Like the deep green leaves of the plant from which this joyful number takes its name, this song starts humbly enough, with breathy vocals barely rising above a mumble and horns that seem to brood above motorik guitars. But the chorus, like the bloom, lifts into a riot of brilliant color, Dana Buoy crooning to the flower like some wooing soul singer. Have you ever before sung along to a scientific name?
Experiments in Plant-Based Music: Vol. I is Akron/Family’s Dana Janssen’s exuberant and strangely assuring synthesis of those previously parallel domestic lanes, houseplants and a home drumkit. Inspired by the flora that reign on the ground floor and Mort Garson’s endlessly pleasing Plantasia, and conceived in the basement beneath, these 12 pieces of luxuriant pop — rooted in Steely Dan and synthesizer strata, Afrobeat energy and astral harmonies, Robert Hunter koans and righteous horns — offer new mantras for and prospective maps of our complicated lives.
Janssen’s two previous albums as Dana Buoy have charted that very territory — unapologetic pop songs informed by R&B and electronica — without the compromise that band life entailed. But remember: He had no drums before. These songs are different not only because of their botanical genesis but because actual drums prompted Janssen to play outside of a strict rhythmic grid and to recruit outside collaborators. A longtime acquaintance who became a close friend, Kelly Pratt, arranged and played the cataracts and cascades of horns here, adding Dana Buoy to a résumé that includes relationships with Beirut, Father John Misty, and The War on Drugs. Justin Miller, meanwhile, handled the bass, his bulbous tone a perfect counterpart for Janssen’s angular approach. (John McEntire, of Tortoise and something of a hero for Janssen, offered a crucial assist in mixing it.) After Akron/Family, these are Janssen’s deepest musical relationships.
These songs arrive at a fraught time for Janssen. Only a year ago, Miles Seaton — Janssen’s rhythmic and spiritual counterpart in Akron/Family for so long — died in a car crash near the other end of Oregon, a tragedy amplified by the recent revival of their collaboration. (Seaton sings on a track here, while Akron/Family’s Seth Olinsky takes a guitar solo.) And Janssen has contended with many of the same existential challenges so many folks face as they stare down 40, from health woes and novel hobbies to confronting the future after something that defined you for so long has ended.
In a very real sense, then, the plants helped Janssen find meaning and metaphors for what has been and what may be next. In these songs, it sounds like measured hope.
