{"id":3237,"date":"2021-04-21T15:12:57","date_gmt":"2021-04-21T15:12:57","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/farefwd.com\/?p=3237"},"modified":"2021-04-21T15:13:01","modified_gmt":"2021-04-21T15:13:01","slug":"forever-only-idaho","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/farefwd.com\/index.php\/2021\/04\/21\/forever-only-idaho\/","title":{"rendered":"Forever Only Idaho"},"content":{"rendered":"\t\t
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There\u2019s No Place Like Home<\/h2>\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<\/section>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<\/section>\n\t\t\t\t
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Harrison Lemke\u2019s hometown album captures the complications of place without resorting to romanticism or despair.<\/p>\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t

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Review by Gracy Olmstead<\/em><\/p>

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Harrison Lemke\u2019s album Forever Only Idaho<\/em> serves as an ode to a place, and a group of people, that he\u2019s left behind. It\u2019s an album about childhood memories and regret, about the voices that tell us to \u201cgo far\u201d (or whisper the word \u201cfailure\u201d in our minds if we don\u2019t). And it excellently captures the complicated layers of love and frustration, anxiety and fondness we often feel about the places we\u2019re from.<\/p>

According to Lemke\u2019s website, the album imagines the stories of \u201cthe Coeur d\u2019Alene High School graduating class of 2006 in 2018, wherever they ended up\u2026 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.\u201d<\/p>

But it\u2019s also about \u201cthe self-absorbed, self-hating small American town, and the way its anxieties and failures follow its children wherever they go.\u201d There\u2019s even one track\u2014 \u201cMissed Connection Blues\u201d\u2014dedicated to those who \u201cfell off the map,\u201d whose stories have been lost to time or lack of better acquaintance.<\/p>

In an email conversation, Lemke said he didn\u2019t plan to make an album about Coeur d\u2019Alene. But writing songs about the holidays kept pulling him back to his childhood\u2014\u201cwhen 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,\u201d he wrote. \u201cEverything points back to it, even if you\u2019d rather it didn\u2019t.\u201d<\/p>

My mom grew up in northern Idaho, in the town of Moscow, and so I\u2019ve been to Coeur d\u2019Alene a handful of times. I have two uncles and aunts who live there now. It\u2019s the original home of the Coeur d\u2019Alene, or Schitsu’umsh<\/em>, 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\u2019s white supremacist compound, the Aryan Nations (created and disbanded in the 20th<\/sup> century near Hayden Lake). These days, it\u2019s 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\u2019s ever seen.)<\/p>

Lemke avoids easy characterizations or depictions of Coeur d\u2019Alene 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\u2019Alene is a place filled with stress, resentment, and hurt\u2014with people who see \u201cthe mansions gleam like topaz in the mountain’s inky heights,\u201d and contrast them with their own, more proximate \u201chouses all in rows, uniform and brown.\u201d As a child, Lemke told me, he sensed \u201ca dividedness in the town\u201d: between the ordinary people who lived there, and the visitors who came with more money from far away. Many of the album\u2019s songs are characterized by this uneasy envy over those who\u2019ve \u201cmade it,\u201d and those who feel stuck in place.<\/p><\/div>\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<\/section>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<\/section>\n\t\t\t\t

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Lemke\u2019s lyrics are beautiful and compelling, full of imagery that sticks in your head long after his songs fade away.<\/p>\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t

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The track \u201cWonderful Life\u201d (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 \u201cthe way other people’s lives seem to shine with God’s own light: a place near the coast, op-eds in the Seattle times.\u201d (\u201cBut oh, what kind of son would just take off, no thought for anyone?\u201d)<\/p>

There\u2019s something heartbreaking, too, about the hotel concierge in \u201cVisit Beautiful Coeur d\u2019Alene,\u201d fiddling with his or her name tag, taking note of \u201cthe lobby’s velvet denizens\u201d who \u201cwon’t look you in the eye like you’ve failed some hidden test.\u201d Yet, at the end of that particular song, the concierge calls these visiting tourists \u201csheep without a shepherd,\u201d and notes in an outburst of compassion, \u201cGod bless all such as these.\u201d<\/p>

\u201cLocal Business,\u201d meanwhile, shares the more embittered thoughts of one of the kids who left, and is visiting for the weekend\u2014he or she says of Coeur d\u2019Alene, \u201cIt’s a dirty tourist trap. It’ll never love you back.\u201d<\/p>

There are moments where grace and wonder seem to break through, animating\u2014and perhaps even redeeming\u2014the brokenness of the lives in these songs: a red sun bleeds out in the mountain, followed in another track by a \u201cdream of blood flowing from Christ\u2019s own side.\u201d In \u201cExonerated,\u201d the protagonist who\u2019s been \u201clet off on a technicality\u201d looks out on a world made new through relief, and \u201cWeep[s] to see the winter sun, the Wednesday morning just begun; Post Falls never looked so beautiful, and it never will again.\u201d<\/p>

