"Oh Lord, I reckon I'm not much just by myself." So begins "The Cowboy's Prayer", a couple stanzas of boot-and-saddle wisdom made famous by Roy "King of the Cowboys" Rogers. In 2011, Mutual Benefit's Jordan Lee happened upon a recording of Rogers reciting this "Cowboy's Prayer" at the tail end of a cross-country trip he'd taken in the aftermath of Hurricane Irene. Lee, his mind reeling from the scenes of displacement and destruction he'd witnessed in Irene's wake, found something to cling onto in Rogers' time-worn adage. "Lord, when trails are steep and passes high," Rogers' benediction reads, "help me ride it straight the whole way through." These lines quickly became something of a mantra for Lee, and he named The Cowboy's Prayer—his final EP before his 2013 breakthrough Love's Crushing Diamond—after Rogers' cattleman's litany.
Lee's pre-LCD EPs—many of which are still available for free download on Bandcamp—split the difference between ambition and naiveté; one needs not look much further than Lee tethering a natural disaster and a TV cowboy's sign-off for proof of that. Taken together, however, and a picture starts to form: an eager kid, earnest to a fault, equally besotted and bewildered by the world around him, looking to make some sense of being young in the old, weird America. Lee's penchant for dressing up his dewy pastorals in heavy syrup was in place pretty much from the jump, but on those early EPs, there's a frequent disconnect between the two sides, one he would eventually close as the years trickled on. At its best, the five-song, 15-minute Cowboy's Prayer feels like a dry run for what Lee would accomplish with Love's Crushing Diamond.
Opener "Auburn Epitaphs" matches an effects-spackled piano loop with a pair of ambling guitar figures, as Lee—his voice sweet, slightly shaky, the sound of a guy still Figuring It Out—grapples with the supposed futility of writing about something larger than himself. The plaintive, banjo-led "Passenger" breaks into a cloud-parting chorus before the whole thing's swept up in swirl of spectral synths. With the benefit of hindsight, it's easy to see all the elements of LCD there in this opening twofer. Yet the balance isn't quite right: the songs are more halting, his voice a hair meeker, and the accoutrements distract nearly as often as they delight. The faint pulse and nest of wriggling keyboards that kick off "The Cowboy's Prayer" seems to betray Lee's fascination with the so-called "lap-pop" of the early '00s, a curiously uncharacteristic experiment that lets a heavy-handed arrangement to crowd out the threadbare melody behind the fluttering electronics.
Going back through the early EPs, it's clear Lee's knack for letting involved arrangements blow through his songs wasn't always in place the way it happened to be on on LCD. By the time The Cowboy's Prayer rolled around, he'd found a way to keep the scraping strings and rustling chimes from overpowering the songs; yet "The Cowboy's Prayer" itself is an overreach, the kind of I'll-try-anything juvenilia Lee had to work out of his system before landing on the more surefooted sound of LCD. With its flickering triangles, wheezing pump-organs, and smattering of strings, "Backwards Fireworks" takes its sweet time getting going. But once Lee starts in on the "burning highway effigies" he'd witnessed—or maybe dreamed—on his post-Irene jaunt through the country towns, it's Prayer at its most graceful, a fractured middle-American fairy tale set to the plunk of a couple-three banjos. Unfortunately, instrumental closer "招魂"—which translates to "evocation" or "spiritualism"—seems more "sketch" than "song," a backdrop begging for a little more action in the foreground.
In a 2013 interview with Pitchfork's Ian Cohen, Lee described a chance meeting with a St. Louis-based violin player named Jake Falby that helped shape the sound of Love's Crushing Diamond. "The record originally had Casio violins… but after he did these beautiful arrangements, I spent another eight months tweaking it so that it was absolutely perfect to me." Though Lee remains Mutual Benefit's only permanent member, it's clear that what he'd envisioned for The Cowboy's Prayer—that searching, starry-eyed Americana—came to fruition on LCD through time, patience, and more than a little outside help. Lee would soon shed some of the more intrusive, out-there arrangements, letting the conceptual dot-connecting fall by the wayside, and bringing his songwriting closer to the forefront. By the time The Cowboy's Prayer—clumsy in parts, underformed in others—came around, Lee was clearly closing in on something. But it wasn't until Love's Crushing Diamond that Lee would follow that path straight the whole way through.
