About two and a half minutes into “Blacksburg,” off his fifth solo record, Cory Branan pauses his countrified classic rock tune for a solo from what sounds like bagpipes, a saxophone, and/or fuzzed-out Flying V power chords. Constantly shape-shifting, it sounds like a parody of white guys making fist-pumping music about feelings: a big moment undercut by its own purposeful self-awareness yet somehow made even bigger by its own self-deprecation. The song itself is about a woman with big dreams stuck in a small town; Branan rhymes “emptying rounds in dark bars” with “getting around in a parked car.” He sounds impressed with her decisiveness and daring, the way she risks becoming the subject of local gossip to inject her life with something like a thrill. If that summons forth too many bad memories of bros singing about fantasy women (the alpha monkey in this dubious genre is Train’s “Meet Virginia”), that strangely hilarious solo allows the song to avoid condescension and let the character breathe.
Branan is smarter and wilier than the singer-songwriter genre typically allows and more intellectual than he’d probably admit. He started barking out his songs in Memphis around the turn of the century, and after two albums on local indie Madjack Records, he moved to Nashville and took forever to write his third and fourth albums, which revealed an easily distracted musical mind and a weakness for confusing cleverness for substance. At times his self-awareness sounded suspiciously similar to self-absorption: Does anyone really want to hear a song about your floundering career called “The No Hit Wonder”?
Adios is possibly his best album to date—it’s certainly his most musically imaginative and arguably his wisest. “Don’t ask me how I even got here,” he sings on the rollicking opener “I Only Know,” before Laura Jane Grace joins him on the chorus: “I only know I ain’t gonna go back.” Rather than aim for the punk assertion of Against Me!, the song recalls the candy-sweet catchiness of Buddy Holly and serves as a short (not two minutes long) overture for the album, establishing its themes if not its sound. Branan is all over the map, veering from the swamp rock of “Walls, MS” to the synth-driven pop of “Visiting Hours” to the country crooning of “Cold Blue Moonlight.”
The album’s greatest detriment, consequently, is its length: At 14 tracks, it meanders, occasionally lags, and indulges far too many tangents and jarring transitions. But Heartbreaker is just as long, so that’s only a minor complaint. Ryan Adams may be the obvious point of comparison for a singer-songwriter in his early forties who loves classic rock as much as classic country and probably has a soft spot for classic metal, too. Branan is funnier and more disciplined as a songwriter, which may be why he’s not as popular. Adios is a good place to start because it’s an album animated by a compelling personal backstory: the death of Branan’s father, the birth of his son, and his relocation from Nashville to Memphis.
With its gently finger-picked guitar theme and two-step drumbeat, “The Vow” could have been just another country song about fathers and sons, but the details are so carefully sketched out and so specific that it feels fresh and affecting. That second verse in particular—in which he considers the implications of the phrase “That’s what you get for thinking”—is Branan at his best, taking something familiar and finding new dimensions in it. All the while, he sounds like he’s just thinking out loud. “I remember thinking, ‘That’s probably not the best lesson for a kid,’” Branan sings. “And although that was just something he said… I get to thinking there may have been some kind of genius in the effortless way he just did.”
“Don’t Go” traces a pair of lover from World War II through the end of their lives, but avoids Greatest Generation sanctimony by indulging his storytelling chops. He tosses off a line like, “Shame about your curfew, I would have liked to have the chance just to kiss you into 1941,” before following the couple right up to their recent deaths. When the horns come in on the bridge, there’s no irony in the music—just a funeral march for two people you feel like you’ve known your whole life. It’s a crushing thematic finale. At the risk of sounding clever myself, Adios sounds more like Hola. Nearly 15 years into his career, Branan sounds like he’s finally found the right balance between audacity and subtlety, between humor and heartbreak.
