055 :: BOUND

Featuring

Cruel Joke by Ken Pomeroy, released by Rounder Records in 2025. Listen / Buy direct

Transcript

Some pieces of music are so simple and pure that it's difficult to pin down just what's so remarkable about them. With this piece of music, I guess it's, first and foremost, the voice: so dulcet, expressive, and down to earth. But the instrumental accompaniment is also perfect in its own, understated way, from the sparsely strummed guitars to the quietly plucked mandolin to those long swelling tones that fill in the spaces between. It's melodically indelible, and lyrically evocative, without ever being obvious or quite what you'd expect. It just comes in and hits you with lines like this: "The devil's hiding in the Bible Belt".

Which is maybe just a roundabout way of saying that what's remarkable about this music is not so much that it's doing anything new, as that it's just doing everything right. And maybe there's a lesson here, about the particular type of music this is. Because whatever you want to call it, be it Americana or roots or country or folk, this is clearly music that is steeped in tradition, that moves forward by looking back and finds new expression in old forms. And part of what this music makes me feel is a kind of gratitude and admiration, that a young musician can still find such relevance and vitality in this timeworn form, and can still find ways to make it their own.

But there's something else I love about this music, and that's a certain ambivalence that runs throughout its lyrics, a darkness mixed with the light, a strident honesty about life in all its ugliness and its beauty. And I can't even say how it does it; as many times as I've listened to this song, its lyrics still strike me as impressionistic, like little snapshots of the world gone by. But the impression they leave is one of a world where the everyday always contains a hint of menace – where rainclouds stand magnificent in the distance and it's bound to rain.

And maybe again there's a lesson here, about the type of music this is. Because whatever you want to call it, be it Americana or roots or country or folk, this is music which, by its very name, bears the weight of a nation and its people on its shoulders. And the only way it can properly do that is by showing the nation for what it is, in all its colors and contradictions. But that's what this type of music, in its best instances, has always done.

This music doesn't make me nostalgic for my country. But it does weirdly feel like home – that uncomfortable familiarity of a place you know too well, a place you're always trying to get away from, a place that always keeps pulling you back, a place that never changes and always seems to sound the same.

Liner Notes

I discovered Ken Pomeroy through the television show The Lowdown, from Sterlin Harjo. Not only does Pomeroy's music appear on the show's soundtrack, Pomeroy herself also appears on the show, in the role of Pearl, and even plays a solo acoustic version of "Bound to Rain" in episode 5.