There’s No Place Like Home
Harrison Lemke’s hometown album captures the complications of place without resorting to romanticism or despair.
Review by Gracy Olmstead
Harrison Lemke’s album Forever Only Idaho serves as an ode to a place, and a group of people, that he’s left behind. It’s an album about childhood memories and regret, about the voices that tell us to “go far” (or whisper the word “failure” in our minds if we don’t). And it excellently captures the complicated layers of love and frustration, anxiety and fondness we often feel about the places we’re from.
According to Lemke’s website, the album imagines the stories of “the Coeur d’Alene High School graduating class of 2006 in 2018, wherever they ended up… in and out of hospitals, in and out of jail, in or out of debt, trying to make it in New York or L.A. or still living at home.”
But it’s also about “the self-absorbed, self-hating small American town, and the way its anxieties and failures follow its children wherever they go.” There’s even one track— “Missed Connection Blues”—dedicated to those who “fell off the map,” whose stories have been lost to time or lack of better acquaintance.
In an email conversation, Lemke said he didn’t plan to make an album about Coeur d’Alene. But writing songs about the holidays kept pulling him back to his childhood—“when you live somewhere from, say, the age of 4 to the age of 18, you belong to that place forever, regardless of how you feel about it or where you go,” he wrote. “Everything points back to it, even if you’d rather it didn’t.”
My mom grew up in northern Idaho, in the town of Moscow, and so I’ve been to Coeur d’Alene a handful of times. I have two uncles and aunts who live there now. It’s the original home of the Coeur d’Alene, or Schitsu’umsh, tribe, a region of Idaho characterized in more recent decades by its timber and mining booms, as well as by its proximity to Richard Butler’s white supremacist compound, the Aryan Nations (created and disbanded in the 20th century near Hayden Lake). These days, it’s a growing city on the banks of a stunning lake, home to a ski resort and a floating golf course. (It also boasts the best Fourth of July fireworks display my dad says he’s ever seen.)
Lemke avoids easy characterizations or depictions of Coeur d’Alene in his songs, while also portraying, in nearly every song, the mixture of envy and pain that can accompany our struggles at life in America. This Coeur d’Alene is a place filled with stress, resentment, and hurt—with people who see “the mansions gleam like topaz in the mountain’s inky heights,” and contrast them with their own, more proximate “houses all in rows, uniform and brown.” As a child, Lemke told me, he sensed “a dividedness in the town”: between the ordinary people who lived there, and the visitors who came with more money from far away. Many of the album’s songs are characterized by this uneasy envy over those who’ve “made it,” and those who feel stuck in place.
Lemke’s lyrics are beautiful and compelling, full of imagery that sticks in your head long after his songs fade away.
The track “Wonderful Life” (referencing the classic 1946 Capra film) shares the life of a young man whose mother is in a nursing home and in need of constant care, thus keeping him in place despite his desire to leave. Like Jimmy Stewart, the protagonist notes longingly “the way other people’s lives seem to shine with God’s own light: a place near the coast, op-eds in the Seattle times.” (“But oh, what kind of son would just take off, no thought for anyone?”)
There’s something heartbreaking, too, about the hotel concierge in “Visit Beautiful Coeur d’Alene,” fiddling with his or her name tag, taking note of “the lobby’s velvet denizens” who “won’t look you in the eye like you’ve failed some hidden test.” Yet, at the end of that particular song, the concierge calls these visiting tourists “sheep without a shepherd,” and notes in an outburst of compassion, “God bless all such as these.”
“Local Business,” meanwhile, shares the more embittered thoughts of one of the kids who left, and is visiting for the weekend—he or she says of Coeur d’Alene, “It’s a dirty tourist trap. It’ll never love you back.”
There are moments where grace and wonder seem to break through, animating—and perhaps even redeeming—the brokenness of the lives in these songs: a red sun bleeds out in the mountain, followed in another track by a “dream of blood flowing from Christ’s own side.” In “Exonerated,” the protagonist who’s been “let off on a technicality” looks out on a world made new through relief, and “Weep[s] to see the winter sun, the Wednesday morning just begun; Post Falls never looked so beautiful, and it never will again.”
These songs gather up the shards of life, broken and pained, full of unrequited longing or disappointment, and seek out beauty in their fragments. By the second-to-last song, “Your Hometown,” many of the feelings of loss or betrayal felt by various imagined characters have melted away: “I forgive you, you dirty old town,” the protagonists says. “It’s not your fault I stuck around.”
This begrudging forgiveness seems to redeem the envy and pain over discrepancies in life outcome—those aforementioned mansions, glittering in the heights, now “shine, like jewels in the crown of your hometown,” and in the last song, the despair of “Only Idaho, Forever” has become “Forever, Only Idaho.”
