* * *

Call It What It Is is unpredictable, lacking much cohesion, weird—and brilliant. It was recorded over the course of a year, with sessions sometimes happening months apart. I theorized to Harper that the record’s melodic, lyrical, and thematic inconsistency was related to the intervals between sessions, and he didn’t disagree. “Oftentimes what you are doing and what you think you are doing aren’t the same thing,” he said. He needed time in between sessions to let the recordings settle, to give himself some critical distance. He ended up with an album that tacks between the dark—images of the literal end of the world—and the light, with a girl carried aloft by a pink balloon. Call It What It Is is an exercise in getting jerked around; it’s an 11-track tilt-a-whirl.

“When Sex Was Dirty,” which kicks off the record, is upbeat and drum-driven, beer-soaked. It begins:

I remember when sex was dirty

And the air was clean

Harper grew up in Claremont, which is situated east of Los Angeles in a smoggy nexus of cars, geography, and industry. In the song, he remembers it before all this, in the ’70s and ’80s, when he was a kid. This was, he says, “when there were orange groves,” and sex “was not really in the conversation.”

The song’s an ode to his old friends who know him best. To all the sons and daughters of the boulevard who learned to go without sleep and to hide all the scars.

“It’s for them, it’s for my closest friends who have survived and sustained through some of the harder periods of the human experience,” he said. “Now mind you, it’s not famine, it’s not a Third World situation, but it’s incredible how First World problems can quickly degrade into a significant level of despair.”

That despair permeates many of the songs on the record. “How Dark Is Gone” is inspired by a friend of Harper’s from Claremont; Dee was a few years older, another black kid in a town where there weren’t many. “I have vivid memories of sitting with him outside the front of my house on the rock wall,” he says. “Even though I was just a little grom, he always gave me an affirming nod and a kind word, seemingly as curious about me as I him.”

In the early ’80s, Dee was put in jail. In an attempt to escape, he tied some sheets together. The sheets slipped open and he fell to his death. Harper wasn’t terribly close to him, but his friends were. Said Harper: “To see them grieve and the stories that we all now tell, having coming up to the middle of our lives—it’s a song for us.”

“How Dark is Gone,” with its fast, aggressive strumming and thumping that recalls a club’s drenched and dirty floor, is effectively at odds with lyrics that deal meaningfully with getting old.



As life traces

The lines in our faces

I won’t look away

* * *

Ageing, in fact, seems to be among the record’s dominant obsessions, and it’s certainly present in “All That Has Grown,” which is Call It What It Is’s literal midpoint. The song, a reflection on an enduring, not always placid relationship, evokes in the listener a serenity that, given what has preceded, feels well-earned. It offers a few minutes to catch our breath before the record flips over: