“It’s a mass grave, a dollar-fifty resting place / on the north face, it’s a rope I’ve gotta climb / I’m a stone’s throw from everyone I love and know / and I can’t show up looking like I do.” These are the lyrics that follow the clarion call of those C chords, and they set the table for what’s about to follow: loneliness, inadequacy, and boozy brio, a man in a house in Omaha clutching a bottle of cheap red wine and looking out of windows, the ones in his room and the ones in his mind. On the record’s first three songs, Oberst flits from wanting to get drunk before noon to wishing he could channel John Muir and disappear into the comforts of nature; he simultaneously sinks into the muck of his condition and fantasizes about escaping to “some far-off place where I don’t belong.”
And on the next song, “Counting Sheep,” Oberst addresses an unusual subject for a singer once feted as a Dylan-esque voice-of-his-generation, rising up like a pillar of flame from the plains of Nebraska, burning with passion and Gothic metaphors. The mirrors and portals and brakemen of Bright Eyes have become vital signs, hospital horrors: “Life is a gas, what can you do / catheter piss, fed through a tube / cyst in the brain, blood on the bamboo,” he sings in one verse; in the next, it’s “Early to bed, early to rise / acting my age, waiting to die / insulin shots, alkaline produce.” He tells us his blood pressure, 121 over 75, then sings, as if in afterthought, “Scream if you want, no one can hear you.” What music we do have about suffering through illness does not typically come in such a frank, almost diaristic package, and at a time when many of us have bought oximeters to keep a close eye on our blood-oxygen levels, they have a renewed and startling relevance.
The lyrics all have the brutal elegance and jagged honesty of some mid-century male American self-portraitist—John Berryman at his most lucid, maybe, or Henry Miller at his least aroused. And they all point in one direction: Oberst paints a startling picture of how surreal life becomes when backlit by illness. Ruminations creates an atmosphere of closeness and squalor, when the boundaries of life seem to be the limits of your head and house; increasingly, pieces of architecture, in particular Frank Lloyd Wright’s Fallingwater and Imperial Hotel, come to represent the permanence and solidity that Oberst, in his sickness, lacks. What escape Oberst can find comes in the form of a bottle, but that relief is more a mirage than anything else; by the time of the closer, “Till St. Dymphna Kicks Us Out,” Oberst sounds like he’s singing at his own funeral, except in place of an open casket, he’s been pickled in a bottle of Maker’s Mark.
These descriptions might not suggest beautiful music, nor do the stories of Ruminations’ creation: two New York magazine profiles, one then and one now, sketch the process in extremely dark tones, and in the latest, producer and bandmate Mike Mogis says that Ruminations could’ve been mixed in a day but took two weeks, since Oberst was “so fucked up all the time.” Don’t be fooled, though: these songs are heartrendingly beautiful, filled with the beauty of day-drunkenness and Proustian flights into memory and waking up in the afternoon and realizing that, however imperfect the day is, it’s a day.
And it provides a remarkable companion piece to Down in the Weeds, which is the night-sky version of Ruminations’ pinhole. Look no further than the song “Forced Convalescence,” whose first verse basically summarizes the whole Ruminations arc, then moves on to a dizzying trip through space and time and finally lands in the body of a father—not, it should be noted, the childless Oberst—who is catastrophizing his 40th birthday and coping with Seroquel.
But there’s no summarizing on Ruminations: it’s all details. A drink rattles in a shaking hand; eyes are red and raw; urine vanishes into a catheter tube. For those of us all too immersed in the quotidian flatness of day after day spent indoors and inside of screens, listening to this kind of introspection, particularly when it’s been rendered into art, isn’t just relevant—it’s a relief. Oberst has been there, he’s been worse, and he turned his suffering into something he could share. And when the rest of us end up in a similar spot, we can meet here, at an album like this, and buy another round.