Earlier today, I was rummaging frenetically through the shelves and drawers of my room, searching for a few crumpled papers covered with red chicken scratch – artifacts that were certain to provide vital inspiration for my review of Tea For Julie’s The Sense in Tying Knots. After several futile minutes of leafing through reams of disheveled papers and dust-sheathed notebooks, I finally dug up the object of my search: a transcription of an unpublished interview I conducted with Tea For Julie last year.
As I read the questions and answers one by one, I recalled with a smile my wide-eyed zeal that day, the excitement of being whisked backstage to sit down and talk with one of my favorite bands. I reached the abrupt end of a page and realized that a sheet was missing from the transcript. I returned to the drawer and continued my search, but before I could find the missing paper I was distracted by a more intriguing discovery -– a high school yearbook that had been left unheeded for years, filled with sentiments just waiting to be remembered. I dug deeper and unearthed long-forgotten notebooks hiding poems and stories, letters from friends removed and family departed, and juvenile drawings produced before I had acknowledged (or cared) that a hand is supposed to have only five fingers. I have yet to find the final page of my transcript, but in my search I happened upon a more profound and appropriate source of inspiration for my review of this record.
There is a lot of power in nostalgia, and Tea For Julie uses this power to great effect in The Sense in Tying Knots, the long-awaited follow-up to their impressive debut, Division. The record plays like a musical reverie on the dichotomy between the desire to stray from the past and the need to reclaim it. “I think that home – the idea of home – is a big theme,” says Michael Deresh, lead vocalist and guitarist. “And there's a theme running throughout it of getting back to feeling where you came from tugging at you at a certain point.”
The songs paint a dual, complimentary portrait of urban adulthood and rural childhood. On one end of the spectrum, “Scape” and “Pollyanna” vividly illustrate a cityscape at night, complete with the inherent potential and exhilaration of the big city after dark. They evoke images of dark buildings with illuminated windows, headlights and taillights blurring red and white through streets and highways, and the palpable vibrancy of nightlife. It's not through the craftwork of the lyrics alone that this is achieved — the fabric of the music itself is deeply evocative and multifaceted, providing a very apt backdrop. Drums palpitate with urgency, guitars swell and swoon, and bass rhythms dance throughout. “Lamplights & the Long Walk” and “The Meantime” have a metropolitan vibe, but with interlacing feelings of intimacy and pensiveness that suggest that the party is over, so to speak, but still buzzing resoundingly within.
On the other end of the spectrum are songs that reach deep into yore to reclaim vestiges of the past. “Salamander Queen” and “Far Off Sun” play like a montage of sepia photos, conjuring recollections of childhood simplicity and innocent optimism. “And Winter Calls” and “Snow Globe” swirl and cycle through the revolution of days, seasons, and years, conveying the passage of time as a chronicle of unfolding memories. “Tying Knots” and “Get Home” pull the record’s thematic elements together, communicating very sincerely the need to knit the rift between past and present, between family and self, between home and retreat.
This record is a big step forward for Tea For Julie in many respects. The sophistication of interplay between instruments has continued to develop since Division. Every note illuminates the meaning of its respective song, and each song is integral to the record as a whole. The lyrics of freeform poetry are the only source of loose ends in the music, at times equivocal but never nondescript. Each time I listen through the record, I find new ways to tie ends together and glean meaning from them. An important progression in Tea For Julie’s evolution is their common investment toward a clear, universal motif. The angst of a quarterlife crisis is something that everybody can, or someday will, relate to, and to hear it conveyed with such passion, intelligence, and optimism is refreshing.
But in the end, the universal must stem from the personal, and this is where Tea For Julie has really grown, and hopefully it is where they will continue to grow. The surest way to stir the heartstrings of others is to strum your own.