Amanda Wood
John Hardin
Madison singer-songwriter John Hardin goes spelunking into his own soul on his new release, Bright Arcana in the Lowland Plains. The album is an 11-track confessional that’s as heart-wrenching as it is heart-rendering. Hardin says he’s never paid attention to dreams, but this project was based on one so vivid that he wrote down the name he heard spoken in the dream as soon as he awakened: Bright Arcana. It’s now his professional handle.
The Americana form is at large in these songs. Think Steve Earle at his most tender. But more than that, Hardin isn’t afraid to push the form entirely out of the way. His daring takes a classic Americana sound and leads it to other potent American sources.
“Dawn” is a waltz that has as much in common with Aaron Copland as any country music maker. The changes in the song’s chorus rise steadfast and sure, like the morning sunlight. The album’s final track, “Bright Arcana in the Lowland Plains,” is beauty so primitive it could have been written in shape notes.
As lush as the production sounds, and boy is it lush in the hands of Eau Claire’s Shane Leonard, it’s Hardin’s voice that defines the emotion of the songs. He sings much of the album in falsetto, which dashes in from out of nowhere, effortlessly — pain-stricken one moment, angelic and uplifting in the next.
Hardin has had an intense life since leaving the Mississippi River town of Alton, Illinois, at 19. He picked Kenosha, a choice he described as, “throwing a dart at the map,” for his first stop. There he met other musicians including Milwaukee’s Hayward Williams. Williams and the now 35-year-old Hardin have never stopped collaborating.
Hardin’s 2016 release, The Piasa Bird, produced by Williams, was pure Midwestern mysticism. In my Isthmus review of that album I wrote that Hardin’s sound combines the pioneer instincts of Levon Helm with the rapture and intelligence of Bonnie “Prince” Billy.
The Piasa Bird was born from a four-year exile from music and, in part, from the world after Hardin determined to come to grips with substance use, the wear of non-stop travel, and assorted other health setbacks. “I decided to eliminate everything from my life,” he said at the time, “to try to find out the meaning of it all.”
Little did he know, his self-realizations were just beginning. There were darker times ahead. Times that led to the birth of a record after the death of a son.
I spoke with Hardin about the creation of his latest album.
Tell me about the name transformation to Bright Arcana.
I don’t have too many dreams (that I remember), but the ones I do have are often very vivid. I also suffer from bouts of sleep paralysis, and often the dreams come in the midst of these episodes. It was shortly after the stillbirth of our first son, and in the dream I was face to face with a figure that referred to him as my "Bright Arcana.” When I woke up, I wrote this down, and thought about it for a long time. I usually don’t assign too much meaning to dreams, but for some reason, this one just felt more profound.
What do those words Bright Arcana speak to?
“Arcana” essentially means a secret or mystery that’s meaning is hidden, and when I think about the words “Bright Arcana,” my interpretation is a mystery that was once hidden but is now illuminated. On a personal level, this made sense. The loss of the child devastated me more than anything in my life, and it also forced me to examine everything within all of my belief systems and the way I live my life. I visited shadowed corners of myself and my identity I had ignored for a very long time. I faced many uncomfortable truths. I was faced with my own weaknesses and shortcomings. In short, I was completely broken, and in order to reassemble, I needed to look at every piece in the light. The son we lost was light that allowed me to examine those pieces.
These are songs of survival. Yet they share a longing and natural mysticism with the songs on The Piasa Bird. Compare the two projects.
At their root, they’re both albums about love. The Piasa Bird was about moving to a new city, falling in “romantic” love with a person, and all of the feelings that come with these new life experiences. At the time, the writing that ended up on The Piasa Bird didn’t feel superficial, but when reflecting on it within the context of Bright Arcana in the Lowland Plains, it’s a more superficial record about falling in love. I don’t mean superficial in a negative light, I just mean at the time I wasn’t writing about going spelunking into my soul. The Bright Arcana record is about a deep, unshakeable and often painful love. It is about human connection. It is about the Self, and what’s left when everything else is stripped away.
