In Nashville where I live, the first autumn leaves have fallen.
They’re a little premature, of course – it’s supposed to be back up near 100 degrees this week. But the last two weeks were cool enough to fool a few leaves into dying early, and my yard is lightly scattered with them. Group that with last week’s fantasy football draft and Starbucks releasing their fall menu, and it’s basically already October.
And if it’s fall, that means it’s time to dig out the fall music.
I’m a firm believer that, like many other things, music is meant to be enjoyed seasonally. You don’t eat pumpkin pie in the heat of summer; you shouldn’t listen to Springsteen in the dead of winter. I could work up an explanation if you pressed me enough. I could argue that art is the emotional language of humans, and nothing makes humans more emotional than the passage of time, and nothing makes the passage of time more concrete than the cycle of seasons. But that would be making analysis out of mystery.
It’d be just as truthful to say that fall music is fall music, simply because it is.
And Tyson Motsenbocker’s 2020 record Someday I’ll Make It All Up To You is fall music.
The album wields nostalgia like a scalpel for life-saving surgery. Tyson draws deeply on his own memories – of specific people in specific places at specific moments – and manages to make meaning out of them for the rest of us. His sentimentality spurs ours; as he reflects on the past, we can’t help but do the same.
The songs flow into each other like the closing credits of summer, with visions of an end-of-August church camp (“Sunday Morning”), final goodbyes to old friends (“The Last Summer”), sunsets from rooftops (“Fire Escape”), long car rides (“Miles”), even deaths (“Fentanyl”).
Half the album feels like a drive through the mountains, with deep and rich acoustic layers, driving rhythm sections, and the simple singalong moments that are the harbinger of great folk/Americana. The other half feels like a quiet, pensive bonfire, Tyson’s lonely vocals putting forth lyrics that make you stop what you’re doing to listen close.
The whole record ends with a line that sticks like a catch in the throat:
I want better days to miss
I want better days to miss
I want better days to miss
I want better days to miss
Batting cleanup in the middle of the album is “Autumn Love,” the most streamed song on the record in which Tyson says it plain: listen to this in the fall.
Even four years later, this is still the album I come back to when I see the first leaves on the ground.
