I'm just sitting here trying to process things. I have the reeling sway of distorted guitars in my ears and it's helping. The album I am listening to is by Haley Butters. They play with some other folks in Slumped, but when they perform as Absinthe Father, they are flying solo.
Their 2018 LP good enough is comprised of a collection of soft shoeing, electric folk songs that acts as a vehicle for declarative whispers of necessary affirmations and deep admission of want. It's guitar pop with a dreamy essence that contemplates a world where its personal poetic admissions can find full purchase.
good enough sees Haley asking the questions that flow through the mind in moments of doubt. Thoughts that often escape one's conscious articulation. Musings like; what if you could take off your skin, and become someone else? Would you be better? Or would you just not be yourself anymore? Or what if the person you've become, never manages to feel like yourself?
These are frightening accusations to throw at the ego, but it's enlightening to see them postulated in a way that they become both fixed and without a determined resolution. Battling these introsive delmas is part of being human- a terminate condition that resists reduction. Haley captures these cogent ambiguities of beautifully, painfully, but still beautifully.
I would hesitate to define what they are doing on good enough as protest music. At least in the strictest sense. However, their music does presume a certain character of refusal. It illicates a desire to not have one's path determined for them- a self-directed demand to be more momentous than circumstances see suitable to permit.
The affairs of one's life, and the world in which they are forced to inhabit, can often feel like a conspiracy to test one's resolve and sanity. Such conspiracies are not directed against a single individual though, and many share the same fate. When a whirlpool begins to churn it is not discerning about who it swallows, and all those snared by it's currents will eventually find each other in the din of its chaos. They are linked like a constellation of falling stars.
The remarkable thing about human beings though, is that they can always change their fate. They are not destined to plummet, but can defy the gravitational death drive of the weights that have been slung around them. They can reverse course. Find strength in one and other. Make history. And in the end, accomplish all this and more, and come to know the truth: that they were good enough all along.
