Say you’re at a bar, a baseball game, a barbecue—anywhere, really—and you meet someone who earnestly describes himself as a "hard luck boy." He doesn’t appear to be a coal miner, or a factory worker, but a regular guy with a sharp haircut and a bespoke suit. Handsome, too. How dare he? I’m comfortable in assuming most people would instinctively roll their eyes, and wish this guy back to the Dust Bowl.
Tom Brosseau pulls it off, somehow, collapsing decades of folk tradition into an identity that feels not only modern, but believable. Perfect Abandon, his latest LP, is an endearing collection of pastoral narratives and humble melodies that sounds unearthed from the Gaslight Cafe, where minor folk singers plied their trade and presented their authenticity for analysis in the early '60s. It was recorded naturalistically, with just a single microphone capturing Brosseau and his three-piece band. That accounts for the looseness—the way the arrangements fall together, like when the kick drum rumbles into the mix on "Roll Along With Me" like a steam engine creaking into motion. Brosseau's handle on his acoustic guitar, the album's predominant instrument, will not blow you away. But he sounds like he's right in the room with you, which is the least a folk singer can hope to convey on record.
Brosseau sketches his origin story on "Hard Luck Boy", where you understand he wasn’t being wry about his self-appointed moniker. The apparently autobiographical song is about how, as a child, Brosseau was abandoned by his mother in a department store. "That's how it all happened, all those years ago, when I was just a boy," Tom Brosseau drawls in a voice both quiet and sonorous, "and to this day I have never seen my mother."
How it all happened and all those years ago—it’s a singer approaching his life story as mythology, oral history, biblical text. Brosseau was raised religiously, and Perfect Abandon is not only peppered with references to God, but to the spiritual quandaries that arise when a serious person begins considering God as more than just an all-powerful guy who lives in the sky. On "Tell Me Lord", he asks God if the darkness he sees in the world is only temporary; on "Landlord Jackie", he balances his faith against his desires for the married Jackie, and concludes, "trying to be faithful only increases the volume of the voice that says ‘It's all right, what are you waiting for, jump on in.’" Brosseau sounds overwhelmed by the temptations of the world around him—his breathless paeans to "your voice, your breath, your style of hair" on "Take Fountain"—and softly humbled about his place amongst all this majesty.
I’m reminded of the novelist Marilynne Robinson, whose work grapples with similar dilemmas in a similarly world weary voice. A 2007 Pitchfork review criticized Brosseau’s music for its smallness. But acknowledging one’s smallness can be its own virtue, and while Brosseau’s music splits from folky tradition by being pointedly unpolitical, his deference to the world around him comes with its own admirable grace. He presents his cautious optimism on "The Wholesome Pillars", his voice hesitant and earnest as the band trails behind him like a slow river. "Defend yourself, dear one, from the voice that says you must die," he sings, before disappearing back into the country, aware of his luck but determined to press on.
