Pan•American: Fly the Ocean in a Silver Plane
In 1993, two record-store lifers in Chicago founded a label for one reason: to release the debut album by a Richmond band called Labradford. The label was Kranky; its motto then and now is "going nowhere slow," and thirty-three years later, Labradford's Mark Nelson is still on it, releasing music as Pan American, the project he's carried since the late nineties. Brian Eno once described his sound as "Duane Eddy playing Erik Satie," which remains the best five words anyone has spent on it: twanging American guitar suspended in weightless, patient space. Fly the Ocean in a Silver Plane, his new album, might be the most personal work of that entire long residency, and it announces its heart on the sleeve, literally.
The cover is a photograph of Nelson's mother that he never saw while she was alive. A headscarf, an expression he reads as excited and nervous, a woman who looks about to cross the tarmac and board the silver plane of the title. He found the photo after her death, and the album grew around everything that image holds: journeys real and metaphorical, the arrival of his children, the decline and departure of his parents, the decades of leaving home and returning that make up a musician's life. His liner note signs off wishing safe travels to all, and the record means it.
Two old songs form the spine, and Nelson's reading of them is half the pleasure. The title comes from a lyric in Jo Stafford's "You Belong to Me," the 1952 ballad he hears as an ode to being the one left behind, not asking the traveler to shut down horizons, only to come home when the traveling is done. The other is Chuck Berry's "Promised Land," the 1964 epic of crossing segregated America toward California, whose hero's first act on arrival is to call home and tell the old world he made it safely to the new one. Departure and return, the two phone calls that bracket every journey. Ten tracks live between them, and the titles read as one itinerary: "Silver Plane, Now Boarding" through "Heaven's Waiting Room" and "Taxi to the Terminal" to "Golden Gate, Silver City," the shimmering closer dedicated to the late Brian McBride of Stars of the Lid, a fellow architect of American slowness, sent off with the album's most hymnal piece. Travel, on this record, keeps sliding between the airport kind and the final kind, and the music refuses to treat either with dread. "Death Cleaning," of all things, is the most tender song here, a fog of guitar under a softly repeated blessing of release.
Its making matches the intimacy. Recorded at home over a couple of years: electric guitar, a rubber-bridge acoustic, Ableton, one small Elektron synth. His friend Mallory Linnehan, who records as Chelsea Bridge, added violin and vocals to a few pieces, captured on a single summer afternoon in Chicago with the windows open, and you can practically hear the season in them. Nothing about this record is in a hurry, which, after three decades on a label whose motto promises exactly that, reads less like a style than a kept vow.
Listen and buy: on Bandcamp in lossless, on LP and CD through Kranky, and streaming everywhere.
