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From The Desk Of Shearwater’s Jonathan Meiburg: Jim Pepper’s “Witchi-Tai-To” And “Newly-Weds Song”

Shearwater’s Jet Plane And Oxbow is an album that looks backward—to the recording technologies and sounds of the early ’80s—in order to interrogate the present and to contemplate the future. Shearwater’s moody, thoughtful style, built around Jonathan Meiburg’s dramatic, beautiful voice, turned toward rock with 2012’s Animal Joy, which now sounds like a stopover in the flight path toward Jet Plane. Meiburg used period-specific instruments; his guitar playing alludes to Adrian Belew’s work with David Bowie and Robert Fripp’s with Peter Gabriel; he integrates the stark sounds of Joy Division and early New Order. But the goal wasn’t nostalgia. Jet Plane doesn’t sound retro, nor does it sound like an homage. The allusions are there to create a sonic parallel to our time. Meiburg will be guest editing magnetmagazine.com all week. Read our new Shearwater feature.

JimPepper

Meiburg: In 1971, Jim Pepper, a Native American saxophonist, flautist and singer, released a unique record called Pepper’s Pow-Wow, a proudly Native American rock album that contains at least two songs I’d hold up as innovative classics of American music. The first, “Witchi-Tai-To,” incorporates a peyote ceremony chant taught to Pepper by his grandfather; Pepper stretches the meter of the song around the chant in a way that’s thrilling but entirely natural. And then there’s the single English verse Pepper wrote to accompany it:

Water spirit feeling swimming ‘round my head
Makes me feel glad that I’m not dead

If you’ve ever had to fight the voice that tells you otherwise, this line is guaranteed to move you when Pepper sings it. “Witchi-Tai-To” is one of those songs with the power to pull you out of a very deep hole.

The other track, “Newly-Weds’ Song,” is one of those rare perfect tracks, probably one of the best American rock songs, period; and it swaggers in a way no other song does. I won’t spoil its great lyric, but just about everyone I’ve ever played it to starts grinning like a fool during the second line of the first verse.