Juan Wauters’ sweet, unvarnished folk-rock comes from a forgotten New York, between the suburbanization and white flight of the 1950s and the impoverished 1970s, when it was enough for Simon & Garfunkel to visit the Central Park Zoo on the A-side of the single and the Queensboro Bridge on the B-side, when people’s hearts were alight with hope for a new baseball club called the Mets.
His second album, Who Me?, features 13 songs, all of which are less than three minutes long and several of which are less than two, played on about as many chords. Most of them are arranged for acoustic guitar, electric bass, and other things that can be rehearsed in the living room without bothering the neighbors. Simplicity here isn’t a matter of technical limitation but of philosophical stance: For Wauters, music stopped evolving when the Beatles decided mysticism was more complicated than puppy love.
Wauters has always seemed breezy but never quite so meek. I first encountered him as the singer of the Beets, a bratty, separatist band whose songs were anchored by declarations so simple they sounded like Zen aphorism. (My favorite of these is still probably "If you’re cold, get a coat," though I also get great comfort from "There’s only one horse and twenty riders/ Only one of them will get to ride it," which I take to be a metaphor for the narrow odds of success.) Whatever certainty he had has winnowed. "I grew up thinking I’d be a hero," he sings on "El Show de Los Muertos". "I grew up thinking I wouldn’t be them/ But what am I doing/ Here alone lost and wondering/ How many times do I have to die to be only me?"
Doubt is universal, but Wauters always seemed like someone able to enjoy himself in spite of it, someone who brandished his cardboard sword and charged the castle laughing. That’s him on the cover of Who Me?, standing on the hood of a car with the Manhattan skyline in the background, dwarfing the buildings but shying away from the camera. Later, he said he looked uncomfortable because they had to stop traffic in order to take the shot. Being in the way isn’t really his way.
I like Wauters; I want him to win in part because I don’t think he cares much about winning. His songs are a stay against the passage of time: Kid to adult, openness to inevitable close. Music that takes on smallness as a cause—the third, self-titled Velvet Underground album, Daniel Johnston, half the history of indie pop—usually carries within it some hard intimation of purpose, a candle flame, a secret message that tells the people who bother to stick with it that they are in fact on the true and noble path. Call it the secret toughness of wimps. Every time I see the title of this album I reflexively think, yes, you*!*