“I chose the title because it’s an ambiguous phrase; it could be a cry of celebration or despair, spoken by anyone near or far about the town they grew up in,” Lemke noted. “They could be speaking of themselves, or of the place itself; wherever I go in the world, I take Idaho with me, and everything points back there for me; meanwhile, Idaho is forever exactly the place it is, and no other.”
Lemke’s lyrics are beautiful and compelling, full of imagery that sticks in your head long after his songs fade away. He’s careful to note specific places, geographic touchstones and objects which make north Idaho itself. I loved his description of “Bitter lake-sand smell, a jagged line of evergreen,” or of a jewelry case “glittering like a dragon’s hoard.” Lemke said he was “very exact about geography and factual correctness in ways no one will probably ever care about.” While he believes conveying a sense of place in writing is “a doomed venture”—“nothing I say can produce Coeur d’Alene (or Post Falls or wherever) in the mind of anyone who hasn’t been there,” he argues—Lemke also saw this exacting attention to detail as “an act of love toward the place.”
Efforts at literary and poetic regionalism—in the work of Willa Cather, Wendell Berry, and William Carlos Williams, for instance—suggest that it is an important and valuable thing to capture particular geographies and communities in art.
There’s an element of contrition to these songs,” Lemke says, “an apology to a place I left so suddenly, even eagerly. The sense of contempt in some of the songs, of being trapped in a place unworthy of one’s genius or whatever—those are my old teenage feelings.” Lemke’s parents have moved away from Coeur d’Alene, he notes, meaning “no triumphal return is actually possible.” But, he adds, northern Idaho still feels like home. “I have the sense of having been condemned to wander the earth, and I wonder from time to time what it’d have been like to stay,” he wrote.
The album has a pleasant, soft indie rock sound to it. The percussion shines in tracks like “Overpass in Dreams,” while other songs add brightness and color with trumpet, saxophone, banjo, and harmonica. “Burn Down the Title Loan” has a slight Black Keys vibe, while a couple of other tracks reminded me of older songs from the band The Airborne Toxic Event, with their mix of compelling narrative and soft guitar accompaniment. “Exonerated” features the steel guitar and rocking sway of an old country song, while “The Old Band” possesses an appropriately eighties-inspired sound. Only “Silverlake” seemed (to me) to have a sound somewhat mismatched to its narrative—its chipper combination of piano and brass felt ill-fitting to the moody angst of the lyrics.
I perceived a pattern of jewels and glass and chandeliers, cracks and sunshine and blood, glinting through the songs, perhaps suggesting that “all that glitters is not gold.” But ponderosa pines also connect and conclude the album: in the first song, the pines seem to convey the banality and emptiness of rooted human existence—the pines “leave their branches behind like they’re trying to leave the ground, and sometimes they drop a load of snow into the snow and it disappears without a sign or a sound…” The jagged line of evergreen against the sky speaks of suffocating stuckness or despairing remoteness in other lines in the album.
But the pines are also emblematic of hidden beauty, originality, and dignity: “they stand so tall, like they’re made for more than power lines and dirty strip malls, but there’s only one place they’ll ever grow: forever only Idaho.” Lemke seems to suggest that the tree’s locality in this place serves as its own form of beauty and power—the quotidian tree, so chained to place, offers hope and stability to the ground that holds them.
Efforts at literary and poetic regionalism—in the work of Willa Cather, Wendell Berry, and William Carlos Williams, for instance—suggest that it is an important and valuable thing to capture particular geographies and communities in art. But they also remind us how difficult it is to write about place while avoiding romanticism on the one hand, and despair on the other. Musical regionalism often comes to us through the preservation of folk music, through the beautiful, placed history of jazz, and the concerted efforts of composers like Dvorak with his “New World Symphony.” But a “placed” album is a difficult endeavor (as Sufjan Stevens might attest). Lemke has given us a beautiful one, one that avoids the easy traps of nostalgia or disdain.
“Any place where people live and die deserves to be written about, and places that aren’t written about unfortunately start to seem less real, at least to a certain mind that approaches life through the lens of art,” Lemke says. Forever Only Idaho is a thought-provoking, enjoyable album about Coeur d’Alene—but like any good work of art, it’s also an enjoyable album for all of us, no matter where we’ve grown up. It’s a work that draws heart and head homeward, to consider the pains and joys of ordinary life, and the importance of ordinary acts of fidelity.
Gracy Olmstead is a writer whose work has appeared in The American Conservative, New York Times, The Washington Post, and elsewhere. Her book Uprooted: Recovering the Legacy of the Places We’ve Left Behind was published in March 2021.
Forever Only Idaho was released on March 19, 2021. You can listen to the title track and purchase the album on his website here.
