Alasdair Roberts’ songs are difficult to digest. Like a large pill you can’t quite swallow, that lodges toward the back of the throat, they are dense, layered, poetic ballads coupled with a forcefully picked acoustic guitar, abrasively fragile vocals and a thick Scottish accent. His new self-titled album is not the kind of thing you put on while washing dishes. But it’s the kind of album you go back to again and again, trying to parse the lyrics, trying to understand why these songs grate at the base of your spine. Roberts will be guest editing magnetmagazine.com all week. Read our brand new feature on him.
Roberts: My next choice is a towering figure of 20th century thought, and one whose ideas have had a big influence on me artistically in various ways over the years. Such is the breadth of Carl Gustav Jung‘s work and the scope of his achievements that it’s difficult to single out one particular concept that has been especially important for me—it’s more the fact that certain Jungian notions resonate with one more at certain periods of one’s life than others. For instance, his alchemical conception of the “lapis” or “wonder-working stone”—which in my interpretation is a sort of grail-like object, emerging from complete psychic integration, found or revealed at the very end of the Quest—led to me entitling a record of 10 songs I recorded with a bunch of musician friends a few years back, A Wonder Working Stone. In that instance, I envisioned the pursuit of the wonder-working stone as very much a communal thing. By contrast, the concept of “individuation” has been on my mind more recently, in part because I understand that it’s supposed to happen to a person at around the age that I currently happen to be … and this is the main reason that my new Drag City release, which I’d now like to take the opportunity to plug, is self-titled.
Video after the jump.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O67a8_XXqK4
