Shakey Graves
Fondness, Etc.
DUALTONE
Austin-bred musician Alejandro Rose-Garcia has been performing under the bone-rattling moniker Shakey Graves for a decade and a half now, and his crooning vocal stylings and haunted 1932 Gibson L-7 have earned him a spot in the dust-covered musical history of the American Southwest. The last couple years, however, have seen a lot of personal change for Rose-Garcia. He’s been settling into his new life as a husband and father, and through raising his young daughter has found a newfound appreciation for the fleeting process of creation. Fondness, Etc., the latest offering to come off the sun-strewn porch of Shakey Graves, embodies that process, bottling up the faint feeling of a freshly kissed cheek with the winds of Big Bend to produce a record that lingers in the beautifully imperfect moments of creation.
Fondness, Etc. occupies a peculiar middle ground between tugging at your heartstrings and haunting you with its Americana soundscapes. The crackling of static sets the stage for “When the Love Is New,” a rather ghostly love song about the honeymoon stage of a new relationship that Rose-Garcia has dubbed the “anchor point” of the album. It’s not hard to see why, given the microcosm it provides of the eerie, fleeting romance that grounds the album. Rose-Garcia sets up a sharp, crashing drum loop before hopping on his guitar to croon about the sweetness of a new love and how quickly it can turn sour: “You say that it’s forever when the love is new” morphs into “You say it wasn’t nothin’ and the love is through” over the course of the track, the romance fading as the instrumentals lean into the melancholy.
Absence makes the heart grow fonder, however, and out of the melancholy bursts a soft and warming cover of Frankie Sunswept’s 2022 psych-rock ditty “Time Flies.” As Rose-Garcia swings into the chorus—“Time flies when you’re with the one you love”—you can hear the laugh lines etched upon the corners of his smile. Of course, absence has to be reckoned with here, leading to a minor-key breakdown that cuts the track in two to process the grief before delving back into the fond recollection of time spent together, wiping tears as the strings dance in the background. And then there’s “I Once Was an Ocean,” a near five-minute instrumental cut reimagining the prehistoric body of water that once submerged the Chihuahuan Desert. The track kicks off with haunting synths that sound almost like vocal tracks before a cascade of bird calls usher in a reverberating bass solo and the track settles into a dance of fluttering marimba notes, guitar melodies, and castanet clicks.
When discussing the inspiration behind Fondness, Etc., Rose-Garcia recounted seeing his young daughter find more joy in the activity of painting than the end product: “She loves setting up, using the colours, putting the apron on. The painting itself? She doesn’t really care.” That joy in the ephemeral, in the process and the spontaneous moments that only leave memory impressions, is at the core of Fondness, Etc. Throughout the album you can hear fleeting imperfections like wind whistling through the mic or the stutter of track static. Those spontaneous happenings mark that process for Rose-Garcia. Fondness, Etc. is the activity of creation in all its fleeting, imperfect beauty.
