Current favorite song ever: "All The Trees Of The Field Will Clap Their Hands" by Sufjan Stevens

Lisa Germano, Lullaby For Liquid Pig

Lisa Germano's sixth album is a brief, quiet, simple affair, just like most lullabies. It has a couple of melody lines, usually played on piano, that recur in almost every song and that further cement its purported "concept-album" status.

What's the concept, then? Well, to hear some tell it, it's alcoholism. To my knowledge, Germano has never said this explicitly, though she has alluded to problems with alcohol in her past. There are certainly songs here about drinking, about the deceptive sense of security and warmth and familiarity we get from alcohol, about the loneliness that comes with addiction and recovery and stands in stark contrast to the imposed community of recovery groups, and especially about alcohol as either remedy or as poison--often both within the same song. That duality is hardly startling, and it's a truth that anyone who's been drunk even once can understand.

At the beginning of "Dream Glasses Off", when Germano sings: Hey again, I thought that you were my friend, it's not hard to imagine she's singing to a mostly-empty bottle of vodka the morning after a bender. The references aren't always explicit, and even when they are, they're not unambiguous, as in "Pearls": Hate will grow with your alcohol glow / you'll get used to the show / hate will grow into someone you know / it feels good to be home. Also present are the complementary acts of self-loathing and self-aggrandizement at which the drinker becomes an expert: There's too much me, and not all the people I wanna be, begins the ironically-titled "It's Party Time", which goes on to offer an awkward explanation of the temporary delusions of grandeur afforded by drunkeness: What I am is dreaming of dreams / of what I was, or could be.

I got this album last summer, as I was beginning a self-imposed month of sobriety. It was an experiment to see if I could stop drinking for a month without going crazy. I succeeded, though I'm not sure what else I learned from this supposed experiment. I learned that, when sober, I sleep better, get more accomplished, feel better physically, see less of my friends, and don't find bars or huge crowds of people very much fun. I am more directly engaged with experience, which is both a good and bad thing. I also get lonely. (Everyone's wondering where you are ... )

So on those quiet, solitary, sober summer nights one year ago, I would usually listen to this album before my early bedtime. It provided a sort of empathetic solace, the knowledge that someone else has been there and knows what it's like (somebody knows how this feels). Whether this correlation between my experience and the theme of this album is a coincidence or subconsciously deliberate, I'm not really sure, and I don't think it matters. What does matter, and what I think these spectral, very pretty songs are trying to suggest, is this: it's not merely difficult to give up something to which you've grown so accustomed it's now a part of you, like blood--it's surreal, and lonely, and occasionally liberating, but offers no great lesson or redemption or resolution.

Any addict--recovered or otherwise--can tell you that there's no teleology to recovery: you don't just arrive at a given goal on a given day and declare yourself the winner. There is no finish line, there is no reward beyond the dubious gifts of clarity and daily survival. Germano understands this, her music embodies it, and I think I may have just gotten the slightest glimpse of it during my brief tenure as a novice recoverer.

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