“I think of many of the songs on the album as old mountain folk songs, but remembered in a modern city-dweller’s dream,” Cincinnati songwriter Henry James House says of his forthcoming record, Last Lights Off the Black West. This is more than metaphor, as the songs on this record are a combination of new, very old, and reimagined. This, House believes, is what distinguishes the work as post-Americana. While it is firmly rooted in history, it is not a rehashing, but a next step. House’s statement is sure-footed and poetic, like the record itself, throughout which he seems at times to be channeling the ghost of Marc Bolan or J.J. Cale, sending folk and blues through a tunnel of fuzz and psychedelia. Coming from the new album, House has released “Mother Earth.”

“‘Mother Earth’ is a new interpretation of a Memphis Slim song and a track that feels very personal to me,” House says. “The lyrics have always stood out to me as some of my favorite blues writing, and I often feel like it’s easier to carve out a musical identity by giving a new expression to pieces written by other people. I used to play a more straightforward cover of this song with my band Pop Empire. The version on this new record came about through application of a sort of guitar and synth bass blues boogie style that I’ve been experimenting with for as long as I’ve been making music. The synth bass and minimal drum machine hold down this warm, bouncing groove, and the spans between the chord changes are allowed to stretch to fit whatever I’m trying to do with the vocal melody.”

The album’s title comes from the sonnet “God’s Grandeur” by 19th-century Jesuit priest Gerard Manley Hopkins. The poem speaks to the darkness of humanity, a world brought to the brink by human-made folly, but also asserts that “for all this, nature is never spent.” This not only represents the thematic threads running throughout the record, themes of longing, beauty, and reconciliation with nature, but it also parallels House’s broader artistic tendencies and philosophies. The traditions in which House trades –– blues, folk, Americana –– are so well-explored that they are like a fundamental part of music itself. But rather than deterring House, that fact is simply treated like nature, and like nature, these traditions are never spent.

Besides “Mother Earth,” there are two songs on the album that are covers, presented with House’s very unique arrangements: “The Living End” by The Jesus and Mary Chain, and “Rock Me” by Rev. Thomas Dorsey, first recorded by Sister Rosetta Tharpe. The remaining seven songs are a fascinating and nuanced combination of original and traditional. There are, on the one hand, traditional texts with new tunes and, on the other hand, very old tunes with new texts, all interlaced. It’s not about nostalgia for House. Learning these songs, studying their histories and bringing them forward, recontextualizing them, serves as a living and progressive process for him. Making this work in this way, House says, is “the best salve for loneliness, and the best daily psychological nourishment.”

One doesn’t need to know all of this to enjoy Last Lights Off the Black West, a collection of infectious songs, at times swaggering and rollicking, at others, swaying, romantic. “I think I’d somehow like to plant in people’s minds the thought that I have often had, thinking about the incredible tradition of human song spanning millennia, that tradition is not just something that builds us up to the present day, but something that pulls us irresistibly into the future.”

Photo Courtesy: Michael Wilson