The cover artwork of Billy Strings’ fifth album is a sort of collage scattered across nine gilt windows. Each is filled with found objects, most of which look sourced from an attic or one of those bric-a-brac stores occasionally if inexplicably found along the side of American freeways – the hands of a mannequin, one of them yo-yoing what looks like a Christmas tree bauble, a deer skull inside a picture frame, a mismatched pair of glass shoes, among other surreal tableaux. In the middle, Strings is photographed strumming a guitar, his left leg in plaster. Just above him hovers a black and white portrait of the artist responsible for this piece: Strings’ mother, Debra Apostol, who was working on it the night she died in June last year, aged 64. The album it encloses is – unsurprisingly – largely a coming to terms with loss.
Strings has always been bracingly candid about the degree to which his work has been informed by his life: the early loss of his father to a drug overdose, an upbringing and an adulthood roiled by the addictions of those close to him, and himself. He is accustomed to fossicking in the wreckage for inspiration. Even by those standards, So Much For Goodbyes is starkly confessional, and openly anguished – but redeemed well short of the actually funereal by a warmth and wit that permeates proceedings even at their bleakest.
It begins amiably enough with “I’m One Of Those”, an addition to country’s canon of semi-rueful laments by the reckless wanderer: in style and content it’s immediately recognisable as a close cousin of John Hartford’s “Gentle On My Mind” (“I wave to all the ghosts that wander back across this road I’m strolling down,” and so on). It’s a beautiful song, but proves something of a feint. “Burn The Other End”, which follows it, is more representative of the album as a whole. It’s a prowling gothic gospel yelp evocative of 16 Horsepower, cresting on a frantic guitar solo, and introducing another recurring theme, that of self-reproach, Strings fretting that he might have “traded everything I love for what I’ve become”. The album’s other most obviously gospel tracks – “Lay Me Down”, “Light The Way”, “Wrestling An Angel” – sound, as was doubtless the intention, they might have fallen off a Roy Acuff or Louvin Brothers album.
Strings’ astonishing virtuosity is, inevitably and delightfully, another motif of So Much For Goodbyes. He is of that lofty strata of musician whose virtuosity is apt to produce not only awe appropriate to hearing a master at work, but also the befuddled laughter of a magician’s mark trying to understand how that hundred-dollar note got behind their ear. The solos in “Remember To Cry”, a counter-intuitively upbeat reflection on things never said, is an impossible weave of arpeggios that Strings makes sound about as difficult as putting on a hat. “Bluewater Breakdown”, a joyous Dillards-ish instrumental which serves as a sort of interval roughly halfway through, sees Strings duelling with a fiddle player. When Strings properly lets rip, it is genuinely giddying.
It’s one of a few downright playful moments. These tend to be the tracks which are not so much steeped in tradition, as having an amount of fun with it. “I Like Train Songs”, launching with a locomotive whistle impersonated by a violin and a characteristically fluid fretboard shred from Strings, joins Todd Snider’s “Play A Train Song” in the pantheon of songs about rather than of the genre in question (“Some like songs of happiness, and some like songs of pain/You can keep ’em all, I like my songs about a train”). “I Wish I Wanted To” is a Waylon Jennings-esque shuffle drolly bemoaning the narrator’s own apathy (“Another night here on my own/And all my friends are at The Rolling Stones”). Strings cleaves more stringently to tradition on a pair of accomplished working man’s ballads. “Mill Town Flood” is a fine where-it-all-went-wrong song somewhat in the fashion of Bruce Springsteen’s “The River”, and “10,000 Miles From A Friend”, the deadpan lament of a trucker trapped by the open road (“I’ve been everywhere and barely left this rig”).
There is little doubt, however, about the real subject of So Much For Goodbyes. “Still I Crash” is an undisguised open letter to Strings’ late mother, set to a pretty and plaintive Paul McCartney-ish solo acoustic guitar figure. The closing track, the self-explanatory “Debra’s Waltz”, is a delicate instrumental deliberately scuffed enough to sound like it is being beamed in on an AM radio tuned in sometime during the Great Depression: this music, like the sorrow that fuels it, is eternal.