From the Valley Advocate

Bomb Pop
All and Nothing

By Sean Glennon
Published 08/23/01

I've finally figured out what it is that holds Bill Janovitz's new solo record together.
It took more than a month of regular listening for it to hit me, but it did. And now I understand the real reason I've been drawn back to Up Here at least a few times a week for a good chunk of the summer. I also understand why it took me so long to figure it out.

Up Here is an elementally human record. It is an 11-song exploration of one of the most essential, most comforting and most troubling aspects of human existence -- the experience of being everything and nothing, a world and a speck. Up Here is about the inability to escape recognizing that your life is tiny -- even if it is everything you have.

It's hard to see that, I think, because of its very simplicity. It's not something you need anyone to tell you about. It's just sort of there.

It lives in the spaces between your ribs, leaves you alone most of the time, reaching out to brush your heart every once in a while -- when the day is graying and the room is emptier than it ought to be; when the shadows of the trees stretch across a curve in the road in a way that hints at a vague memory of something you loved when you didn't know enough to be afraid of losing it -- and taking you over when you need it to -- at those odd moments when you need to be nothing if you're going to have any hope of continuing to be anything.

It's hard to create good art that deals with such an essential truth. Most often, the artist ends up being too direct, which is to say heavy handed. That's off-putting at best. Usually, it's just plain irritating. And on those occasions when the artist approaches the subject with appropriate subtlety ... well, it makes it tough to figure out what's happening.

Janovitz does an exceptional job of addressing his theme on Up Here (out this week on SpinART Records), and that's what has kept me listening to and thinking about the record -- and what kept me from really getting a grasp of it.
 
I was sitting outside late Saturday night, staring at the stars through tufts of cool, foggy mist when it set in.

The night sky kept me thinking about some lines from the album's opening track, "Atlantic": "St. Christopher was decanonized/as man went to the moon in 1969." That's a nice image, and one that I realized I'd been hearing entirely the wrong way. Until then it had struck me as a bit smug. I'd been wondering if Janovitz were suggesting that we no longer need St. Christopher. Was he claiming that if we can find our way to the moon, we can pretty much find our way?
It didn't fit. Janovitz is too intelligent for that. And the vignette folk songs he presents on Up Here are too intelligent for that as well.

I started thinking about some other lines from "Atlantic," lines that had been poking at my consciousness since the first time I listened to the disc. "World swirls down around an old man/Lost his wife in an earthquake in Japan/Goes out to the beach and shouts her name/Every day he does the same."
Those lines make me want to cry every time I hear them, think about them. And not because they make me feel bad for the fictional old man, but because they make me feel terrified for myself. They force me to remember how very small and very helpless I am -- we all are. They force me to think about how the universe can strip anything we have and everything we are away from us without even really trying (nothing personal, it might say in passing) and how we can't even begin to believe we can do anything about it.

The point Janovitz makes in the first song on Up Here is that we do need St. Christopher, perhaps more than we ever did.

And he continues to illustrate that point throughout the album, sometimes wistfully ("Minneapolis," "Your Stranger's Face") sometimes hopefully ("Like You Do," a pure, simple, gorgeous love song), sometimes angrily (the closer, "Long Island") -- with stories about being alone in the world, even when you're not.
 
That's not the only thing that makes Up Here an album worthy of repeated listenings.
There are also the spare, roomy melodies and the quiet, pensive mood that stand in contrast to the tight arrangements and the musical onslaught that have marked his work with Buffalo Tom, the band (with Amherst origins) he's fronted for 15 years. And there's a bit, though just a tiny bit, of the twang that colored his first solo effort, 1997's Lonesome Billy.

But Up Here is a much better album than Lonesome Billy. Where that first CD came off very much like a collection of songs Janovitz wanted to record even though they didn't fit Buffalo Tom, this new one plays like an album. It sounds consistent, coherent, planned. It sounds like Janovitz has something to say.
And, Janovitz says, it's an album that is very reflective of the writer, particularly in its lonely, pensive aspect.

"It's just a large facet of my personality," Janovitz says. It's not that he can't be hopeful ("Like You Do" proves that, if nothing else), just that he can't stay that way. "Anyone who lives with me has to live with my mood swings."

"We live so much inside of our heads," he says. "I think that's where these songs come from. I think probably a lot of what art is is just trying to make peace with yourself."

The album was also shaped at least in part by a deliberate attempt to break away from Buffalo Tom's very band-driven style of noisy guitar pop.

"With Buffalo Tom, it gets a little complicated," he says of the writing/arranging process, which requires him to shape everything to that sound. "It also gets a little tedious at times."

"With this acoustic stuff, there's no one to question you," Janovitz says. "You second guess yourself. But that's good; that's part of the process. And that's it."

He points out that he's looking forward to making another Buffalo Tom record -- eventually. Right now, though, he's enjoying his quiet exploration of what's inside his head. And it's working, because he's truly hit on something that's inside all of us. *