June 2005
We’ll start with a note. I was gonna mention this when he pops back up again for the Disconnect entry because that one’ll be more applicable to what we have to lay out here, but I felt I had to bump this up because otherwise it’s going to be a bit of an elephant in the room for those of us who know. Here we go: yes, I am aware that John Wesley is one of those right-wing NRA gun nut types.
This seems as good a time as ever to emphasize that our tale is going to wind its way through people with atrocious politics, or who’ve otherwise said or done horrible/stupid/problematic things. Sometimes we’re going to have to wrestle with it directly, like when Fish used the N-word in Sunsets on Empire, or when our brief detour through 70s prog in France required dealing with genre-launching wunderkind and fascist reprobate Christian Vander. Sometimes…we won’t, or at least not with that level of righteous fury. As we continue, it’s worth recalling Andrew Hickey’s disclaimer about this stuff in his 500 Songs podcast: this blog has a specific purpose, and that purpose is not to document the precise contours of the awfulness of awful people. When we cover someone who’s said/done terrible things or who holds objectionable views, their iniquities will come up if it feels appropriate in the context of the entry, but if it doesn’t, don’t conflate that with me being unaware—or worse, approving—of the things they said, did, or endorsed. Consider this a long-overdue formal statement of the methodology with which we’re going to deal with this stuff going forward.
To the extent this affects how we engage with Tampa’s own Mr John Wesley Dearth III, I wasn’t going to say much about it for this entry, but I did think it appropriate to mention it right from the top because he’s still the right-winger with whom Steven Wilson has been the closest, personally and professionally. As such, I also want to re-up Steven Wilson’s explicitly stated policy of not caring about other people’s politics, and as such whatever bullshit they believe never reflects on what bullshit Steven believes. Just because Wes is right-wing doesn’t necessarily mean Steve is right-wing also. If Steve feels some type of dumbass way about something, don’t worry, we’ll hear from him directly.
I was also originally going to go lightly on Wes’ politics this entry for a few other reasons. First of all, Wes is one of those guys who generally keeps his views close to his chest, the archetypal Nice Conservative that people on the other side can still interact with without becoming uncomfortable. (My college roommate was similar, one of the sweetest guys I’ve ever known, and I think we’d still be close if I didn’t turn out to be, y’know, queer. The implications speak for themselves.) I don’t know what he’s like privately, but in terms of his public persona he extremely does not strike me as a swivel-eyed Aaron Lewis-esque crank who’ll go off on critical race theory if you look at him funny. It only really pops out when you look at who he follows on Instagram, or when he dragged Steve to Hooters that one time, or in his extensive interest in the military and veterans’ causes. That’s not to say I’m unaware of the implications, though. I have, in case it wasn’t obvious, no illusions of how he feels about me as a nonbinary anarchist opposed to the existence of the US armed forces, but that’s not a part of himself he’s actively broadcasting to the world, so whatever.
Second of all, his conservatism hasn’t stopped him from collaborating with Wilson (liberal), Adam Holzman (liberal), Rush (the Objectivist days are long behind them), Fish (socialist), or some of the other members of Marillion (went on to write Gaza), all of whom as far as I can tell have only nice things to say about him (again, all of them are also cis white dudes, so big ole caveat there). And third of all, Wes isn’t really writing political songs yet. At the stage of his career we’re looking at right now he’s still mostly writing personal stuff, not stuff about Iraq or whatever, and to the extent his songs do reflect world events, it’s in the same way that Collapse the Light Into Earth is a 9/11 song: as background radiation; as a mood.
This’ll change in a few years when we talk about Disconnect (and, by extension, A Way You’ll Never Be), but for right now we’ve got an uneasy equilibrium going, and it’s one that makes it easier for me to engage with his solo work on its own merits.
John Wesley’s early solo work is really good.
The big thing to understand about Wes is that he basically cut his teeth with Marillion, serving as their guitar tech and opening for them on several tours in the 90s, and as such developed almost the exact same musical sensibilities they had at the time. Here, though, is the difference between Marillion and Wes: Wes is just a guy. He doesn’t have to uphold the legacy of a band that made it all the way up to #2. He’s not over here solipsistically ruminating on the pressures of fuck-you fame because he’s never been fuck-you famous. He’s not complaining about how unfair it is to be a man. He’s not reeling off hollow self-help slogans (usually). He manages to sidestep most of the pitfalls that Marillion had fallen into because he’s the single least pretentious person in the band’s orbit. John Wesley is, fundamentally, a neo-prog musician with the soul of a singer-songwriter.
