Forget Me Not

When life is always spent on the road, the house is not a home. And
some things are just better off left behind. No one knows this better
than 31-year-old traveling troubadour Cass McCombs, who for the better
part of this decade has traversed the country and world with little
money but an abundance of richly poignant indie-folk songs.

“I have never really had an apartment, and I’ve never had a credit
card. I don’t need all these things,” says McCombs over the phone from
Los Angeles, just one of the many places, including Baltimore, New
York, and Chicago, where he has set his bags down over the years. “I
would rather have nothing and be able to work every day on my songs,
because that’s the most important thing to me.”

The words McCombs strings together like a poet roll off his
soft-spoken tongue, woven through with literary and metaphorical
references. “My Sister, My Spouse,” off his latest release,
Catacombs, was taken from the Song of Solomon, a short biblical
story that explores the courtship of a man and woman and the
consummation of marriage. “I guess I had been thinking a lot about the
impossibility of authenticity and the masks that we generally all wear
at different points in our life,” McCombs says.

Since McCombs’s first EP, Not the Way, dropped in 2003 on
now-defunct Baltimore label Monitor, he has gone on to release four
solid full-lengths—the first two, A and Prefection,
on Monitor; the latter two, Dropping the Writ and
Catacombs, on the highly visible indie label Domino. Yet he
remains perhaps one of the most underrated artists in the current
lexicon of American singer-songwriters. “I’m not really going for
obscurity,” he says. “I’m trying to break through, just trying to make
ends meet.”

Although McCombs has held down his nine-year-long career solely
playing music (“I’ve never been much of a day jobber,” he says), he has
only gotten the scraps of the feast that more-well-known, less-talented
songwriters are stuffing their bearded faces and bellies with. With
Catacombs, though, that’s all bound to change.

The five-and-a-half-minute-long album opener and lead single,
“Dreams Come True,” shuffles along at a gentle pace, with McCombs’s
acoustic and electric guitars dancing around the soft percussive
rhythms of longtime collaborator Orpheo McCord and upright bassist
Walker Teret. It’s a perfectly crafted love song, McCombs’s soft,
tender voice floating around the Marianne Faithfull–esque guest
vocals of 70-year-old veteran Hollywood actress Karen Black like an
angel with a broken wing: “I’ve been blessed/Your eyes are two moons/I
hope this voyage will not be ending very soon.”

The politically apathetic anthem “Don’t Vote” reflects McCombs’s
long-standing stance on the electoral process; he sings, “It must be
hard sometimes not to complain/But that’s the deal your Uncle once
explained.” “For a time, I was antidemocracy,” he says. “I needed to
write a song about the pains of democracy.”

As for the rest of the 11-track-long player, it’s a delicate balance
of hopeful, twangy pedal-steel ballads (“You Saved My Life” and
“Harmonia”), the snail-paced optimism of a wonderful life despite
financial setbacks (“Executioner’s Song”), literary and metaphoric
tales (“Lionkiller Got Married,” the aforementioned “My Sister, My
Spouse”), and good memories left behind (“One Way to Go”).

“The songs draw from a variety of sources and influences and my
memory,” McCombs says. “My memory has a lot to do with it.
Every­thing triggers some memory, wherever you are. You remember
something else and that memory can deceive you, and it can corrupt you,
and it can seduce you, and it’s not always good. But the times in life
where I felt the most joy, I have completely forgotten about. I’ve
lived that joy, and I have no need to relive it again.”