Thirstier
A decade ago, Mackenzie Scott—musical name: Torres—earned a bachelor's degree in songwriting with a minor in English lit. Yet, it’s not a British but an American scribe who comes to mind as I listen to Scott's quite (yes) literate, downright addictive late-2021 love-and-struggle album Thirstier (Merge Records): namely, my favorite living author, Joyce Carol Oates.
Both Scott and Oates specialize in smart, artful, probing, intimate verbal disclosure, deftly expressed in voices at once simple and far from simplistic. Just as Oates’ protagonists “Calla Honeystone” in I Lock My Door Upon Myself, “Marilyn Monroe” in Blonde, and the Mary Jo Kopechne-inspired “Kelly Kelleher” in Black Water, all live, breathe, think and feel at the collision-point between longed-for love and often harsh, solitary reality, so do Scott's/Torres' limber lyrics and bold vocals thrash between extremes, documenting the vicissitudes of life and, especially, romance with an eloquence and depth rarely written, sung, or heard.
The key divergence between the two artists’ respective works—beyond the obvious difference in media: sinuous, techno-juiced indie-/alt-rock on one hand; realistic psychological fiction on the other—lies in Scott's idealistic (in the best sense) belief that love, against all odds, just might eke out a victory.
“... And the greatest of these is love,” wrote the Christian apostle for whom this reviewer was named. Scott clearly concurs. Raised in a conservative Christian family, she now self- identifies as an “inclusive post-Christian” who strives to adhere not to dogma but to Jesus’ teachings and example of radical love. (I know this, because Scott and I—kindred spirits in this regard—once discussed it.) Herein lies another gap between Oates and Scott: the former chronicles characters on a desperate quest for psycho-spiritual and/or romantic fulfillment, whereas Scott—having located (for herself, at least) that fulfillment's source—now fights to grab onto and hold it close.
Her personal-liberation theology, as it were, turns some Biblical notions on their heads. “Drive me,” she huskily implores her lover in the song of that name, “to keep choosing to eat the fruit,” because knowledge isn't to be feared but embraced: “I know, therefore I am” (“Constant Tomorrowland”); “I am diabolically truthful / And I live beyond illusion” (from “Big Leap); “The more you look, the more you'll see” (“Thirstier”); “It's a bad habit to start asking questions with one eye closed” (“Hand in the Air”); “Time and money aren't real, and empathy is God.” (“Hug from a Dinosaur”). Moreover, it isn't the Second Coming of Christ but the pan-spiritual Age of Aquarius for which Scott longs: our “Bringer of Consciousness / Bearer of Justice / Harbinger of Progress ... [When] comes a mighty harvest” (“...Tomorrowland”). Implicit in her lyrics: the type of progress she seeks is neither technological nor doctrinal; it's ethical.
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For Scott, sexuality/physicality and spirituality are intertwined. “Lord, girl!” she belts out to her lover in the swaggering, muscular “...Dinosaur,” “You're the best of all possible worlds”— a world where “all this joy I feel [is as] ancient and eternal and surreal as a hug from a dinosaur.” Some of her tuneful poetry wouldn't be out of place in the Old Testament's sexy Song of Songs— for example, “There's so few like you / Sweeter than juice / Better than a muse / Burns slower than a fuse” (“Drive Me) and, from the title track, “The more of you I drink, the thirstier I get, baby.” Scott sings of romantic uncertainty, hesitation and fear, but never of guilt or “sin”; there is —thankfully—no room for those in her-and-her-beloved's best of all possible worlds.
As the above “The more of you...” line suggests, Scott has an affinity for the occasional riddle. “I just had a memory of the future” (“...Dinosaur”), she attests; “From far away,” she notes, “your hand in the air could mean goodbye / Could mean hello” (“Hand...”). Leave it to a daughter of fundamentalists to gravitate toward koans and paradoxes rather than toward clear-cut “solutions” that may or may not be sound. True: on the opener she sings to her lover: “I'm gonna chase the answers with you” (“Are You Sleepwalking?”). But that's chase, not find. And the with you attests that love, finally, is the closest thing we have to an answer.
At other times, Scott's “Fierce machinations of the mind” (“...Tomorrowland”) are disarmingly straightforward, as when, in “Don’t Go Puttin’ Wishes in My Head,” she lays it on the line for a lover she does not want to leave—but will leave, if she must: “If we're callin’ off the funeral, then I'm callin' for a hitchin' ... I know promisin’ ‘Forever’s’ not your thing / ... [But] don't spend your mornings and your evenings in my bed / If you don't want me believin' that you're never gonna leave me, darlin' / Don't go puttin' wishes in my head.” The singer knows exactly where she stands, and now—thanks to the candor, confidence and vulnerability of her statement—so does the recipient of her affection.
Scott's tour-de-force lyrics meet their match in music that sounds very little like anyone else's. Sure, there's an occasional pinch of Liz Phair in the vocals (not to mention a striking cover painting of Scott by her fiancée, Jenna Gribbon, that calls to mind the cover of Phair's eponymous 2003 album) and perhaps a half-pinch of Lissie. A couple of Thirstier's echoing soundscapes wouldn't be out of place on Halsey's remarkable rookie effort Badlands (2015). But in no case do these slight similarities sound derivative. In this, her fifth studio release, innovative guitarist and synth-player/“looper” Scott and her fist-tight band play—sometimes playfully— potent, melodic indie rock and minimalist alt-pop, melding sub-genres, samples loops 'n' (vocal) leaps in unexpected, novel ways, all while deploying deft doses of Scott's guitar feedback.
Instrumental and arrangement-related highlights include, but aren't limited to: the riot- grrrl-meets-disco pulsations and intermittently dissonant finger-pickin' of the “...Sleepwalking?” choruses; low-alto Scott's vocal jumps-up to Sopranoland, and the winsome, borderline-singsong choruses in both “Don't Go...” and “Drive Me,” as well as the latter song's extended calliope-like fade-out; the techno-folk simplicity and closing a-capella line of “Big Leap”; the growl-'n'-roar, deconstructed-then-reconstructed final verse, and Times-up! ending of “...Dinosaur”; the title track's power-chord-laden choruses and its martial-drumbeat section; the oft subterranean bass, and the sensual, hypnotic vocal and synth echoes, of the languorously lovely “Kiss the Corners”; the determined inhale that kicks off “Hand in the Air”; and the haunting sonic background-terrain and heaven/hell verse/chorus dynamics of the closer, “Keep the Devil Out.”
Per Louis Sullivan's architectural dictum “Form follows function,” Scott's lyrics are invariably well served by the chord structures and arrangements with which she has paired them: it all works, and it all works together. Scott/Torres, whose output has become more compelling with each album, has released her “masterpiece with an asterisk”—the asterisk designating “For now.”
“If you only had one song left to sing,” she asks in the album's final minute, “what would it be?” I have no idea, but thank God—specifically, Scott's God of empathy—that, at just 31, she has many, many more songs left to sing.
Meanwhile, here's to chasing the answers with her.
