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What Was, the EP side project of Dan Grissom from some say Leland (ssL) is both a maiden voyage of Grissom’s solo work and an offering of subtle charm and perfectly human imperfections. By the third listen through the 20 minute album, on the second song, yours truly actually cried. In a time and in a society where hate turns the quick buck, What Was captures a grace that is both delicate and luminescent. Is it perfect? No. Completed in two days as a means to obtain gas money while on tour, there’s only so much one can expect. But, do the imperfections matter? Not in the slightest. To the contrary, they add to its magic and make it the best $10 I’ve spent all year.
If ever there was any doubt about the origin of the intimacy, harmonic roots, and floral humor found in ssL, they have been answered by this EP. Tracks like “lazy fluorescence” rely primarily on basic folk instrumentation and Grissom’s contemplative boy-next-door voice. The result is a general theme of almost painfully simple lyrical poetry opened up and revealed under his care. “sometimes I see the dog in me, pawing at the floorboards, nothing beneath / it’s crazy the things that we do when we believe something is true; it’s crazy the things that we say we can’t take away.” Other songs take the same basic tools to create an atmosphere of congenial whimsy, like in “Slow to rise”, a strolling banjo piece not just about a jealous sun, (“[the sun] pulls me from my sheets, burns my elbows and my knees / because he knows where I was last night / I was singing to the moon, an old Steven Foster tune / I was walking with the stars / … I’ll steal kisses from the breeze, talk religion with the trees / by the way most of them say ‘there’s no way to know’”) but capturing an oft unstated irony of “the sun will rise tomorrow.”
Digging deeper into layered harmonies and representing one of the two songs not recorded in the two day session is “The Ocean Was No More”, a mosaic of how even the best of intentions can both create and sometimes end in concessions to solitude. “I was listening to you but you were listening for me / and I wasn’t going to speak so it was plain to see / sometimes I just don’t know what to say, so I wait for the moment to pass away.” The song transitions from his own story to one of a woman sailing on a raft of paper plates—ultimately choosing loneliness over potentially tainting a pristine land. (Sound cool? It is. Make you reevaluate your priorities? Darn skippy). “burned bright”, the final track on the six song disc offers only tatters of a story and a plucking of a classical guitar. The guitar reverberates over and over at the opening until accordion tones lift up the song. Held aloft, percussion gingerly hangs on the edges of the song until the extravagance mounts, exhausts itself, and finally floats out of sight like the ash from a fire.
Three short months ago Dan Grissom played his first solo show barefoot in the grass, under the arms of an oak at Sediers Springs Park. While gathering his instruments near, he did small things to ease and quiet the crowd: joking about his nervousness of his first solo show, asking his friends to sing along, telling bad jokes, and even stopping mid-set to relay a story of a woman in a ghost town who offered to leg wrestle him. That is much of what Grissom does, create an atmosphere of sincerity - be that of warmth and humor or disentangled contemplation.
After all, this is the work of a musician, painter, bearded and bespecked man who asked the seven members of ssL to encircle a Flipnotics audience to create “sensual surround sound.” When and where you’ll be able to see Grissom play solo is anyone’s guess; at the time of this posting he doesn’t have anything scheduled. I suspect you could email Dan to get the CD. But if I were you, I’d make plans to see the some say Leland and get a sense of what What Was sounds like. If we’re lucky Dan will play a solo song or two; I’ll be the one with the Kleenex.
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