Man, the sixties were weird, right? I’m trying to think through pop music history to find a more left-field cultural obsession than the sudden popularity of Indian raga in the later half of the 1960s, and I’m coming up short (maybe the bubble of whisper-quiet singer-songwriters in the mid 2000s, a-la Iron & Wine and his disciples?).

The ubiquity of raga in the ‘60s is perhaps best demonstrated in the discarded record collection I picked this out of: abandoned in a trunk on the side of the road between Emmylou Harris and Barry Manillow records (there was some Grateful Dead in there too). But you get the picture–everyone was listening to raga. It was so popular that it infiltrated even the most vanilla of record collections (to be fair, they also had a Pharoah Sanders record. I have a feeling it may have actually been a mixture of a parent and child’s collections). 

It’s not unexplainable though–in the (pseudo?) spiritual awakening of the hippie movement, scores of bands were already looking to India for philosophy and musical inspiration. And I’m talking the major players: The Byrds, Rolling Stones, and of course the Beatles, who spent months in India under the tutelage of Maharishi Mahesh Yogi. Even before the visit, George Harrison (who had a proper revival experience in India) added Indian flavors to his work without much diluting (see: “Within You Without You”). So naturally, in the same way that I started listening to Sunny Day Real Estate because all of my favorite bands cited them as an influence, many music fans in the 1960s went right to the source.
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And to unaccustomed Western ears, the source can be a little strong. This album features two instrumental pieces, each an entire side in length, performed only on sarod (an instrument I just heard about today—it’s like a small sitar) and the tamla (Indian hand percussion). Both start out slowly and quietly in meditative drones, building and accelerating through their runtimes to almost manic conclusions (pity that tamla players hands). The later sections are writhe with rhythm changes and shifting strong beats, slowly building in tempo until you’re not sure there’s anywhere left to build to. And when it reaches a breaking point, it crashes to conclusion, leaving nothing but a few seconds of the drone strings ringing out. The album is both contemplative and exciting, but if I’m going to listen to it more regularly, I’m going to need a lot more incense.

David Bazan has always made sad music. He cut his teeth as Pedro the Lion, the Christian slowcore band that made a name for themselves by being the sort of band that wasn’t afraid to confront the brutal honesty of their doubt or use harsh language in the Tooth and Nail crowd (though never while signed to T&N). But within that scene, his droopy eyed cynicism was always cut with a hint of redemption, knowing that, despite everything, God was still (at least mostly) good. Even on Control, Pedro the Lion’s most despondent release, there was solace in knowing that the godless main character was fictional.

Curse Your Branches, however, is David Bazan’s first full length released after publicly recanting his faith. Predictably, his already depressing brand of doubtful and self-deprecating lyricism is even more cutting when divorced from trust in God. On about half of the tracks, the weight is only lifted by pairing his words with upbeat pop songs. For instance, “When We Fell,” which asks God, “when you set the table and when you set the scale / did you write a riddle that you knew they would fail,” sung over a major keyed rock riff. The music can be a little disarming, until you listen to the lyrics a little more closely and have your heart drop out of your chest. 

The downtempo tracks are far less deceptive, but despite their minor keyed signifiers, they still catch you off guard. “Hard to Be” most directly refers to the aftermath of his fallout with God, challenging his Creator on putting us in that garden in the first place and mourning the divide between his family and himself that his doubt (or rather their continued faithfulness) has caused. “Lost My Shape” is a pointed fall-from-grace tale that is directed at no one in particular, but with lines like “you used to feel like the forest fire burning, but now you feel like a child throwing tantrums for your turn,” it’s hard to read it as a little autobiographical. After all, between disappointing his family (“Hard to Be,” “When We Fell”), failing his daughter (“Bless This Mess,” “Please Baby Please,” “In Stitches”), and heaping suspicion and anger on God (the whole album), he has pretty hard feelings toward himself. And with that in mind, while it is a deftly crafted and honestly written album, it is not one to be entered into lightly.

​One sidenote: I saw David Bazan play a house show shortly after his wife gave birth to their second child at home. He played Hard to Be, and after singing, “childbirth is painful,” shook his head and whispered “oh shit” before continuing to the next line.

Despite revisionist history, the Beatles didn’t completely dominate 1960s pop music. Their influence had an undeniably long arm, but certain parts of California were too far for them to grasp. The Association, for example, seems to exist in an alternate universe where the British Invasion never happened and the Beach Boys took on the Beatles’ mantel as Biggest Band in the World. 

By this point in history, we should all know that genre classifications are by no means a precise art, and that every artist’s work is an amalgam of often disparate inspirations and that compartrmentalizing music is often pointless and sometimes even dangerous. For instance: I have completely ignored Bruce Hornsby most of my life (I was unaware of what the song was Pierce ripped off for his Greendale anthem), until some Pitchfork article brought up his influence on indie darling Justin Vernon of Bon Iver.
 
Record scratch.

Not that it’s any sort of accurate measure, as my collection is likely to grow before the end (there’s already a small pile of picks from a collection I found on a curb awaiting entry into the collection), but this entry marks the halfway point of my project of blogging through my entire record collection (which I thought would be done like…two years ago). 

More importantly, it also marks the end of the large queue of assorted picks that have been waiting for the past year for me to go through so I can progress with my collection as usual (instead of middle-of-the-road 70s rock that I’ve picked up for cheap/free that I don’t actually want to listen to, hence the delay). 
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And what a way to get back to business than with Carryin’ On with Johnny Cash and June Carter, the famously dry-witted, mud-slingin’, square dancin’ album of duets between two of country-western’s biggest names. Jackson is legendary, as is their version of Bob Dylan’s “It Ain’t Me, Babe.” But the less celebrated tunes are just as wryly hilarious and tender—”Long Legged Guitar Pickin’ Man” sees the two trading insults, while “Shantytown” is as tender a ballad as they ever did. Their versions of Ray Charles’ “I Got a Woman” and “What I Say” are fantastic as well, even if the funky electric piano of the latter is a little out of place alongside the finger picked acoustic guitars on every other song.