A Post-Post-Rock Exclusive! The video premiere of “The Journey Back Down Jump Truth Mountain,” directed by Nathan Gulick, from Toby Goodshank’s 2011 album Truth Jump Fall. This premiere and subsequent review of Truth Jump Fall is the first in an in-depth series of three articles about the life, music, and visual art of Goodshank–a “TG Triptych,” essentially.
After amassing a more-than-substantial solo discography of over 15 albums (not to mention numerous other collaborations), in October 2011 singer-songwriter/NYC anti-folk mainstay Toby Goodshank released what would be his last solo record stateside before his forthcoming move to Berlin. At eight songs, this collection entitled Truth Jump Fall combines the length of an EP with the thoughtfulness and serious intent of a full-length.
The genesis of the album is an intriguing one. After recurring nightmares related to the passing of his father a few years ago had subsided, Goodshank began to have a series of vivid dreams instead, from which Truth Jump Fall would emerge. Rather than dreaming narrative scenes, the artist envisioned melodies, lyrics, and instrumental passages. One gets the sense that Goodshank had no other choice but to sing these songs and document them for the world at large.
The video for Goodshank’s “The Journey Back Down Truth Jump Mountain”–directed by Nathan Gulick, with costume design by Liz Abbot–is a narrative snapshot of a young social outlier making her way down Hollywood Boulevard, an area Gulick refers to as “like a seedy shopping mall.” “Toby mentioned to me that a lot of the writing of the album came from dream imagery so I wanted it to be dream-like, nightmare-ish [sic] really,” explains Gulick. “The back story is of someone that maybe got a little bit of a break, overplayed it and alienated her friends, moved to LA and then blew it, and ended up lost on Hollywood Blvd.”
In casting the video’s protagonist, Gulick explains the choice of Pepper Bridge:
We had a small casting session and found a couple actresses that looked cool but not rough and vulnerable like Pep. They had to be able to rock the Elvis shades (which were for a long time a Goodshank staple) without looking too ‘rockstar’ – they had to be more like they were a pose or a shield.
Pepper Bridge’s character is estranged from the world in which she finds herself, yet is undeterred by her troubled presence in it. She comes across as an extension of the characters that steadfastly trudge through Goodshank’s songs–the real-life embodiment of the experiences and feelings expressed in the music.
Produced, arranged, engineered, and mixed by Jack Dishel—a former bandmate with Goodshank in The Moldy Peaches—the album Truth Jump Fall is a group of tightly coiled, highly personal songs that showcase a solo artist brimming with maturity. There is a sweet vulnerability throughout, tempered with an unwavering resolve lying just under the surface. As with all Goodshank songs, the songwriter’s voice is the nucleus around which the other musical parts move. An endearing nasal tone that hints at The Decemberists’ Colin Meloy intertwines seamlessly with the melodic phrasing and corporeal lyrical sensibility of Jeff Mangum (formerly of Neutral Milk Hotel). The resulting alchemy yields a deceptive musical concoction with a rather paradoxical taste: an ethereal, nonthreatening mouth-feel at first sip, it finishes with raw earthiness. It’s all very bittersweet, and it works. A perfect encapsulation of this signature quality of the Toby Goodshank persona can be found in the opening lines of the album closer “My Reflection”:
Horrible companion, you mean to do me harm/Disenfranchised concubine, catch a bullet scar/ Within you, jacked off to the desert sand/ We’re both failures clutching ruined plans
Goodshank’s world is populated with weathered yet beautiful souls—his among them—mangled in their circumstance; but the artist’s take always avoids judgement. He is reverentially honest in his insightful takes on the fragile human psyche and its simultaneously conflicting emotional states, a fact evidenced even in song titles such as “Baby I Feel Like Just Got Cut in Half.” As stated in the incisive “Prelude to Fire,” an album highlight, the prevailing philosophy of the album seems to be “When truth collides with revisionist attitudes, we will not place blame, we will seek a higher plane.”
Given the melancholic focus of the singer’s words, this higher plane is in part only achievable through the potency of Goodshank’s musical accompaniment, with its carefully crafted combination of propellant power-chord riffs, and folksy “comfort food” finger-picking—which possess a kind of mystical life-affirming power of their own. In this way, what otherwise could have been pessimistic songcraft dominated by its indebtedness to the lyrical legacies of post-punk and grunge instead evinces a sobering hope without detracting from unwavering emotional realities.
The vitality of Jack Dishel’s contribution to the record can’t be overstated: he provides the bulk of the additional instrumentation with understated atmospherics and economical, somehow intimate arrangements that closely hug the minimalist, lo-fi songwriting of aesthetic of Goodshank.
Truth Jump Fall can be found at Toby Goodshank’s Bandcamp site.
