Jimmie Tramel
Tulsa World Scene Reporter
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Oklahoma music artist John Calvin Abney has something to say about memories and the passage of time in a new album released Friday.
The 10 tracks on the album, “Transparent Towns,” were written during a period of introspection while recovering from vocal cord surgery in 2023.
“The time to himself, a year without singing and months spent in near-total silence, left him seeking meaning in the invisible markers of time: old cafes, forgotten voices, small towns transformed by progress and loss,” said a news release about the album.
Good news: Abney, after vocal therapy, said he is singing better than ever. And he used his voice to talk about his new release in a recent phone interview.
A question about the album title led to Abney talking about how he loves the Italo Calvino book “Invisible Cities.” He went in-depth on the reasons he loves the book and segued into memories and perceptions.
“Memory and how we explain what we remember kind of all changes as we grow,” he said. “I feel like it’s a human feeling or it’s maybe a curse to think that when we cement a memory, those places and people and locations, they just stay the same. Like we change, but they stay the same. And then the more we try to explain and tell about the memories, we lose sight of the fact that everything else is changing, too.”
Abney said he has been traveling since he was a kid, and while touring and traveling, you find yourself coming back to your college town or the town where you were born or the place you loved to visit as a kid.
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“It’s completely altered, because nothing stands still and nothing is static,” he said. “So you find yourself kind of in a state of trying to either crawl back to an old memory or trying to re-explain it, or realign with the reality that you’re older and so is the place or the person. People die. You know, all sorts of stuff. Nothing stays the same.”
Asked how that applies to the new album, Abney said: “I feel like the songs are, they’re all me trying to make sense of the fact — not make sense, but just accept that everyone and everything changes, and that curse I was talking about earlier. If I leave or you leave or any of us leave, we come back to where we were at and it’s not the same, and it never will be the same. It’s kind of an album about understanding how I should go about living with memory without drowning in nostalgia. The record is a lot about acceptance and returning — like disembarking and returning and accepting that when you crossed that river, you were younger and now you’re older and you’re not the same man and it’s not the same river.”
Living with memory without drowning in nostalgia? Sounds interesting.
“Well, it’s easy,” Abney said. “It’s easy because it’s golden-hued and rosy tinted. Sometimes the memories we make aren’t as bright or as dark as we make them out to be. But we’re imaginative. We’re creative. We think and we feel and we make sense of things. It’s just this kind of unbelievable thing that we are all just humans. Just existing is such a such a funny, funny thing. We’re all kind of thrown into this world, and we just have to make sense of it.”
Abney said he is excited for folks to listen to the new album, his seventh studio album and the first to be recorded in Oklahoma. Abney was born in Nevada but grew up in Tulsa and Norman. He now lives in Columbus, Ohio.
Abney self-produced “Transparent Towns,” tracking most of it at Cardinal Song outside of Oklahoma City (with Michael Trepagnier handling mixing and engineering). The band included mostly Oklahoma musicians. Lydia Loveless and John Moreland contributed harmony vocals.
Said a news release about the album: “Having toured for years backing up artists like Moreland, Wild Child, Ben Kweller and S.G. Goodman, Abney embraces a lead role again, as he presses forward with the loving lament and defiant joy throughout ‘Transparent Towns,’ calling us to leave behind the pressures we place on our ourselves and recognize that just because there is an ending, it doesn’t mean it’s the end.”
jimmie.tramel@tulsaworld.com
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Jimmie Tramel
Tulsa World Scene Reporter
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