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Gravity Levitates Above the Madding Crowd
Paul Mark's 11th studio album rises to meet the noise
Gravity Levitates
“Have you heard? Gravity is failing.” The opening line from the title track of Paul Mark and The Van Dorens newest release Gravity immediately draws you into a clanking carnival of pop Americana spiked with Mark’s trademark lyricism. With one eye on the boundaries of roots-Americana songwriting and the other on a society in disarray, Gravity is Mark’s 11th studio album.
Asked if politics informed his latest collection, Mark’s is cryptic. “Other than Brecht and Bob Marley, I don’t really care much for overtly political lyrics. Maybe because the half-life of political lyrics is often predictably short. The best songs carry their own context with them, they don’t rely on the context of today’s news to make them reverberate.”
The songs on Gravity nonetheless evince a writer who’s been following current events. A lot. And with its release date almost exactly coinciding with a crescendo of public unrest
in the American streets, Gravity similarly roils with rebellion below its masterful arrangements and lyrical slight-of-hand. With a dollop of Mark’s trademark wit.
“All the Gravity tracks were written, recorded and mixed long before the crises of 2020 hit,” says Mark. “So no, I was not sitting at the piano two months ago reading headlines then speed-writing songs about the day’s news. Personal songwriters generally write about personal things. Maybe what’s happening now is that we’re living through an extended time when the personal is particularly political.
“It’s really unlikely that a song that explicitly describes events, or worse, beliefs, can work,” he adds. “Songwriters are smarter when the story they write gives details of some unreliable narrator’s reaction to some event or belief. Indirectly telling the story this way drills down quicker to the facts and into the mystery of the situation. Which is always more provocative for the listener.”
Mark says the final song written for Gravity, completed in January of this year, was Waiting Round for You. “A New Orleans piano song, with a melodic nod to Ray Davies and The Kinks. Not political at all. Although maybe a song about a person who’s never showing up on time might just be a little bit political,” he adds with a wink.
Nonetheless, the coincidence of Gravity‘s release with the current upheaval in the streets reveals a remarkable creative prescience. “I do read the papers. Every day,” Mark notes. “And yeah, I do get angry. Sometimes about stuff that hasn’t even happened yet.”
