Points of Origin

After starting off his music career with a series of acclaimed introspective releases that engaged audiences with rawly personal lyrics and a warm vocal quality as well as with his intricate guitar finger work and knack for elegant compositional technique, Will Stratton turned his attention outward for his seventh album, The Changing Wilderness (2021). The follow-up, Points of Origin, takes this approach further on a set dubbed a concept album by the songwriter. It was written between 2021 and 2024 about California and related existential subjects like climate disaster and generational alienation. Consisting of skillful (mostly) first-person character sketches, the songs seem like intimate Stratton remembrances until the settings crystallize. (The one exception is "Bardo or Heaven?," a song about West Coast wildfire smoke reaching Stratton in New Yorks Hudson Valley.) Closing track "Slab City," for instance, is told from the point of view of a retired public defender and touches on arson, narcotics, and the CIA. Its all delivered through a gentle, matter-of-fact folk with loads of sympathy and evocative lyrics like "Here in Slab City they dont care where youre from/You can be crawling out a deep ravine/Or you can rise with the setting sun." Elsewhere, "I Found You," one of a handful of songs here that the guitarist wrote on piano, opens with "I lost track of family when I was nineteen/My sisters were drifters and old magazines," then proceeds to recount an isolated life spent working as a trucker and dodging wildfires, among other developments. That songs dreamy, reflective arrangement supports Stratton and his piano with pedal steel, electric guitar, occasional saxophone, and a light rhythm section. Its representative of an album that takes some focus off Strattons enviable guitar skills and puts it onto storytelling. Theres still plenty of sinuous guitar playing here -- most conspicuously in "Firewatcher" and "Higher and Drier," with their implied forward motion -- but the arrangements nevertheless have a comfort level to them that complements the idea of gathering around for reading time, which is apt for Strattons most literary record yet. It may be worth noting that Points of Origin was recorded in multiple studios and homes, and features no fewer than a dozen guests, among them drummer/pianist Sean Mullins (Sam Evian, Kate Bollinger) and bass guitarist Dandy McDowell (Cassandra Jenkins, Amen Dunes), as well as components like synthesizers and sampled instruments. That knowledge makes the albums seamless quality -- songs that fit together like chapters in a book -- even more impressive. ~ Marcy Donelson