Josh T. Pearson, Last of the Country Gentlemen 4 comments

By Andy Whitman

Photographs of Texas troubadour Josh T. Pearson reveal a man out of time. His rail-thin body, long hair, audacious, disheveled beard, and hollow eyes call to mind a shell-shocked survivor of Gettysburg or Cold Harbor, not the victim/protagonist of the petty internecine warfare of a failed twenty-first century marriage.

Listening to his solo debut album Last of the Country Gentlemen, it’s equally apparent that the wounds are no less devastating simply because they weren’t physically inflicted. It’s there to see in those vacant eyes. Something got lost along the way; a soul perhaps, or possibly hope, and Pearson catalogs the resulting trauma in hushed but bluntly horrific terms. This may be the prettiest and most becalmed music about despair you’ve ever heard.

The son of a Pentecostal preacher, and the former leader of the short-lived but critically lauded psychedelic rockers Lift to Experience, Pearson and his musical astronauts made one surreal album in 2001—the apocalyptic and twistedly prophetic The Texas-Jerusalem Crossroads—and then promptly disappeared.

There is some evidence that he spent the ensuing decade losing his faith and his mind. Rarely venturing out in public, living in his bedroom for months at a time, Pearson apparently recovered sufficiently enough to woo and wed a lovely woman.

Alas, there is no Happily Ever After coda to this story. Last of the Country Gentlemen chronicles the dissolution of that relationship, the wild emotional swings between angry recrimination and bitter self-loathing. It has the whiff of absolute authenticity about it; this is the way real people in the grip of a chaotic relational breakdown seem to function.

Expressing sentiments that are by turns profane, irate, and resigned, Pearson sings these highly charged songs in a lovely, soulful voice that amazingly barely registers above a whisper. The preacher’s kid hasn’t lost his flair for biblical imagery, either. His words call down divine judgment like a thundering Ezekiel or Amos. But his Texas drawl breaks, cracks, and barely holds on.

It’s a beautiful, fragile thing, singing words of doom.

"I don't know if any of you guys know who the fuck I am,” he explains in the intro to one of his new songs. “I don't even know myself. I played a bunch of psychedelic music for a while and then I stopped about ten years ago. Now I just play country songs."

That sense of lost identity hovers like a miasmic malaise over the entire album. These are indeed country songs, but they are as far removed from Nashville clichés as can be imagined. Certainly the Texas drawl places them solidly in the Willie Nelson camp, but the instrumentation—often just Pearson’s gently plucked acoustic guitar and a ghostly string section—argues for a subdued sort of chamber music, a melancholic song suite that places the emphasis squarely on the words.

And the words are those of an incredulous man who cannot believe the person he’s become:

I’m in love with an amazing woman; she just is not my wife
But will I tell my pastor, friends, my family, or said blushing bride?
I cannot seem to pray this preying madness off my troubled mind
Lord, I just didn’t see this coming in my life

That’s the way “Honeymoon’s Great, Wish You Were Her” starts. Don’t expect the CMT video anytime soon. These are disturbing, nearly voyeuristic sentiments, to be sure, but Pearson invests them with such overwhelming sorrow and horror that they are raised to the level of a confessional psalm, and over the course of a long, draining thirteen minutes he excoriates the life he has chosen with nearly clinical precision. It’s breathtaking, deeply uncomfortable listening.

The biblical imagery is threaded throughout, often in rueful ways. Opener “Thou Art Loosed” is the story of a divorce, not the story of freedom from spiritual oppression. It is a tale of dreadful deliverance. “Sweetheart, I Ain’t Your Christ” is an irate, emphatic refusal to adopt a role that can only lead to failure:

I ain’t your Savior, your Christ
Or your goddamned sacrifice
And when I said I’d give my life
I wasn’t talkin’ suicide

Saddest of all is the haunting “Woman, When I’ve Raised Hell,” an unnerving lullaby that alternates between belligerent defensiveness and acknowledgment of the demons that cannot be resisted:

Woman, when I’ve raised hell you’re gonna know it
There won’t be a shadow of doubt in your bright little mind
Honestly, why can’t you just let it be
And let me quietly drink myself to sleep?

There have been many stellar divorce albums in the past. I wouldn’t wish the circumstances on my worst enemy, but the emotional turmoil engendered by the bad end of a relationship that was supposed to be good has frequently led to superb art, from classic releases from Bob Dylan, Van Morrison, Bruce Cockburn, and Richard and Linda Thompson to more contemporary salvos and muffled cries from The Mendoza Line, Jacob Golden, and Richard Buckner.

Add Josh T. Pearson’s Last of the Country Gentlemen to that storied and sorrowful list. Lovely and austere, disquieting in its quietness, this is the sound of raw wounds flaring angry red, the echo of repentance that comes too late. There may be better albums released this year. There won’t be a more harrowing one.