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Jim O'Rourke on Drag City: A Primer

Earlier this month, word arrived of a new album by the musician Jim O’Rourke. To some people this will mean a great deal; to the other 99.99% percent of the population it will mean nothing at all. O’Rourke is an artist of mildly godlike status in extremely small circles, a veteran of free improvisation with nearly 125 records to his name whose biggest star turn was briefly becoming the fifth member in Sonic Youth and later producing Wilco’s A Ghost Is Born, which won a Grammy.

O’Rourke’s music varies dramatically, from plasticky synthesizer experiments to sprawling, orchestrated suites that sound like progressive rock played by a somewhat irritable marching band. He is one of those musicians whose admirers call him a "composer," as though what he does requires a level of thought and expertise that places him above people who just pick up a guitar and start shredding, which O’Rourke often does. (He is also the kind of prickly, restless musician who makes a record with guitars and then tells interviewers he doesn’t really like guitars.)

Some of his earliest records were with a project called Gastr del Sol, who took the adventurous mechanics of free jazz and 20th century classical composition and mapped them onto what to most people would just look like a rock band. Gastr’s records came out on the Chicago label Drag City, home to an entire subhistory of noble, subtly defiant freaks, including Bill Callahan and Joanna Newsom, both of whom O’Rourke has worked with as an engineer. They’ve also put out the records for which O’Rourke is probably best known: Bad Timing, Eureka, the Halfway to a Threeway EP, Insignificance, and The Visitor. (The forthcoming Simple Songs is on Drag City, too.)

A quick show of hands among Pitchfork contributors showed a low level of Jim O’Rourke recognition, so it seemed time to revisit the Drag City albums, both for posterity and emphasis. Note that that Drag City’s catalog isn’t on Spotify, and O’Rourke’s releases on the label aren’t even sold as MP3s, which means you’ll either have to get this music the old-fashioned way (theft) or purchase them with money, the way you might with food or other forms of nourishment.

Behold, O’Rourke:

Bad Timing (1997)

O’Rourke's first Drag City record—four long instrumentals led by fingerpicked acoustic guitar—took up the project of the Beach Boys circa Smile or what the guitarist John Fahey called “American Primitivism”: Acoustic music that put an alien perspective on old forms. Most of it feels like film score—music either incidental to an image or designed to inspire one, expanding and contracting to shift mood, moving through itself like it was an imaginary landscape. In this case, O'Rourke's vision is the dust bowl, the big sky, the Pilgrim campground at night—places that have an almost natal familiarity whether you’ve been there or not, absorbed from picture books and kindergarten history. Besides the guitar, almost none of the instruments play throughout, instead existing as color and shade, an approach that—like O'Rourke's music with Gastr del Sol—breaks down the sanctity and romance of the "band" for something more distant and old-fashioned: the orchestra.

Eureka (1999)

My favorite of O’Rourke’s Drag City records, and one O’Rourke personally called a failure. The biggest and most immediate difference between this and Bad Timing is the appearance of O’Rourke’s singing voice, a grumpy and somewhat noncommittal instrument that hides sheepishly amongst the horns. O’Rourke’s music has a peculiar way of giving teeth to styles that can otherwise seem lame: soft rock, bossa nova, lounge jazz, the stale, grandparental opulence of the "Saturday Night Live" theme.

I can’t think of many records that put a sound as calming as a flugelhorn so close to a lyric like, "Nothing makes me want to disappear/ As when someone opens their mouth." (Another track, "Through the Night Softly", is named after a performance piece by the artist Chris Burden in which he crawled on his belly through a long patch of glass. It finishes with a great saxophone solo.)

Lost amongst the arrangements, O’Rourke seems like an irritable next-door neighbor in an old sitcom, puttering around in a cardigan and waiting for the laugh track to turn on him. A little misanthropic, yes, but also beautiful in conventional ways: After all, that flugelhorn is very carefully played. This is the record I like to imagine Sufjan Stevens might’ve made had he not been polluted by wonder.

Halfway to a Threeway EP (1999)

Something of a mini-Eureka: Fewer strings, fewer horns, fewer tricky polyrhythmic turns. The title track is a long, dewy ballad that details someone's sexual appetite for people with disabilities, which in most company would pass for cruelty but in O'Rourke's world passes for humor. More "provocative" than actually "funny," though I do admire the tenderness with which he sings the words "leg brace" and "life support"—he almost makes his intentions seem sweet, which I suspect is the point.

Insignificance (2001)

The last of O’Rourke’s records to be named after movies by the English director Nicolas Roeg, whose work has the same muted, elusive strangeness as O’Rourke’s. (Of the movies, I think Bad Timing is the most interesting, in part because I never imagined seeing Art Garfunkel amongst so much paranoia and psychosexual violence.) What Eureka did for cocktail jazz, Insignificance does for muscular, '70s-style rock, twisting a familiar sound into an unusual new shape. With the exception of a handful of songs—"Therefore I Am", "Memory Lame", the glistening ballad "Good Times"—I don’t listen to this one much, and have a somewhat active distaste for "All Downhill From Here", which reminds me of Collective Soul and a host of other meaty, neo-buttrock bands that inadvertently got me into indie music to begin with. Still, it’s tempting with someone like O’Rourke—who really does seem to think a huge amount about what goes into his music, possibly overthink it—that there’s something happening here that still elides my ear, but I don’t let it get to me too much.

The Visitor (2009)

My second-favorite to Eureka: A long, hallucinatory ribbon of music that moves through folk, prog-lite, country, and a host of other American traditions subtly turned on their ear for 40 minutes. O’Rourke has always had a reputation for "good sound design," which always seemed like one of those things people said when they didn’t want you to understand what they were really talking about, the tasting note only the most refined palate can detect. And while I got used to recognizing his production sound, especially on mid-period Smog records (Knock Knock and Red Apple Falls are worth the time), The Visitor was probably he first moment I had with O’Rourke’s music where I had the feeling of wanting to step directly into the speakers. Because his music on Drag City avoids extremes, I feel strange overselling how unusual it can be, but I also think that that's the gist of O'Rourke's project: To defy the radical by appearing normal.