It bears repeating: What a strange world Jason Lytle inhabits. As the frontman for Modesto, California-based Grandaddy, he sang about homemade pets, homesick space miners, and carpool jockeys struck dumb by the natural world. Three years after that band's final breaths, his world has grown no less odd. On his first solo album, he sets songs about dead dogs and birds on suicide watch to technorganic arrangements featuring ELO guitars, from-the-heart-of-space synths, and steady, stoic drums-- if drums can be said to sound stoic, which in Lytle's world, why the hell not? With Grandaddy, Lytle sung his mock epics with such earnestness that many took them as ironic, which itself is a little ironic. But then as now, his songs work because they are deeply sincere, and that sincerity makes them sound all the more awestruck and imaginative.
So Yours Truly, The Commuter sounds an awful lot like a Grandaddy album-- not just another Grandaddy album, though, but a really good one, the best since Sumday. Relocated from Modesto to Bozeman, Mont., he recorded these dozen songs over three years, sequestering himself in his home studio to indulge the perfectionism he says he couldn't entertain with the band. It's a return, of sorts, to his roots: Grandaddy was born as a solo bedroom project for Lytle in the mid-90s and mutated into a full band. Such care and attention show through in these songs, which generally sound a little spacier and synthier than the band's records. On the other hand, in three years you'd think he could have come up with a better album cover.
Yours Truly opens with what sounds like a thumb piano playing a quiet overture, which is interrupted first by a foundational bass rhythm and then by Lytle's warmly familiar voice:
*Lytle: "Last thing I heard I was left for dead."**Comically high-pitched chorus: "Yeah?"*Lytle: "I could give two shits about what they said. I may be limping, but I'm coming home."
Is this a rebuke to critics who greeted Grandaddy's final breaths with enthused ambivalence, to no-longer-amicable bandmates, or to some made-up tormentors too quick to turn their backs on him? Whatever the target, the song strikes a defiant early note, and because it's not only a solo album but a solo debut, it's tempting and perhaps way too easy to read way too much into such moments. But Yours Truly is strong enough to absorb whatever interpretation you throw at it and still retain some of its mystery. Besides, defiance fits Lytle like s a sleek spacesuit. The title track immediately restores some of the old grandeur to his signature sound, and songs like the defensive "Ghost of My Old Dog" and the piano lament "This Song Is the Mute Button" have unexpected bite.
"I see the pretty in things," he sings on the latter, "but you disappeared like a dream." Lytle offsets the somewhat caustic tone that creeps into some of these songs with tender ruminations on absence, which fills the album. "Rollin' Home Alone", possibly a sequel to the title track, grafts a distorted synth line to sugary canned strings to evoke a great American expanse, as if to soundtrack some long, lonely road trip. "Flying Thru Canyons" creates a churchly ambience perfectly summed up by that title. On the other hand, "It's the Weekend" is Lytle's Loverboy moment, a churning power-pop anthem that sounds like a Friday-afternoon staple on classic rock stations of the future.
As with previous albums, Yours Truly benefits from creative sequencing that winks at expectations. There are two obvious closers here, and neither of them come at the album's end. The first is the opening title track, whose chorus-- "I may be limping, but I'm coming home"-- makes Lytle sound like a true survivor, and the second is the soft lament "You're Too Gone", which ends with him singing "So long, so long" like he's floating away in a space pod. Instead, everything closes with "Here for Good", a tender, almost entropic ballad that sounds less like mission accomplished than a mission never undertaken. Again, it's tempting to read real-life connections in a song like "Here for Good". It's not that they're not there, but they don't matter. Such autobiographical trappings aren't necessary to make Yours Truly sound strangely affecting or Lytle newly reinvigorated.