You assembled an incredible line-up of supporting producers/musicians on this album. How did this ensemble come about?
Shane Leonard and I met when I was playing a show with a band he used to play with. One of the things that was a driving force behind me asking him to produce this record was his abilities as a multi-instrumentalist, specifically percussionist, and his knowledge of traditional American folk music. I always have a very specific sound in mind when I begin to think about recording a collection of songs, and usually that sound is paired with a person. For Piasa Bird, it was Hayward [Williams]. For Bright Arcana it was Shane. When I sent him a bunch of demos, he was excited about the songs, and he also began to have a vision for them. Our two visions are interleaved very well on this record, and it’s a solid reflection of both perspectives.
All of the other musicians, as well as Brian Joseph, the engineer, I met through Shane. Shane was finishing up an album with vocalist Anna Tivel when we first started sketching the Bright Arcana record. We became connected from afar, and were both fans of each other's songs and writing. I was so excited that she wanted to lend her voice to the songs and to imagine them without her leaves them sounding very barren. Ben Lester [pedal steel, piano] is an unheralded wizard. His understated contributions fuse this entire record together. Jeremy Boettcher is a world class bass player, contributing both upright and electric bass. Jon Neufeld is from Oregon and plays in a band called Black Prairie, He’s a ripper. Josh Gallagher added a lot of piano and organ to the record that really dolls it up. He’s a tremendous jazz player who plays often with Shane and Jeremy in a little jazz outfit around the Eau Claire area. In short, Shane is the straw that stirs the drink, and is the one that brought everyone together. I think he is a musical genius, and I don’t use that word lightly. It is an embarrassment of riches that I remain so grateful for.
The songs of emotional reckoning coincide with a time of emotional conciliation happening in our country due to the pandemic, racial injustices, and political turmoil. How can these songs be heard by the innocent listener with those things in mind?
To me, the thing about raw emotion is that it transcends individual experience and is felt by all of us in our own way, through our own experience. These are the things that make us human — that join us all together as the singular Self, albeit through different expressions. The sense of loneliness, anxiety, and uncertainty that so many of us feel in the midst of a pandemic is the same raw emotion that I wrote about when I was going through my experience, just through a different lens. I cannot not know the Black experience in America, what it is to be oppressed, marginalized, targeted and racially discriminated against, but I can know the feeling of righteous anger. These raw emotions can bring us together. That is what makes music and storytelling so transcendent, and why they have been cornerstones to our evolution as a species. Art will always be subjective, and will always be living, with its true meaning dependent not on the creator, but the person who is experiencing it.
What was the hardest song for you to get right on the album? Why?
The last two songs on the album, “There’s Such a Wonder to it All” and “Bright Arcana in the Lowland Plains” were actually written as one song. I started it when my partner was pregnant, and finished after the stillbirth of our son. Originally the song was very long, like 15 verses long, and then finished with the “Bright Arcana” dialogue that ended up being the last song on the record. I have never revised a song as much as that one. It started as a song I was writing to our unborn child, but as the situation changed and evolved, and I went through the gauntlet of so many emotions, the subject, lyrics and music kept evolving.
Do you wish you could be playing these songs right now to a room filled with eager ears?
That’s hard to answer. I wish we weren’t in the middle of a pandemic. I wish the country wasn’t being torn apart. I wish we didn’t have a white supremacist, narcissistic, megalomaniac president whose primary concern seems to be oppressing, driving people apart and maintaining power instead of trying to bring people together and leading by positive example. I wish our Black neighbors weren’t being murdered by some of the people sworn to protect them. When things like that are happening every day, it’s hard to find room for something as small as wishing I could share this music in a live setting. But music and communion and bringing people together can heal some of these wounds, and though I am not saying in any way that what I do has that power, I do wish that we could collectively and safely get together to hear music again.
