So much of Mark Eitzel’s music exists in spite of itself. Sung in a husky register between a whisper and a croon, his songs are filled with characters willing themselves to disappear, transmitting from a translucent state between existence and nothingness. At the beginning of his last album, 2012’s Don’t Be a Stranger, a woman approached Eitzel to say, “I love you, but you’re dead,” a six-word phrase that sums up the tension in Eitzel’s body of work, both in his seminal band American Music Club and throughout his fruitful solo career. His songs don’t confront mortality; they drift in and out if it like subway stops.
So when the reaper himself comes to take Eitzel away in “The Last Ten Years,” the opening number of his latest album Hey Mr Ferryman, Eitzel is not particularly bothered. As he begins his descent to the netherworld, he’s actually more concerned that they get his drink order right: “So, mister ferryman,” he sings over a smooth, lite-rock groove, “Do you party where you’re from?” While Mark Eitzel’s songs have always been stately, with his moody fingerpicking standing as one of the saddest, most immediately identifiable sounds in indie rock, they’ve never been so ornate. The eleven tracks on Hey Mr Ferryman are adorned with codas and false-endings, strings and bells, backing vocals and auxiliary percussion. If Don’t Be a Stranger, with its stark ballads and haunting production, felt like a vulnerable return-to-form, this is the moment where the stakes heighten and the urgency increases: the Skeleton Tree to Stranger’s Push the Sky Away.
All the production on Ferryman might seem over-the-top (more than one song ends with an on-the-knees-at-the-edge-of-the-stage guitar solo), if his lyrics weren’t so crushing. In a standout track called “In My Role as a Professional Singer and Ham,” Eitzel wails in the chorus, “When you look at me, I look away.” It’s a sentiment that’s often rung true for Eitzel. For all his years as a working songwriter—with even a major label deal thrown in the mix for a little bit in the ’90s—he’s never armed himself for a proper breakthrough: his work always felt too quiet, too insular, too strange. But on Ferryman, Eitzel is staring right back out at you. Notice in that line in “My Role” how he holds out the second syllable of “away” to make sure he’s got your attention (while also making the self-deprecating song title feel a little less ironic). In this context, the orchestration feels less ornamental and more like a reflection of Eitzel’s own confidence and catharsis.
As always, Eitzel populates Ferryman with a myriad of stories and characters, taking the focus off of himself and onto his word choice and the thematic links between songs. Sometimes, he takes on a literal character, like in the Joni Mitchell-style showbiz tragicomedy “Mr Humphries” or the repurposed folklore of “La Llorona.” Other times, he uses his subjects as a foil for his own fatalistic tendencies. “An Answer” is one of Eitzel’s finest love songs and one that finds him questioning his entire belief system: “You make me want to stick around and find if there’s an answer,” he sings. It’s crucial that he doesn’t say, “You make me believe that there’s an answer”—it’s still a Mark Eitzel song, after all. But the idea that someone can open him up to the possibility of permanence feels like a revelation.
That sentiment forms the underlying message of Ferryman—that optimism doesn’t necessarily mean knowing that things will be okay, but simply having a reason to wait and find out if they could be. It’s Eitzel’s heaviest album, but it’s also, in a peculiar way, his sweetest—like Phil Spector orchestrating a George Saunders story. “If that was death, it’s not so bad,” Eitzel sings in “An Angel’s Wing Brushed the Penny Slot,” from the perspective of a dead woman haunting her gambling-addict widow. Visiting him in the hotel where she died, she leaves him with a pithy message: “The El Cortez still welcomes me/Guess if you die on their floor, the drinks are all free.” After all, Eitzel implies, seeing a light at the end of the tunnel is just another way to look on the bright side.
