There’s guitar music, and then there’s guitar music. Glenn Jones’s new album, “The Wanting”, falls into the latter category. The album is Jones’s fourth solo, though he collaborates with Chris Corsano for the album’s epic seventeen minute sign off, “The Orca Grande Cement Factory at Victorville”.
Glenn Jones alternates between a six string guitar, a twelve string guitar, and a banjo. Jones’s songs slide through both alternate tunings and string instruments without losing his distinct musical voice. In an interview with Pitchfork, Jones said on alternative tunings, “You think you’ve found all of them, but there’s no end, it doesn’t seem like.” There’s a deep sense of this infinity of possibilities running through all of the tracks on the album. You can honestly hear Jones’s sense of awe and wonder in music through his guitar playing.
And let’s be clear to those among us who believe songs sound naked without a frontline of vocals: Jones’s string instruments don’t need vocals– his twangs and plucks sing all on their own. His guitar doesn’t just strum, it picks along with a distinctive rambling. His are the sounds that convey what words and the human voice cannot. “The Wanting” has this intellectual intensity that meant I had to ingest the album in bite-sized pieces. This is the album’s drawback: there’s so much detail that if you’re focused on the music– not simply casually listening, but purposefully engaging with the sound– you might find it a little enervating.
Others have written how complete this album, how it certainly doesn’t leave the listener wanting. But I feel as though the wanting referred to in the album’s title lies in the mnestic quality of the songs and their titles. It’s the kind of wanting built upon the foundation of fully sated memories, rather than an unsatisfied one. It’s a wanting that comes from having had, from possessing not lacking. Jones invokes the type of wanting leftover from the act of remembering– nostalgia rather than envy. The fact that we’re privvy to Jones’s personal memories of specific times and spaces is made pretty clear by the track titles, from the previously mentioned “The Orca Grande Cement Factory at Victorville” to “A Snapshot of Mom, Scotland, 1957”.
What I loved about listening to “The Wanting” is Jones’s ability to play from a place of emotional connection and feeling while still creating music that remains intellectually stimulating. Jones’s fiddling with tunings and instruments doesn’t compromise the emotional integrity of his pieces, while the personal, commemorative elements of the songs never overshadow his technical mastery. So many musicians compromise one for the other, prioritizing either sense or sensibility. On “The Wanting”, though, feeling harmonizes with thoughtfulness in a memorable way. Stream the album here.
