Born, Blessed, Grateful, & Alive is Yarn’s first studio album in eight years. The new music reverberates with echoes of past classic rock and country from the 1970s and 1980s with apparent sonic references to artists such as Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers, John Prine, Lynyrd Skynyrd, Dwight Yoakam, and Lowell George. These aural Easter Eggs deepen the record. One can imagine the conversation between the past masterworks and the new songs in a discussion about how to live a good life. The material frequently addresses serious existential questions with a wink and a smile. The album’s title says it all. We are all holy just by the fact of birth and need to appreciate that simple fact. How else can one cope with the absurdity of it all?
Some examples of musical connections should make this clearer. Tom Petty sang about having a heart so big it could crush this town. One could easily feel the overwhelming sentiment expressed of knocking down the walls between us on “Walls”. In the anthemic “Heart So Hard”, the Yarn bandleader Blake Christina declares that nothing and no one can touch him, whether it’s the death of his mother, his lover turning against him, or the betrayal by his only friend. The music echoes the Petty song, especially the chorus. Petty wanted to tear down what separates us. Christina proudly announces he puts up his own defenses. His everybody hates me exaggerations are meant to be overstated but believable. Mothers do die, lovers leave, and pals can be disloyal. The combination of an everybody in life will hurt you scenario works like a slip on a banana peel. The fall is funny, even as broken bones are not.
Or there’s the Prine-like “Turn Off the News” where Yarn remind us that too much information is poison. We need to search for the light and sing hallelujah. Prine semi-humorously instructed us to blow up our TVs, throw away our papers, have a family, eat peaches, and move to the country. Christina may seem more serious, but it’s a deadpan comedy. He and Prine both imagine life without mass communication, but they understand that leading a modest existence has a separate set of problems. Overanalyzing the lyrics ignores the larger point. These songs are meant to be fun. Life is too short to spend your time worrying. The music itself is upbeat and uplifting.
Yarn have always been a loose-knit group. In addition to founder, singer, and writer Christiana, the latest incarnation features the old rhythm section of drummer Robert Bonhomme and bassist Rick Bugel. Renowned guests include guitarists Mike Robinson (Railroad Earth), Andy Falco (Infamous Stringdusters), and Mike Sivilli (Dangermuffin), bassist Johnny Grubb (Railroad Earth), harmony vocalists Heather Hannah and Elliott Peck (Midnight North), and keyboardist Damian Calcagne. Calcange and Christiana produced Born, Blessed, Grateful, & Alive. The players create a welcoming vibe that allows Christiana to sing about topics heavy or light with a nuanced touch. They keep in the background and deliver decorative flourishes that can set the mood.
In a track like “Play Freebird”, the singer simultaneously mocks and offers tribute to the original’s sentiments. There is something inherently disingenuous about a three-pronged guitar attack on the original that asserts the need to be alone. Here, the musicians sonically connect to Lynyrd Skynyrd and then purposely fade away to allow the singer to sing a capella for effect. He won’t cover “Freebird” because he is no longer alone. Ha!
Christiana proposes a few solutions to coping with life’s stresses, including the tried and true one of travel. His “Traveling Kind” recalls Dwight Yoakam’s take on “Honky Tonk Man” with its short verbal phrasing mimicking the act of moving on. The cut ends in a cacophony of steel guitar and piano runs before dropping into a few seconds of purposeful silence. Later in the album, “Nomad Man” takes off from the quiet and exhibits the peace one finds journeying by oneself. Like Lowell George on “Willin'”, he names the places he’s visited as a mantra. “I’ve been to Omaha, Nebraska, Austin to LA, but the only home I’ve made is on the way,” Christiana sings in a plaintive voice over a martial beat. Life itself is a trip.
As a word of caution, I don’t know if Yarn purposely refer to the specific tunes I’ve mentioned. That doesn’t matter, as these songs are a part of the general zeitgeist that informs the music in its wake. Just like the Beatles influenced whatever is on the current pop charts, whether the particular artist ever heard them or not, today’s Yarn owe a debt to what came before. The specific allusions sound clear to me, but Yarn’s music was born in the heads of its creators. We are blessed and grateful they are still alive and have released an excellent new album. That’s a story (or yarn) for the ages.