That probably explains why my favorite Wes songs are the ones where he goes into full singer-songwriter mode. My personal pick for best Wes studio record is 1995’s The Closing of the Pale Blue Eyes, an almost-fully unplugged EP written in the white-hot swirl of pain and agony following a breakup he didn’t want. It works the same way Springsteen’s Nebraska works, with the relatively sparse instrumentation and Wes’ raspy vocals bringing a particular rawness, immediacy, and intensity to the material that a very particular strain of folk music has at its best. I listened to Wes’ solo work backwards from Shiver, and as such The Closing of the Pale Blue Eyes felt like the fullest realization of the sort of deeply moving yet troubadour-esque sensibility that he strives for, because its relative simplicity lets the power of the subject matter speak for itself. In addition, Pale Blue Eyes also does that thing Together We’re Stranger does where Wes’ purging of all his post-breakup emotional turmoil becomes a cathartic universal. When Steven Wilson talks about the saddest songs being the most beautiful, he’s also talking about The Closing of the Pale Blue Eyes.
Wes’ full-length albums are more electric, but still have that particular emotional intensity about them. 1998’s The Emperor Falls in particular is a pretty solid example, where a bunch of songs (Come and Gone, An Ordinary Man, Gift of a Woman, Someone for a Day, The Desperation Angel) do that thing I’m a huge sucker for where the arrangement is full and lush and there’s some gorgeous backing vox and harmonies (courtesy Steve Hogarth and Tracy LaBarbera) but it’s still fundamentally built around a guy and his acoustic guitar, and that’s a combination that will always short out my critical faculties completely. The peak of this particular form is probably the album closer, A Time to Dance, a low, thrumming duet between Wes and LaBarbera that feels like a brief moment of quiet candlelit grace in a world of darkness and turmoil. (Wes is exceptionally good at closers more generally, come to think of it; Right Here Beside Me is the perfect summation of The Closing of the Pale Blue Eyes, and Showing Happy to the World does some serious legwork in redeeming Chasing Monsters.)
There are moments that descend into Marillion-esque corniness, especially on There Go I or Last Man By Your Side, but when Wes does it it doesn’t feel like a terminal affliction because he’s fundamentally in a different place than Hogarth and friends. It’s also not a coincidence that many of the best Marillion songs between Brave and Marbles, like Man of a Thousand Faces, feel like extended or repurposed John Wesley songs. They hit the exact same way.
Shiver is Wes’ fifth full-length solo record, and the first one Steven Wilson was involved in mixing. 2005 sees Wes coming off the relatively underwhelming Chasing Monsters, which sounds like a weird mix of the album he just completed with Fish (fitting, then, that its album cover is clearly ripping off Fellini Days) and grubby post-grunge without the yarl. (Trip and Fall and Disappeared are both pretty good, though. That violin is inspired.) Shiver is substantially better; right from the first track it’s clear he knows what’s he’s doing with the heavier stuff, because Pretty Lives sounds more than anything like one of his singer-songwriter outings, only seriously beefed up. Something like Swing, meanwhile, definitely has more than a few shades of In Absentia and Deadwing about it. It feels like a more natural progression from The Emperor Falls than Chasing Monsters was.
The faster songs on Shiver are also a significant improvement from previous albums. Up until this point, whenever Wes did something more uptempo it always had a certain kid-trying-on-his-dad’s-clothes energy about it, like he was pushing himself just a bit too far. Here, when he’s doing something like Always Be, he sounds as much in his element as he is with The King of 17 or Some Miracle. And that, I suppose, is the difference between this and Pale Blue Eyes: on Pale Blue Eyes he stuck firmly within his wheelhouse of what he was good at at the time, but on Shiver he tries everything and is great at everything.
So Shiver’s pretty good, probably the best album of his solo career. And yet, for as much as I love John Wesley’s music, there’s still the question of whether I can formally recommend any of it, knowing full well that it’s perfectly reasonable to read me going “I liked this” and think it’s an unqualified endorsement of both the songs and the person behind them. And so we come back to his views, which do complicate my enjoyment of his music. Wes is basically the Chris Pratt of the progressive rock world (one of several, really), and so the same questions that can be raised about enjoying Parks and Rec or Guardians of the Galaxy are raised about Shiver and The Emperor Falls.
I don’t have a good answer for this, largely because I don’t believe I have the authority to tell someone it is or isn’t okay to read/watch the work of people who are, er, Problematic in some way. I’m not even consistent about what I do when I personally discover the creator of a beloved piece of media has iffy politics or has serious skeletons in their closet. I still love Chuck Berry, Infinite Jest, Transmetropolitan, Perdido Street Station, and Seinfeld, but I’ll never be able to watch Car Boys or Manhattan or read Junot Diaz, Sam Kriss, or Brian Wood ever again. Ultimately, I can only speak for myself. You might be able to enjoy Wes’ music despite his conservatism, or you might not. Both responses are perfectly valid.
That said, I do make a very clear distinction between the act of watching or reading or listening to a person’s art and giving that person money. I may still like Transmet, but Warren Ellis will never get another dime out of me. Fortunately, this particular ethical question is pretty much moot in Wes’ case because every studio album up to the subject of this entry, including all his best stuff, is available on his website for free.
Catalogue. Preserve. Amass. 