Daisies by Your Stone

William Elliott Whitmore - Hymns For The Hopeless

In Southern Texas a few weeks ago, my road-companion and I stopped for a while to watch a freight roll by. As we played with the hypothetical of us chasing it down and then being beaten unconscious with a Maglite, my thoughts slipped into this rustic aesthetic of heavy machinery chugging through American wasteland beside the setting sun. It’s hard to explain the feeling that a scene like this conjures, except to say that it’s a little too real for comfort. Through dead ground and dry brush this vestige of man pushes ceaselessly onward—it’s striking.

In the days since, I’ve found myself listening to this album a lot. It’s slow-moving, it’s rough, and it’s pained. Whitmore has the voice of a ghost. He sings in a sort of bristly amalgamation of the voices of old bluesmen and railroad workers and fill-in-the-blank hand-calloused souls that gives the impression he looks a lot different than he actually does. The music, as my friend Doug would say, is real shit-kickin’ music—it’s the type of blues you get when you need the help of your guitar or banjo to tell the whole story, to make the whole apology.

Where Whitmore really shines is in the honesty of his writing. He’s not padding the blow, because it doesn’t seem like he can. The songs are about death and regret. They’re about the things you couldn’t bring yourself to tell someone and the things you never got a chance to. “It does me no good to say I’m sorry, although I am, for what it’s worth”, he confesses. But from apologies for unmentioned trespasses to the unmentioned deceased, he moves on to hopeful metaphors and he chugs through a certain darkness with enough light and levity to keep from being kitschy—it’s just sort of real.

The album is about the often unbearable pains of life. It speaks to the things we’ve done wrong and the people we’ve lost, one way or another, but it never indulges the idea of giving up. It has a tenacity about it that keeps us as listeners certain of the fact that life keeps moving. It inches along, slowly sifting through the defeats of a truly tough existence. Dusk is turning darkness and the wasteland is all around us, but there’s still a necessary belief that the sun will make its way back up again, and this train doesn’t stop, not even for a beat.

“May the light shine down upon your head.”

-Drew