November is a haunted month. October has Halloween, of course, but there’s a festivity to its spookiness, a celebration of that time of year when the days grow short and the leaves begin to fall. But the weeks in between Halloween and Thanksgiving are when the truth of autumn really starts to set in. The wind gets colder. It gets dark at five in the evening. Your pumpkins rot in the garbage or get eaten by squirrels. It all feels strangely liminal; if purgatory had a month, it would exist in a perpetual November.
This uneasy atmosphere is what makes “November Man,” a new song by singer-songwriter Allysen Callery, feel so special. The subtle chill of November is present in every note: Callery’s fingerpicked guitar tumbles through the air like a brittle orange leaf carried in the wind, and her voice is gentle yet weary in that specific way voices get when it’s been a long eleven months and there’s still one more to go. The album that “November Man” is from is called Ghost Folk, and there’s no better way to describe this song. It’s ghost folk, music for people caught in between one world and the next.
“November Man” is a fairly short song, at only two minutes and forty seconds, but it has a sense of patience that’s noticeable even with the song’s comparative briefness. The guitar intro runs on about twice as long as you’d expect it to, which helps build the anticipation for when Callery takes a quiet breath and starts to sing. This is not the kind of song that has moments of sudden, rewarding catharsis, but its unhurried pace does a good job of drawing the listener into its moody, minor-key world.
Callery is not at all coy about her influences. There’s a hint of Donovan, which she winks at on the cover of Ghost Folk (formatted in a similar way to the cover of Sunshine Superman), but her primary influence is Nick Drake. There’s the fingerpicked guitar, graceful and never fussy; there’s the voice, peaceful but with a sense of spectral remove; there’s the song title, which calls back to Drake’s eternal “River Man.” She even sings the word “man” in a similar way, drawing out the “n” like a humming guitar string: “mannnnnnn.”
But “November Man” is no rip-off. Nick Drake never got this eerie, for one; whereas he kept the identity of the “river man” vague, this “November man” is heavily implied to be supernatural. Callery bids him, with his “coat black,” to “flap your wings against the ghost-grey sky” and “sing your song of November.” He is a figure of death, for nature if not for humans, but the narrator doesn’t seem to think less of him. In fact, she feels a certain kinship with the November man. “There’s no fire for you and I,” she sighs; she has no hearth to warm herself around, so she seeks solace with the being that ushers forth the cold.
