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A New Direction: Girls and Whiskey and American History on Pomegranate

Astronautalis’s first two albums represent deeply personal work, yet they don’t quite feel like his unique music.

ASTRONAUTALIS: I don’t think I was truly innovating on those records. I wasn’t breaking new ground. It was sort of derivative, homages to everything I love. It wasn’t until the third record that I was doing what I really love.

So if you loved the folky, outlaw country stuff in those first two albums, we’re moving on. If you liked that music, Bothwell cited Comet, Anticom and Fog as artists you should check out for what inspired him.

By the time he hit Pomegranate, though, Astronautalis had hit new lyrical and musical inspirations. “Short Term Memory Loss” kicked off a relaxed and acoustic album in appropriate fashion. “The Wondersmith and His Sons” starts with a mid-tempo piano rhythm, electric guitars, and Andy Bothwell’s double tracked voice providing an almost moblike intensity to the lead track. The topic of the song is also new. This is the story of a con man whose life has gone awry, which the video takes to a bloody extreme. While I suppose Andy could be talking about himself (a lot of musicians at some level are con artists), this is a new character relatively removed from the singer’s personal experiences.

That’s the story of the album in a lot of respects. Musically, in some ways, it’s more rooted in indie-rock than the last two. There’s more singing, fewer drum loops and samples. Each song features full band arrangements. The album tells the stories of sailors at sea, disillusioned preachers, and perhaps most famously, George Washington’s soldiers right before they crossed the Delaware on “The Trouble Hunters.”

Now this is not a gimmick, and Astronautalis does not try to create musical period pieces. If you’re not paying close attention, “The Trouble Hunters” sounds like a generic fight song. It’s perhaps the most straight-ahead song in the Astronautalis catalogue, with loud guitars and a catchy chorus driving the song forward. If you weren’t listening closely, you might think this is “The Boys are Back in Town” for the hip-hop generation. Then you hear “While Brother Benjamin is back in France, we’re taking Trenton back again. The garrison of Hessians will fall. They say Delaware will freeze a man.”

So let me just say as a history teacher I love this song, because it brings the war alive in a real way. You remember learning about the Revolution? What images do you have in mind? For me, I learned about old, white guys in wigs in fancy halls in Philadelphia. We didn’t really talk too much about the actual war. Our high schools teach the Revolution as a stately affair led by distinguished gentlemen. As the lyrics say,

“It’s spoken over ad nauseum dulling the sharpest story, every veteran, politican, any talking head will get on the pedestal and spin this saga any way that’ll make their means meet our end.”

This is a song that brings the fight alive. (My last side note on American history: If you want a book that talks about the war as an actual war experienced by people who lived far from the halls of power in Philadelphia, check out A People’s History of the American Revolution by Ray Raphael. One of the best histories I’ve read in the last year.)

Okay, so this album is not all about the American Revolution. There’s other history, too!

“Two Years Before the Mast”—a song about smuggling a particularly shocking secret to port—is moved forward by marching drums and features no musical allusions to the era of piracy. And thank God for that. These are stories that pull from history, but they do not have to pretend to be artifacts of history. The only exception might be “The Case of William Smith,” whose chorus suggests almost gothic overtones, which perfectly reflects the story of a minister who has lost his way.

On this album, Astronautalis happily embraces what he coins “historical fiction hip-hop.” Even the packaging wants you to believe this is some sort of historical documents. It includes a map of Italy and generous acknowledgements of everyone who assisted him. The booklet has the faded colors of a history you might find deep in the stacks at a college library. The lyrics are presented as tiny essays. This is meant to feel like an old album, even as it’s doing something very new and very different.

ASTRONAUTALIS: In hip-hop, a lot of the music was introspective, it was about the rapper. And when it wasn’t, it was political, which I find boring. No one was making music about others. So I wanted to fill a void in rap.

I’m super obsessed with history. It’s the kind of person I am. I like that heightened, literary language. The music is a little more all over the place, a little more refined. It’s not a cool record, it’s not hip. There’s lots of sailing, mountain climing. This was a time when MIA was coming out, this was far away from what was cool. But I wasn’t trying to be cool. I was trying to make my record.

Mighty Ocean was made for other people. I wanted to make a record that was cool. Pomegranate was for me… For people who know me, they would say this is a record that Andy would make.

Surprisingly enough, though, this album connected and further built his audience. The Wondersmith and his Sons and The Trouble Hunters turned into videos on YouTube. The album was even featured on NPR Music’s “Song of the Day.”

“The Story of My Life” doesn’t quite fit with the rest of the album, hence its status as a hidden track, tucked away after a 2 minute silence. Yet it’s a great product of one of Astronautalis’s most valuable partnerships, his duets with P.O.S. This is the closest to an autobiographical song that you will find here, if you could call it that. It’s filled with imagery of animalistic forces that have dominated the lives of these wandering musicians. I encourage you to check it out and all the work of P.O.S. He is a brilliant wordsmith from Minneapolis, who effectively combines hip-hop with his punk roots for some intense rhymes. Well worth your time. Astronautalis has promised that the sessions that included this song will come out as an album before the end of the year.

GASP! One more day, y’all! Come back tomorrow as we look at the latest album, and what promises to be an exciting future for Andy Bothwell. In the meantime, enjoy this video of colonials dancing to “Trouble Hunters: