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Happy 3:440:00/3:44
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Land of Plenty 4:470:00/4:47
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Beckonings 4:390:00/4:39
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Hang On, Hold On 3:070:00/3:07
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Amadeo 4:400:00/4:40
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Black Box Witness 4:100:00/4:10
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Sunken Hearts 7:190:00/7:19
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0:00/5:17
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Beckonings
Carla Torgerson
“[Carla] still sounds so clear and pure… her completely unaffected way of appreciating every syllable has something knowing about it… The voice carries all the stories, and the music to it is the most beautiful folk pop, as elegant as it is timeless – not sparse at all, just appropriately quiet. Why do introverts or shy people always have to apologize, the similarly reserved Kristin Hersh once asked me, but the annoying overconfident people don't? Let's light a candle for Kristin, Carla and all the quiet people! Without them, the noise of our time would be even more difficult to bear.”
– Birgit Fuss, Rolling Stone DE
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The voice is unmistakable. Richer now, but the beauty of Carla Torgerson’s vocals still catch the heart as much as they did when she was one of the pillars of The Walkabouts. She’s never stopped writing songs since the group ended in 2014, and finally she’s back with a new band and a new album, Beckonings. But it’s been a long road, fraught with setbacks. “First I broke my heel in 2015,” she recalls, “and a year after that, I broke my right wrist and right leg. Once that healed, I began exploring improvised music with John Leighton Beezer. In 2019 I recorded an album with engineer Ric Vaughan and brought in Akis Boyatzis from Greece to help with arrangements. Then Covid arrived and put a halt to everything.”
The huge fracture that shattered everyone’s world meant Torgerson had to put all her plans on hold. “Listening to the songs again, I knew I wanted to do them in a band setting. That began to take shape with help from Danny Godinez; he played guitar in Michael Shrieve’s Spellbinders (Santana) and became central to this new sound of mine.”
Then she came across an instrumental band, Gems, setting up for a gig with two drum kits and two synthesizers. Unusual in Seattle, which remains very much a guitar-oriented town. “I watched and loved the way they really listened to each other as they played. I talked to them afterwards and we arranged to get together.”
As soon as they played, things clicked, and “it felt like we’d known each other for years.” The musicians - Gary Palmer, Daniel Rapport, Jacob Evans, Adrian Van Batenburg and Danny Godinez – opened up the sound, adding colours and textures to the songs, nuances that draw the lyrical observations of songs like “Amadeo” into sharp relief and highlight Torgerson’s distinctive voice. After almost seven months of rehearsals, they went into Seattle musician Jim Roth’s Fort Lawton Studio and recorded the entire album in three days.
It was often chaotic (“the band was downstairs and I was singing in a room standing by some bunk beds”), but out of the madness came eight songs, with the ninth track "It's Been a Great Show" recorded in a separate session with dear friend and Walkabouts bandmate Glenn Slater. Five of the songs are Torgerson originals, and the remainder are covers that resonate deep inside her.
The musicians give Torgerson’s compositions the widescreen, filmic sensibility that’s long been there in her writing. Still, that’s no surprise, as she’s long been a part of Pacific Northwest’s creative film community. She began as a negative cutter/editor, and her involvement has grown, working on scores for movies, as well as plays, both of which gave rise to material on Beckonings.
“Black Box Witness,” a dark duet with keyboard player Gary Palmer, was born when she was asked to write the soundtrack along with Mark Nichols for a Sam Shephard play being staged in Seattle. A song of shadows and foreboding, it pulls the listener into its pain as the keyboards create a spare frame for the voices. “It’s about parents fighting over their daughter,” Torgerson explains. “I’d thought about it for an album of duets I had wanted to make, but it works so well with the band, and Heidi Wischler’s trumpet fits perfectly in there.”
It’s a sharp contrast to the synth-powered “Hang On, Hold On” with its percussive, 80s feel, but the arrangement builds a dramatic backdrop for Torgerson’s impassioned voice. “It’s fun to sing. I remember I wrote it in 20 minutes, it was going to be on my first solo album Saint Stranger, recorded with Boyatzis’s band Sigmatropic in Athens, in 2004. But the version back then was too glitzy and it never made it onto the record. I remembered it when I needed one more track for Beckonings."
What she's made is an album that very much looks to the future, but also keeps its connections to her musical past. “Land of Plenty,” is “a longtime favorite piece of mine,” written by Terry Lee Hale, once a Seattle musician, with closing guitar atmospherics from former Walkabouts and duo bandmate Chris Eckman, who also gave her “Beckonings,” a song that offers a nod to the days of their Chris and Carla duo. Michael Wells of The Walkabouts supplies harmonica and long time collaborator Anne Marie Ruljancich supplies violin and back up vocals.
The real focus, though, is on Torgerson’s own songs, with the epic, aching sweep of “Sunken Hearts” as the album’s penultimate centerpiece. It’s an elegy to two male cousins who drowned in separate incidents. Snippets of the song feature in trailers for the soon to be made Brion Rockwell film We All Got Up To Dance, but here it’s given the chance to breathe. It’s delicate, a gentle, sorrowful epic, with synthesizer lines leaving trails like a wake behind Torgerson’s voice, while the piano adds a filigree to surround her. “Gary sat at the piano and recorded that part in one take,” she says. “I listened to it and said, ‘You added the ocean.’”
The album closes with the wistful "It's Been a Great Show," a spare and powerful song featuring the piano and sampled clarinet playing of Glenn Slater.
Too many years have passed since Carla Torgerson last appeared on record. But she’s been busy, writing, preparing, and moving forward. Now she’s back and it’s a perfect, welcome return.
- Chris Nickson
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