Caleb Landry Jones
Hey Gary, Hey Dawn
SACRED BONES
I’m healthily skeptical of actors-turned-musicians, just because for the most part they’re not really surrounded by people who would ever tell them no. Remember when Michael Cera was grafted onto Mister Heavenly’s live band? Or when Jeremy Renner thought this sounded cool? Me neither! I had to google both of these things for them to become more than hazy memories of a Maxtrixed past. All of this to say, I don’t think Caleb Landry Jones is anything like these other cherry-picked examples because a) he was a musician long before he filled the silver screen, b) he’s (no offense) not as famous as them, and c) he doesn’t wear a way-too-big hat on stage. I don’t think there’s an official dividing line between actor-musician and actor who uses their fame to live out their silliest rockstar fantasies, but Jones is definitively in the former camp.
Hey Gary, Hey Dawn is the follow-up to Jones’ two-part Gadzooks series and his 2020 debut, The Mother Stone, all of which were released on Sacred Bones—home to several other film-figure-slash-musician success stories. The songwriter peddles in kooky rock music that interpolates punk, noise rock, and ’70s psych that could fit on any number of private press releases that were later reissued by Light in the Attic or Numero Group. It’s a hodgepodge that at its best showcases Caleb’s ingenuity as a songwriter and the brilliant cohesion of his band.
The only time the album is less than diamond-sharp is when the whimsical weirdness of Jones outweighs the actual songwriting. When he released the album’s first single, he offered an accompanying statement: “Naked, thick and hungry volatile feral whining. I picked it back up in Australia.” The song itself is very good—it kind of sounds like Nirvana due to the snare drum clicks, the descending bassline riff, twangy guitar line, and snarling delivery. I would’ve loved to learn more about that influence, not a boozed-up night at Outback Steakhouse.
Yet this look-at-me wackiness doesn’t distract from the overall excellence that purveys Hey Gary, Hey Dawn. Jones sings in a bunch of different voices, and after a listen or two, the album reveals itself to be a carnival of some of the most wonderfully strange ideas to populate the relatively staid history of indie rock. There’s an honesty to this whimsy that makes the album utterly enchanting, a genuine weirdness that permeates throughout—except for when Caleb Landry Jones bottles it up and tries to sell it. Why buy what you can have for free? A gift indeed from the actor and musician—who’s so good at both he can be described primarily as either.
