If I Could Rewind

My recent appreciation of a favorite Eleni Mandell tune from two decades ago led me down a rabbit hole of all that she's been doing since, of which I've only fitfully stayed aware. I have long admired her stab into a simpatico genre with Country for Two Lovers, especially the sweet "Home," and I have dipped into various songs from subsequent albums over the years without following her as intently as I should have and she well deserved. But nothing prepared me for the sheer quantity of lovely music she's made over the last 20 years (or for the primal scream meltdown she stages on the title track of her album Snakebite). She has not been idle, in short, and the only bright side of my regrettable inattention to her work is that now it feels like I have a delicious new bounty of music to savor.

Her most recent album, 2019's Wake Up Again, feels like a breakthrough, and I've been playing its title track over and over. Based in part on her work teaching songwriting to imprisoned women, the album has a matter-of-fact vulnerability and rawness about it—she's not staging or stylizing heartbreak and hard-won hope, as she has often done to great effect in the past. She is just laying it out there, and a lot of this is in the album's stripped-down sound. Most striking throughout is the guitar playing of her husband, Milo Jones, who has clearly been listening to Marc Ribot. His electric guitar reliably darkens and sharpens the songs' harmonies at several points, but his work on "Wake Up Again," which triumphantly closes the record, is a particular high point, elevating a deeply moving song about hope against hope into a kind of awkward, transcendent hymn. The song leans into two of Mandell's signatures as a composer—waltzing triple meter and chromatic melodizing—and lays the groundwork for some rich harmony. Note the D note over the C chord on the word "time." 

And what's this cascade of electric guitar triplets at the end of that line? There will be more where they came from.

The chorus has an amazing left turn in store, but first I want to point out the song's only minor chord, hit in a very idiomatic way, and at the just right rueful, backward-looking lyric:

Hold that thought, because we'll come back to it. And now for the left turn. It's surprising but not quite jarring—an ideal choice for a lyric about a road not taken that's nevertheless still plausibly open. What would I do if things could go just a little differently this time? I might go to A-flat.

As the song blooms, tentatively, with the hope that our narrator might actually be able to make a positive change in her life, look what happens when the chorus comes around again. Farewell, minor key, and watch out for the leap up to "try." It's a brightening on par with this Cole Porter gem.

The title phrase, posed speculatively and conditionally throughout (with a big "if" hanging from it in the opening line, and finally as "Could I wake up again?"), refers most obviously to the wish for a do-over, the chance go back and start a fateful day over from the beginning. Maybe it's just my pandemic Groundhog's Day state of mind, but I also hear it as an existential question about whether it's worthwhile to wake up again at all, with a horizon so circumscribed and a future stretching out in bleak repetition. I would say that Mandell's heartbroken delivery doesn't so much answer that question as leave it hanging like a feather spinning in midair.

And then Jones's guitar whips up a whirlwind to keep that wisp of hope afloat and, as I hear it, lift it to the skies. I've done my best to transcribe what I hear, but just the notes don't capture the squeezed-out, keening, busted-calliope impact of this guitar part. It is the sound of imperfect striving, of a soulful, bounding leap into the unknown that sticks the landing. It has the innocent, effortful beauty of a child doing pirouettes. I can't get enough of it.

This is, for now, one of my answers to the despairing question mark of this moment: It is worth it to wake up again, if only to hear this song again.