Shakey Graves Embraces Constraint, Candor – and a Touch of Corniness

“I don’t want to bore you, but I’m having the best, worst time of my life,” laughs Shakey Graves. That’s more or less the cringe-skirting, gratitude-embracing emotional cornerstone of Fondness, Etc., the singer-songwriter’s upcoming fifth album.

Two years into being a father and nearly 20 years into being a musician under the Shakey Graves moniker, Alejandro Rose-Garcia found himself tinkering with his guitar and 4-track tape recorder in his home studio outside of Austin as he adjusted to the rhythm of parenthood. Leaning on the lo-fi techniques that came easiest to the artist in the early days of his career, back when he had absconded to Los Angeles and was making music as a reprieve from his dream of being an actor, a simpler kind of song started to surface. 

“Moments pass by like flocks in the sky above/ Only a fool and his pride will tell you time’s on your side/ ‘Cause time flies/ When you’re with the one you love,” he sings on “Time Flies,” the album’s second single, released today. The track is bathed in a sepia-toned nostalgia, driven by the distinct rhythmic sense captured in early Shakey Graves tracks like “Roll the Bones,” but conferred gingerly, like a story told to a friend. Over a patient, watchful guitar melody, accented by fairy dust strings and a hearty bassline, Rose-Garcia croons his own rendition of a lesson as old as time itself. 

“I didn’t want to preach to anybody or even myself,” he says. Humming along to Sixties pop songs that wore their hearts on their sleeves in simple terms, Rose-Garcia set about shaking off the writerly tendency to craft metaphors and complex instrumental breakdowns and instead capture the love, and the change, surrounding himself, his family, and friends. 

“At the end of the day, I looked at these songs and they were about that: being corny and cherishing moments as they go by,” he shrugs. “It’s just a small, impactful, little 30-minute album that I’m probably gonna think about forever.”

In a way, it’s the kind of album the multi-instrumentalist says he intended to be making all along: a little scrappy, steeped in storytelling, and rooted in the legacy of outlaw Texas music that the born-and-raised Austinite grew up on. 

“I very much want to be part of the conversation of Texas music, and any chance that I have to be considered part of this long, weird story of art in Texas: That’s really a big secret goal of mine,” the singer confesses. 

Reflecting on his mother’s Tejano ancestors scraping out a desert-tough existence in the Valley and his own lifelong wrestle with the Lone Star State’s “poisonous” politics and the ever-adapting nature of the Capital City, Rose-Garcia muses: “I understand and love the roughness of living here, but I also really hate the kind of cruelty about it. I think it’s a double-edged sword.” 

Raising his own Texan daughter now, he sees all those idiosyncrasies even clearer. And as an artist memorialized with a city-designated day, Rose-Garcia finds public and private ways to celebrate and preserve his own idea of Austin: bringing together local bands and creatives for an annual Shakey Graves Day performance, which took over Hole in the Wall last month; trekking out to Gruene Hall for armadillo races on Texas Independence Day; and playing his daughter the “dad music” he grew up listening to.

“This record is me trying to be very upfront, a little bit, about how grateful I am,” he says. “I can bitch about change all day, but at the end of the day, there’s a lot of big positives and things that I don’t think would happen anywhere else but here, and people that I know [who] don’t exist anywhere else but here.”

Fondness, Etc.is out May 15 via Secret Identity / Dualtone Records.

The post Shakey Graves Embraces Constraint, Candor – and a Touch of Corniness appeared first on The Austin Chronicle.