Country music ruined the pedal steel guitar. I am, of course, being at least a little flip—without country’s popular rise nearly a century ago, it’s entirely possible that the most expressive instrument this side of the human voice might not exist, let alone be so widespread. But country has circumscribed the pedal steel’s accepted emotional terrain to such a degree that, on a 2022 single, the Alabama bros of Muscadine Bloodline pled with it as though it were actually God incarnate, demanding that the “high lonesome sound” try a little less hard to evoke the memory of some lost love. Speaking of God, the pedal steel is capable of exaltation, too, the rise and fall of its strings able to emulate a glorious choir or a keening request or spread out like the cosmos itself. One of the United States’ best regional traditions, sacred steel, is built entirely on that premise, as is one of my favorite ambient records this century, Luke Schneider’s aptly named Altar of Harmony, a reference to the way a player’s body and hands drape over the frame, as if in supplication. “Where the human voice can’t fully reach,” the great DaShawn Hickman once told me, “the pedal steel can.” That reach, it’s important to note, can go high or low.
Evil Graham Lee, a 72-year-old pedal steel mainstay, articulates that range on I Think I’m Alone Now, his modest and beguiling solo debut. There is a strong chance you have heard Lee elsewhere, whether on the run of great records he made with the Bad Seeds’ country cousins, the Triffids, in the late ’80s, or in those spellbinding moments when his pedal steel broke through the scrum on the KLF’s Chill Out a few years later. He’s recorded with Robert Forster and Cut Copy. But for nearly a decade, he has used his Bandcamp page as a repository of ongoing experiments, from ascendant longform instrumentals and aleatoric collages to exquisite and tender tributes to late songwriters like John Prine and Gordon Lightfoot. Lee distills all of that here into six songs that arc between despair and joy but often hang somewhere in between. He ends with “Is There Any Pedal Steel in Heaven?,” a cosmic country tune that seems to give back the answer with devilish relish: If heaven exists, there better be.
The title track is a showcase for why the pedal steel works so well in ambient music, and how it’s able to shape a space that seems active but passive, interesting but ignorable. Lee builds a drone that simply lingers in the background, moving the way a morning breeze might, then plays against it. He glides through and then around a melody, bundling notes so tightly or separating them with rests so exaggerated that I sometimes forget this is a song and not simply a state of being. A riff on Tommy James and Tiffany, the title is a telling and consummate double entendre. Lee recorded alone in his modest home studio, the longtime sideman stepping into his own faint spotlight. But the smoke of loneliness drifts through the song’s 16 minutes, too; this is the sound of being left to sort through your tangle of feelings, of maybe not quite knowing how to do it. “You Are My Sunshine” lands the same trick, with Lee gliding along his strings above a celestial hum. Is the “you” the instrument itself, his partner in working through whatever, in changing the shape and color of his day? It is bittersweet and beautiful, like tears dripped for a setting sun that smears the horizon with color.
Lee indulges that emotional ambiguity, the way the pedal steel can blur the distinction between a frown and a smile. The lick that defines opener “Serein” feels peaceful and warm. As it spills over the country shuffle again and again, though, there’s also an understated sense of resignation, as if Lee were attempting to self-soothe some ache. “Seeking Beauty Through Sadness” makes that quest explicit, as Lee’s slow, thin pedal steel line crawls over a framework of xylophone and electronics. He’s trying to play his way out of a morass, trying to follow the rhythm to any place better. As the piece fades into the distance, Lee is still sliding around the beat, still searching.
Listening to I Think I’m Alone Now or reading Bill Drummond’s playful liner notes about his 40-year relationship with Lee, I find it impossible not to think about his age—the wistfulness of the music, the last-man-standing wink of the title, the last track’s nod to heaven. But Lee also seems like he’s just getting started, this record less like the capstone of a career in which he’s often been in the background and more like he’s finally discovering just how much he can express with his instrument. Since I first heard I Think I’m Alone Now, I’ve listened back to hours of Lee’s music on Bandcamp and enjoyed so much of it. But that all seems to funnel into these six tracks, mixing momentum and wisdom to arrive at the essence of the pedal steel—extreme highs, extreme lows, the expanse in between, out where life is lived.
