The ever-fascinating progress of Luther Russell’s musical adventure takes another glorious turn with Happiness For Beginners; arriving in the depths of winter bringing quickening light and warmth to dark morbid times and only blossoming more with the spring. In recent years best known for the partnership with Jody Stephens in Those Pretty Wrongs, Luther’s history is both long and storied.
A teenage pal and bandmate of Jacob Dylan in the short-lived Bootheels, written up in Rolling Stone as long ago as 1992 for The Freewheelers whose rootsy inclinations surfaced a little too early for the alt.country/Americana wave they might have ridden. Relocating to Portland he would produce Richmond Fontaine’s Lost Sun after Fernando Viciconte recommended him to Willy Vlautin, and in turn introduced his LA pal and Federale bandmate Freddy Trujillo to Willy. Vlautin once said of him; “Luther is a legend in the making. A real musician’s musician. A tremendous producer, songwriter, and a guy who can take any song and save it”.
In recent years he’s been on a roll, and the culmination is Happiness For Beginners; tracked at old pal, and former Freewheeler Jason Hiller’s Electrosound Studio in three days, with limited overdubs – Jason Falkner’s guitar, keyboards, and vocals on three tracks, and Sarabeth Tucek’s voice on a couple more. Seven years ago a highlight of his previous solo collection Medium Cool was ‘The Sound Of Rock’n’Roll’ and this might well be it.
Its impact is immediate; the record unveils chiming renewed warmth into hearts originally stirred by Murmur or ‘Mr Tambourine Man’; the ever-fresh ring of the unleashed Ricky. The aural delight is instant, and the trip is wild; yet while the temptation is simply to revel in the sound of what initially presents as a celebration of jangle – 12-string electric Rickenbacker step forward – as Luther’s voice emerges there’s an equal lyrical richness that needs to be appreciated. Celebratory, heady, the verses packed with internal rhymes and alliteration: “Brain damaged fools and drained of all rules we dive hand in hand/Closing our eyes we soon realise we don’t care where we land” it’s beginners getting the hang of it fast.
‘Downtown Girls’ follows in a further cascade of jangle and a rushing, near-stumbling, drum pattern, with a Falkner guitar solo thrown in. Set in Paris “Joss-sticks burn on the Montmarte hill/I can feel the effects of the pill” It confirms a theme underpinning Happiness For Beginners; obsessive love presented as akin to systematic derangement of the senses as advocated by the French symbolists.
Notably recurring in the exotic, hallucinatory ‘The Midnight Flame’ where the voice hints of Costello, and the atmosphere is that of an opium dream out of Omar Khayyam: “Here I lie face-down in the tide/My hand it clutches a flagon of wine”: and a further scamper on the heels of Rimbaud inhabits ‘Tu Es Donc Je Suis’. A liberal dose of reverse guitar, lyrical flights: ”We’ll walk through absinthe alleyways, girl/Crawl with the saints all the way to the sea”: and an exchange of dialogue with Sarabeth out of A Bout De Souffle itself lifted from poems by Apollinaire and Louis Aragon.
Equally memorable are the capering, busy, Byrdsy, regret-haunted ‘All The Ways’, and the cascading celebratory rush of ‘Sing This Song’ replete with yelps of joy. ‘Wanna Be Your Lover’ meanwhile presents as a classically simple, mid-60s pop song with loads of Beatles elements. Contrastingly the measured ‘And Ever’ carries the ambience of a noir; the tender harmonising with Tucek and the chime of guitar accompany the precise vocal throughout, it leaves the eternal paradox that complete songs may yet seem fragmentary – which of course is why we continually go back to them.
The closer – ‘Your Reckless Heart’ – seems perhaps severe, analytical, a relative austerity, leavened by the traces of melody and jangle of the chorus, allowing us time to momentarily question the enchantment. Happiness For Beginners overall though is too addictive, and the compulsion too great, to put off long returning to what’s in whole a rewarding, ringing, celebratory ride.
Happiness For Beginners is released on Curation Records and available here
Bucketfull Of Brains 
Got it, heard it, love it. Rapturous work of musical art