We had a daughter and she died,” he sings with bleary-eyed resignation, before framing his personal apocalypse in terms of a global one: “Let’s stay on the moon/And watch the earth go down.”
But in the song’s final moments, thanks to a makeshift gospel choir featuring Mann, rapper Open Mike Eagle, and comedian Paul F. Tompkins, the statement transforms from a declaration of fuck-it-all nihilism into a promise of renewal. It’s a testament to Leo’s unyielding generosity that he’s willing to elevate a song about a deeply personal trauma into a vehicle for communal catharsis over the sorry state of our world. On The Hanged Man, he invites us to watch it burn with him—because, at this point, it feels like the only option toward building a better one.