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, \u201cYour Hometown,\u201d many of the feelings of loss or betrayal felt by various imagined characters have melted away: “I forgive you, you dirty old town,\u201d the protagonists says. \u201cIt’s not your fault I stuck around.”<\/p>

This begrudging forgiveness seems to redeem the envy and pain over discrepancies in life outcome\u2014those aforementioned mansions, glittering in the heights, now \u201cshine, like jewels in the crown of your hometown,\u201d and in the last song, the despair of \u201cOnly Idaho, Forever\u201d has become \u201cForever, Only Idaho.\u201d<\/p>

\u201cI chose the title because it\u2019s 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,\u201d Lemke noted. \u201cThey 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.\u201d<\/p>

Lemke\u2019s lyrics are beautiful and compelling, full of imagery that sticks in your head long after his songs fade away. He\u2019s careful to note specific places, geographic touchstones and objects which make north Idaho itself. I loved his description of \u201cBitter lake-sand smell, a jagged line of evergreen,\u201d or of a jewelry case \u201cglittering like a dragon’s hoard.\u201d Lemke said he was \u201cvery exact about geography and factual correctness in ways no one will probably ever care about.\u201d While he believes conveying a sense of place in writing is \u201ca doomed venture\u201d\u2014\u201cnothing I say can produce Coeur d\u2019Alene (or Post Falls or wherever) in the mind of anyone who hasn\u2019t been there,\u201d he argues\u2014Lemke also saw this exacting attention to detail as \u201can act of love toward the place.\u201d<\/p><\/div>\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<\/section>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<\/section>\n\t\t\t\t

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Efforts at literary and poetic regionalism\u2014in the work of Willa Cather, Wendell Berry, and William Carlos Williams, for instance\u2014suggest that it is an important and valuable thing to capture particular geographies and communities in art.<\/p>\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t

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There\u2019s an element of contrition to these songs,\u201d Lemke says, \u201can 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\u2019s genius or whatever\u2014those are my old teenage feelings.\u201d Lemke\u2019s parents have moved away from Coeur d\u2019Alene, he notes, meaning \u201cno triumphal return is actually possible.\u201d But, he adds, northern Idaho still feels like home. \u201cI have the sense of having been condemned to wander the earth, and I wonder from time to time what it\u2019d have been like to stay,\u201d he wrote.<\/p>

The album has a pleasant, soft indie rock sound to it. The percussion shines in tracks like \u201cOverpass in Dreams,\u201d while other songs add brightness and color with trumpet, saxophone, banjo, and harmonica. \u201cBurn Down the Title Loan\u201d 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. \u201cExonerated\u201d features the steel guitar and rocking sway of an old country song, while \u201cThe Old Band\u201d possesses an appropriately eighties-inspired sound. Only \u201cSilverlake\u201d seemed (to me) to have a sound somewhat mismatched to its narrative\u2014its chipper combination of piano and brass felt ill-fitting to the moody angst of the lyrics.<\/p>

I perceived a pattern of jewels and glass and chandeliers, cracks and sunshine and blood, glinting through the songs, perhaps suggesting that \u201call that glitters is not gold.\u201d 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\u2014the pines \u201cleave 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\u2026\u201d The jagged line of evergreen against the sky speaks of suffocating stuckness or despairing remoteness in other lines in the album.<\/p>

But the pines are also emblematic of hidden beauty, originality, and dignity: \u201cthey 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.\u201d Lemke seems to suggest that the tree\u2019s locality in this place serves as its own form of beauty and power\u2014the quotidian tree, so chained to place, offers hope and stability to the ground that holds them.<\/p>

Efforts at literary and poetic regionalism\u2014in the work of Willa Cather, Wendell Berry, and William Carlos Williams, for instance\u2014suggest 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 \u201cNew World Symphony.\u201d But a \u201cplaced\u201d 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.<\/p>

\u201cAny place where people live and die deserves to be written about, and places that aren\u2019t written about unfortunately start to seem less real, at least to a certain mind that\u00a0approaches life through the lens of art,\u201d Lemke says. Forever Only Idaho<\/em> is a thought-provoking, enjoyable album about Coeur d\u2019Alene\u2014but like any good work of art, it\u2019s also an enjoyable album for all of us, no matter where we\u2019ve grown up. It\u2019s 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.<\/p><\/div>\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<\/section>\n\t\t\t\t

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Gracy Olmstead <\/em><\/strong>is a writer whose work has appeared in <\/em>The American Conservative, <\/em>New York Times, <\/em>The Washington Post, and elsewhere. Her book <\/em>Uprooted: Recovering the Legacy of the Places We’ve Left Behind<\/a> was published in March 2021. <\/em>
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Forever Only Idaho<\/em><\/strong> was released on March 19, 2021. You can listen to the title track and purchase the album on his website here<\/a>. <\/em>
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Harrison Lemke\u2019s hometown album captures the complications of place without resorting to romanticism or despair. 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