Album of the Week: Cass McCombs – Interior Live Oak

Interior Live Oak is the new studio album from American singer-songwriter Cass McCombs, his 11th to date. I’ve always had a slightly strange relationship with McCombs’ music, I’m a big fan of his, and I think many of his albums are brilliant, with not a bad record among them, yet I still can’t quite pinpoint what makes him such a prodigious artist. Part of that comes from an inability to place McCombs neatly within any stylistic realm. He arrived just after the Bill Callahan/Smog and Bonnie “Prince” Billy era of modern Americana, and before the current crop of indie-folk artists. His work is also marked by an enigmatic, often mysterious quality that makes him difficult to categorise.

It’s rare that I know exactly what McCombs is writing about, but I’ve never felt the need to, his dazzling wordplay and imagery is enough. His songs seem to exist within their own microcosm, his own fabricated world, constructed in true troubadour fashion from stories collected here and there. Tall tales, fragments of imagery, dialogue, and observations gathered from the numerous places he has lived, travelled, and found himself in. In both style and categorisation, McCombs is an outsider, an outlier working on the margins, and that is exactly what makes him such an intriguing and genuinely interesting songwriter.

I first encountered his work with his fourth album, 2009’s critically acclaimed Catacombs. It didn’t initially grab me in the way I expected, but it revealed itself to be a slow-burning grower. McCombs’ songs often worm their way into the listener’s psyche rather than aiming for immediate impact. I was equally enamoured with his next two albums, Wit’s Endand Humor Risk (both 2011), but it wasn’t until 2013’s double album Big Wheel and Others that I became properly hooked. Since then, McCombs has released a run of excellent records, including 2016’s breakthrough Mangy Love and 2019’s Tip of the Sphere, the latter exploring the ragged Americana of his full-band live sound, something akin to Neil Young & Crazy Horse, with superb results. 2022’s Heartmind is also deemed one of his most essential releases by many a critic’s yardstick.

Interior Live Oak, running at an hour and 14 minutes, is McCombs’ first proper double album since Big Wheel and Others, and his longest non-compilation release to date. Its extended runtime, traversing many of the musical styles he has explored across his career, once again proves to be the optimal way to experience his music. McCombs is not a songwriter who deals in quick, direct statements. Instead, he blurs meaning with lyrical mazes, expansive casts of characters, and complex, romantic poetics that evoke both the vast landscapes and the small, intimate details that fill his songs. The sprawl of an album like this surprisingly makes his music, or rather his vision, more graspable.

Interior Live Oak is a wonderful record, full of high points across a variety of musical settings. You get the sense that, much like Dylan, these songs may have been cycled through many arrangements before landing on the versions that best suited them on any given recording day. Whether it’s the rolling, effervescent folk-rock of Priestess, the plaintive pre-rock ’n’ roll waltz of I’m Not Ashamed and Strawberry Moon, or the majestic, buccaneering rock of Peace and Asphodel, almost every one of the album’s 16 tracks clicks effortlessly. Each one foregrounds McCombs’ many strengths: his melodic gifts, lyrical prowess, easy vocal delivery, and his often-underused skill as an expressive lead guitarist.

Highlights continue to be scattered throughout Interior Live Oak. These include the ponderous, Lynchian Americana of A Girl Named Dogie, the captivating tension and release of Lola Montez Danced the Spider Dance at the record’s midpoint, and the stylistically divergent, humorously jaunty Juvenile that follows. The album closes with the cosmic country groove of the title track, rippling with fervent live energy, and, like its namesake, finding McCombs sounding as evergreen as ever.