Boulder Magazine Winter/Spring 2009-2010

Music Profile: Gregory Alan Isakov

Eyes on the horizon, hands in the soil

by Dave Kirby
Photos by Brian Kraft

So begins “Dandelion Wine,” the first track of This Empty Northern Hemisphere, the latest CD by Boulder-based singer-songwriter Gregory Alan Isakov. Barely a vignette, a fleeting image of longing recalled, and so delicately wrought that a stiff chinook might carry it away, it is the first of many such whispered revelations on the CD, including “That Moon Song,” which has found its way onto KBCO’s rotation list.

And yet oddly enough, for all the achingly detailed and evocative narrative that follows in the rest of the song, Isakov, widely heralded by local and national music observers as a singer of singular talent, admits he wrestled with “Dandelion Wine.”

“I’ve never spent more time on a song before,” he confesses. “I got that part ‘summer days were just a magazine, a magazine’ … and that’s all I had. I’d get to that part and just stop playing. I just wanted it to kind of finish itself. And then, eventually, the other part came.”

Flying Under the Mass-market Radar

For anyone familiar with Isakov’s relatively brief career, neither the richness of the song nor his own patient trust in his abilities comes as much of a surprise. Born in South Africa and transplanted to Boulder a few years ago via Philadelphia, Isakov has enhanced his reputation in a quietly determined way. The latest CD is actually his fourth self-released CD, the first two being little more than expanded demos, sold on the merch tables at venues where he plays. 2007’s release That Sea The Gambler, however, significantly raised the profile of Isakov and his band The Freight. It garnered a handful of awards from local press, and attention from national critics (like Paste magazine) as a solid offering in a legion of new, young folk artists recording and touring independently, below the mass-market radar. Some called it “punk folk,” a somewhat clumsy term to suggest a new approach amongst its practitioners: independent, liberated from many of the familiar idioms of contemporary folk music, melding low-fi rock and country elements into their music, and who frequently spend more time listening to each other than studying the legends.

But Isakov’s music doesn’t feel like a Statement. Rather, in the free spaces between his imagery and his recollections, there’s an arresting sense of casual grace and unspoken reverence, Isakov’s expressive voice draped across hushed arrangements of guitars and strings like gray satin outlining the contours of each song’s melody.

Elsewhere on the CD, which also features Brandi Carlile contributing vocals on a few cuts, the singer conjures the image of a solitary lady (“Evelyn”) working the late-night shift at a gas station, soloing under her breath about her half-minute encounters with the transient humanity that course through her evening, with Isakov himself playing the observer of an observer. It is one of the songs on the CD that most clearly evokes one of Isakov’s early influences, the Tom Joad-era songwriting of Bruce Springsteen—a sepia-toned frame of middle America at work.

“I write a lot of prose and short stories about people I meet. I rarely write those kind of classic ‘story’ songs that Springsteen is so good at, so it was kind of a step out of my normal boundaries,” Isakov says.

on the road

And as is common for songwriters whose careers start increasingly to take them far from home, Isakov includes a number of songs about places on his CD. He says that the many road miles he is starting to accumulate exert a tidal effect on his work. “Idaho,” for example, recalls an expansive horizon slowly slipping by, and a fleeting meld of souls.

down in the bardo

there was nothing to hold so we let it go
we were empty, we were hollow
shined with everything we were living for

and there’s lights up in the north
and i aint wondering where you are
yeah just lights up in the north

now it’s white as snow
watch the evening glow
across Idaho

“That was one of the first songs I wrote for the CD. I had been reading the Tibetan Book of the Dead, and there are some images and references to that book,” Isakov says. “Kind of like there’s this idea that there’s this bardo area, like a purgatory area, that we find ourselves in sometimes. I was traveling and playing in Idaho when I wrote that song. And there was just a lot of driving, a lot of landscape. I don’t know why I connected the two at the same time, but it felt like kind of a cool space between two things.

“It’s an interesting thing,” he continues, “because I feel like I’ve been pretty transient the past couple of years. I do find that I think about a sense of place a lot.”

For Isakov, though, “place” is both what he sees on the road and something that eludes him at home. Up until recently, Isakov lived on a farm near Lyons, feeding his other passion—horticulture. He talks about songwriting in terms that a dedicated grower would understand, dividing his focus between patient nurturing and obsessing over detail, always testing his craft against the vagaries of processes unseen.

But for the time being, the places he sees are somewhere else, outside the window of his van. Isakov admits that this past year, he didn’t get his hands dirty quite as much as he would have liked. “I helped a few friends with their gardens, and visited some gardens I’d been to before, on tour. And I miss it. It’s something I really love.

“It’s kind of something I’m working toward—buying a house, having a little plot of my own. But for now, I’m not a homebuyer. I’m a van buyer.” u

Dave Kirby, a Boulder resident for 29 years, has written about music for various publications since 1978.

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