CERTAIN SONGS: SLAID CLEAVES

The Texas singer-songwriter I’d been looking for my whole life.

By Brian Koppelman

I find myself reaching for Slaid Cleaves’ music this January, as I have each January since I heard “One Good Year,” eight winters back. I want to tell you about that moment. And I want to set it out as clean and true as one of his songs. No gloss. No extra words. No lies.

Stuck in LA. Making television (a pilot, and not one you’ve seen). Family on the opposite coast. Trapped in my car each day for more hours than the average New Yorker is in a month. This is before XM and Sirius and vehicles equipped with iPod adaptors. I didn’t have all my CDs out there either. I was captive to the radio. Most of it shit. And then, one afternoon, I heard Slaid’s voice coming through the speakers.

I promised not to overly dramatize here: In Slaid’s honor—even if that’s how I normally earn my screenwriter’s wage. So I won’t tell you I pulled over to the side of the road to listen, or turned my car around to head straight over to Tower Records on Sunset. Because that’s not what people really do, not what a character in one of Slaid’s songs would do.

Still, it’s no exaggeration to say that the music hit me, made me want to do something as dramatic as slamming on the brakes or punching the steering wheel full force like Tom Cruise listening to “Free Fallin’’ in Jerry Maguire. The song was “One Good Year.” I was caught by the sound of Slaid’s voice, which was unlike any I’d come across—high and sweet, somehow warm and austere with an authoritative quality underpinning it—and by the words this strange voice was singing: “Just give me one good year/To get my feet back on the ground/I’ve been chasing grace, but grace ain’t so easily found/One bad hand can devil a man/A good one can turn him around/I gotta get out of here/Just give me one good year.”

I understood what the man was talking about, but hadn’t heard it put quite that way before. I waited for the DJ to say the name, and when he did, I wasn’t sure I’d gotten it right. Slaid? But the next day, when I was able to get over to Hear Music, in Santa Monica, I saw that I did understand what the announcer had said.

I bought Broke Down, the album with “One Good Year” on it, and listened on the drive back to my short-term rental. By the time I had arrived at the apartment, I was a fan. Here was the songwriter I had been trying to find for years. At that point, I didn’t know anything about him. Didn’t know the level of devotion he had given to his craft, didn’t know that he had left his hometown in Maine to move to Austin, Texas, so that he could play in the same bars as legendary songwriters Guy Clark and Town Van Zandt. But it was all there in the songs: The simple arrangements and sturdy melodies setting the stage for finely drawn characters wrestling with how to get by in a country turned cold.

There is a tension at play in Slaid’s songs between fatalism and a big-hearted faith in humanity, perhaps born out of his geographical displacement, perhaps just how he has always seen the world. Either way, hope and its opposite trade shots in almost every song.

Take “Broke Down.” On the surface, it’s a simple song, about a married couple, Billy, and his wife Sherry who had “pawn shop band of gold, a sink full of dishes and a love grown cold.” But by the time you get to the end, the wedding ring is at the bottom of Lake Pontratrain, Billy and Sherry are just as sunk as the ring, and somehow, despite it, you’re smiling and singing along Or “Drinking Days,” written from the point of view of a man on his way to jail for his part in a particularly ugly bar fight with a police officer. After explaining that “I didn’t know the other guy was a cop/Maybe I didn’t care/ Sometimes you gotta act like you got a pair,” the narrator continues, “I never knew what time it was/’Til closing time came ‘round/my drinking days are over/I’m still trouble bound.” A character’s change, in Slaid Cleaves’ world, as in our own, comes slowly, and is almost always incremental.

About a year after listening to Broke Down on Montana Ave., I was back in NYC, back with my family, when I saw that Slaid was going to be performing at The Bottom Line. This was 10 days after 9/11. My wife and I hadn’t left our home since the tragedy, were unsure if it was even appropriate to go out and try to enjoy ourselves. But we decided to give it a try.

There were maybe 20 other people in the club that night, all seeming to be as self-conscious and conflicted about being there as we were. Slaid took the stage. He didn’t preach, didn’t make long speeches. Just told us he was glad to be with us, in our city, and then he played his songs of everyday people trying to get through the muddle and wring some joy out of their days. I’m not going to tell you he healed us, or made us forget, or anything like that. But he did involve us. By giving himself over to his songs, he gave them to us too. For that hour, we were all connected. And maybe it’s the memory of this, above all else, that makes it impossible for me to take Slaid’s music off my iPod this, or any, time of year.