Maggie Björklund is a Danish pedal steel guitar player who recently released her debut album in the United States. You won’t find any “Steel Guitar Rag” or Hawaiian music on Coming Home, if that’s what your idea of pedal steel guitar is. Instead, Björklund has enlisted a cast of American musicians from Tucson, Seattle and elsewhere to make an album of dreamy, semi-psychedelic desert music.
That desert sound is nearly inevitable when your rhythm section comprises the core of Calexico, Joey Burns on bass and guitars and the inimitable John Convertino on drums, backing Maggie and her pedal steel. She mostly plays with a light touch, the notes sounding like she’s plucking with her bare fingertips, not picks. But she’s also capable of wringing some extraordinary sounds out of her instrument, metallic wheezes and menacing drones and birdsong and falling rain.
This also isn’t a collection of instrumentals, although there are some of those among the 11 tracks. Indie rockers Rachel Flotard, Mark Lanegan and Jon Auer cowrote some of these songs with Maggie and provide vocals on them, and a handful of other guests contribute guitar, cello and more.
Flotard and Lanegan’s vocals work particularly well in this setting. The two perform a duet on the second track, “Intertwined,” a romantic and dreamy song of longing, and Flotard does a particularly nice job on the next song, “Summer Romance.” Her clarion alto, to me, fits beautifully with this kind of desert Americana. Of the songs with lyrics, I’m undecided which is my favorite: “Summer Romance” or another Flotard cut, “The Anchor Song,” a metaphor-heavy bit about sailors and the sea.
Indie-rocker Jon Auer contributes his tenor vocals to a couple of songs, including “Vildspor,” which is “blind alley” in Danish. It’s a languid double waltz with a claustrophobic arrangement. Auer sings the refrain of “which way to go, which way to go” repeatedly, and we hear an odd sound that I suspect is sticks being played on the cello’s strings like a hammer dulcimer; the effect is like the fluttering of a moth against a window screen, desperate to get to the light. And Auer sings on “Playground Stars,” a mid-tempo jazzy song with vibraphone and some amazing wailing sounds from Maggie’s steel.
The really interesting arrangements are on the instrumentals. The opener “Wasteland” lovingly depicts the desert as a beautiful wasteland of melancholy majesty. Barb Hunter’s mournful cello accentuates the mood, and of course Convertino’s brushwork on drum and cymbal is endlessly inventive but always appropriate to the song. On the onomatopoeic “Falling,” we hear clanging, booming noises behind the steel guitar’s eerie wailing, and the short track ends with multi-tracked downward falling notes on the steel. “Insekt” has a theremin mimicking the sound of a mosquito flying around your head over a plucked classical guitar, bowed bass and high-register mandolin. Maggie’s part evolves from a plucked repetitive figure to a melancholy melody and back again, and toward the end she doubles Johnny Sangster’s aggressively plucked baritone guitar part. “Frost” is similarly evocative of its title, with Maggie’s crystal-clear fingerpicking. And the closer, “Finale,” is another lovely desert-evoking piece, with wordless vocalizing from Flotard, a distant trumpet line from Calexico’s Jacob Valenzuela and a beautiful melody line from Maggie.
Maggie has been supporting other musicians and bands for several years now, and also plays with the group The Darleens. She has chosen a fine crew of supporting players who allow her to shine on her own debut. I hope we’ll hear more from her in the future.
You can download an MP3 file of “Intertwined” featuring Mark Lanegan and Rachel Flotard on vocals from the Bloodshot website here.
(Bloodshot, 2011)
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