Arthur Russell came from the cornfields of Oskaloosa, Iowa, a quiet kid who checked out library books on minimalism and psychedelics before running away to a San Francisco commune with his cello and his curiosity. In New York City during the 1970s and ’80s, Russell became a kaleidoscope of Downtown: a prism through which to see almost every fascinating corner of music there illuminated anew. His shyness became a strength, the source of his exquisite introspection, as he created serene music—lovelorn folk-pop, post-disco, classical, power pop—in accordance with his Buddhist logic, borderless.
Russell was a dance-music innovator who sang of “losing my taste for the nightlife.” He used his cello to create a wall-of-sound equally ecstatic and depressive; those who knew him said he quoted ABBA lyrics like romantic poetry. He was Allen Ginsberg’s accompanist; he is believed, by biographer Tim Lawrence, to have played the spiritual music of Alice Coltrane in her touring band. Russell suggested punk could be art and pop could be minimalism. He foresaw the contemporary notion that we need not subscribe to the tyrannies of genre. Through it all, Russell has become a talismanic shorthand for a superpower across time: His name means a way to persevere in accordance with a misfit’s heart and a boundless mind. “Being sad is not a crime,” Russell sang on “Love Comes Back.” His life makes it believable.
Iowa Dream is the latest posthumous Russell release, and it feels in some ways like one of the truest. Unlike the understated beats and pop deconstructions of Calling Out of Context, or the plainspoken country-pop of Love Is Overtaking Me, the 19 tracks of Iowa Dream are presented as demos. But like those warm records, Iowa Dream finds Russell in his singularly comforting singer-songwriter mode: a collection of teardrop piano ballads, sunstruck acoustic songs, and delightfully bewildering studio excursions. As ever, it’s Russell’s voice—clear, graceful, often conversational, with a kind of humility—that makes his music feel like a potential source of enlightenment, no matter the style. He sounds like someone you might know, a friend speaking to you, which is perhaps why so many listeners seem to think they do, sure their personal Russell connection is special. Russell’s vocal turns on “Follow You” are almost painfully gorgeous, as if embodying the “place in the sun [...] a sailboat on the sea” he sings of.
In a recent memoir of their brief affair, the late poet Kevin Killian said Russell’s lyrics were “written right on the very edge of English,” which resonates through Iowa Dream’s quotidian images: riding bikes, driving cars, laying in the grass. Russell’s words here are mostly cut from the same untreated cloth as classics like “Nobody Wants a Lonely Heart” and “This Time Dad You’re Wrong”—testifying to Russell’s belief that everyday English could be elevated in pop. Songs like “Just Regular People” and “I Felt” seem pulled from a childhood diary, reflecting on his parents’ normalcy and feeling “empty” at school. On the moving “I Wish I Had a Brother” he reflects on a fantasy of basketball games on the playground.
Four Iowa Dream songs are from a doomed 1974 session with famed Columbia producer John Hammond, who once said, “When they write my legacy, they’re going to say ‘John Hammond discovered Billie Holiday, Charlie Christian, George Benson, and then Dylan, Springsteen, and Arthur Russell.’” The stark tearjerker “In Love With You for the Last Time” is anguished but calmly resigned, an almost cheekily despondent rock-bottom: “When I start to think, that’s when I start to sink [...] Now you’ve rejected me for the last time/It’s the last time I’ll sit on this fence for you.” Hammond wanted another lone-genius record, but Russell employed a collaborative exchange in his music: Iowa Dream variously features Rhys Chatham on flute and Henry Flynt on violin. The off-kilter dazzle of “Wonder Boy”—“vibes” are credited to Dave Van Tieghem, a future collaborator on Robert Ashley’s avant opera Perfect Lives—is a stunning statement of self. It captures Russell’s inquisitiveness and self-defeat, hope and melancholy, in such an unassuming manner you could nearly miss it: “I’m a wonder boy/I can’t do nothing/The poster was nailed to a tree/And somebody tore it down/Bits of paper nailed to a tree/That’s all I found.” “Wonder Boy” recalls Ginsberg’s description of Russell as Williams Carlos Williams as a singer—poetic and humble at the same time, as Russell’s music so often is.
Many of these songs contain Russell’s wry humor: “I never get lonesome/Especially in the night when you are gone,” he insists through the lightly rollicking “I Never Get Lonesome.” Iowa Dream includes the edges of Russell’s edges, some of his most delightfully odd experiments—like the psych-rock jammer of a title track or “Barefoot in New York,” a Ginsbergian ensemble beat-rap with brilliant full sentences like, “The question is whether or not this kind of music is going to hypnotize you” and “I’ve always disliked the Rolling Stones since I found out what they were up to.” It’s part music-critical essay, part bohemian cartoon. Perhaps this all is what lead the record exec Michael Ostin to once write, on a comment slip now included with Russell’s archives at the New York Public Library: “Who knows what this guy is up to.”
The influence of Buddhism abounds in Russell’s music, but especially on the songs culled from early California tapes, like the luminous “Sharp Eyes” and “Come to Life.” The intimate melody of “Words of Love” channels the emotional candor of Joni Mitchell, but with disarmingly beautiful lines of queer yearning: “Soft as a cherry, round as a peach/Into your pocket my slow hands can reach/To see what you carry up close to your thighs/Reaching and looking right into your eyes.” Russell’s friend and collaborator Steven Hall once said that his and Russell’s radical position as queer artists in the Downtown scene meant that “[p]resenting our lifestyle in our work was our political activity.” “Words of Love” is a glimmer of that fact, a sweet prayer for the power of language when speech must be enough.
In March 1977, Russell laid out some of his personal pop-music philosophies to Soho Weekly News. It was the dawn of punk, but the 25-year-old Russell was describing how he came to see pop as profound, not merely the sound of jocks and commoners in high school. “In bubblegum music, the notion of pure sound is not a philosophy but rather a reality,” Russell said. “In this respect, bubblegum preceded the avant-garde.” He was erasing hierarchies; he saw music and life as inextricable. “If you misuse your capacities as a musician, you’re misusing your capacities as a human being,” Russell explained, “and you’re taking humanity in the wrong direction.” Each new Russell release makes an effort towards the opposite, as his work did, towards more humanity.
One of many Iowa Dream highlights, “You Did It Yourself” was featured in Matt Wolf’s 2008 documentary about Russell, Wild Combination. Russell is seen playing the song in grainy live footage with an acoustic guitar, though here, the song has a lusher, deeper production. In “You Did It Yourself,” Russell seems to be experiencing yet another moment of endearing self-sabotage (“You did it yourself/It keeps you down”) and also reflecting on a “thrilling” film he saw “last night”: “Understood all of it very well/I didn’t like the ending though/Maybe I’m crazy but it just seemed tacked on.” The pieces of his sung critique stream by like a river. Russell was prone to the unresolvable, to the nonlinear, to atmosphere over concrete. The miracle of his catalog is how the seams mend together, stitch by stitch, a different way forward, as if creating no “endings” for himself. Many of Iowa Dream’s tunes instantly find a place in the pantheon of Russell’s best work, though perhaps it’s more fitting to say they create oxygen in his ever-expanding world.
