Its hard not to think of the 1990’s when listening to Susan James’ Driving Towards the Sun. It was a golden era of roosty folk-pop from female singers that culminated in the Lilith Fair touring festival. Susan James would have fit well on stage between Sheryl Crow and Susanne Vega. This makes sense when you remember its only her second album since she took a hiatus after her 1998 release Fantastic Voyage. The overall vibe of the album does make it sound a bit dated, but the overall strength of the songs come close to making up for it.
Driving Towards the Sun in an intriguing blend of bright California melodies and bleak, heartbreaking lyrics. The one exception is “Wandering,” a Carpenters-esque song about getting lost and finding each other. Beyond this track, the only hope that can be found lies in leaving and even that is sometimes too much to ask for. “When our final days have come and gone, will you still remember me,” she wonders on the closing “Mission Bells.” The rest of the album seems determined not to answer this question so much as to find out if the query makes a decent center for a relationship. “Anniversary” finds a wife clinging to the remnants of her marriage, trying desperately to drag her husband into the fray to fight for it, trying to convince him that it is worthy of such an effort. “Agua Dulce Tears” finds her look back at the wreckage of the failure, musing “I remember looking at my well worn ring, sometimes so solid and unbending, in the neon glow, you know, sometimes it could look so hollow...the final call-devotion couldn’t get us through.” Perhaps she sums up the album best on “U-Haul in the Driveway,” with a simple “Goddamn this haunted daylight, I’ll curse this day for all of my life.”
With an album so consistently bleak, it would be easy for the album to fall into a depressing rut of singer-songwriter melancholia. Producer Ryan Ulyate and a top notch band help to save Driving Towards the Sun from this fate. Ulyate stays true to his Jayhawks form, threading elements of 70’s sunshine through the music. Chris Lawrence and Eric Heywood alternately add georgous touches of steel guitar throughout the album that bring the songs right up to the edge of country. James has said that she and Ulyate sought to create a wall of sound vibe, and the album accomplishes that with flair. Ulyate keeps the music layered, yet subtle, creating an intimate cushion around the delicate lyrics.
Driving Towards the Sun is not an immediately memorable album. Like most of its Lilith era peers, it is an album the requires multiple listens, but one that will serve as a crutch at the most heartbreaking of times. While there is nothing here that quite manages to fuse the bleak with the catchy as well as Sheryl Crow’s Globe Sessions, it does manage a sound that it quite a lot brighter. At some point the ability to wrap lines like “I’ll never make him happy, I’ll never make him whole” inside some of the purest and most angelic surf rock this side of The Beach Boys. And, for that, Driving Towards the Sun in well worth a second, a third and a fourth listen.
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