Album Review: TERRA COTTA by Joseph Solomon
A song cycle built on rebooked flights and half-apologies follows one couple from takeoff to the end of the world. Joseph Solomon turns the distance into his most cohesive writing yet.
The flights are always bumped, the weekends always pushed back an hour or two, and there’s always a friend’s couch in a city that’s never really been his; that’s the life of the touring R&B singer when the road proves more resilient than whoever was waiting on the other side. Joseph Solomon sang the words to other people’s choruses into a webcam before he ever wrote one himself, and there’s still a looseness to his own originals from an artist who knows how a melody should resolve, even before he gets to the final phrases. TERRA COTTA is about one failing love affair split across the country with the same woman and the same departure repeated in each song, and the ever-present doubt in his mind that ultimately, it’s he who’s gonna be going.
That he writes so much that’s suspicious, yet turns it into a loving if still wary declaration of feeling is his highest trick. The first, “TOO HIGH!”, sees heaving anxiety turned to a warning, the persona standing beneath a climbing partner’s racing heart (his climbing only a little behind hers) whispering to “keep my toes on the ground,” worried “a long way to fall” because he is, famously, “still scared of heights.” But he allows the twist, that “You don’t fall in love, you rise to it/Up is the only direction.” In just two lines, in just a single song, he has spoken his fear directly, then dismissed it. Later, “MEET THE SUN,” with a swelling arrangement-the most overtly a “rock band”-sees him simply name his problem then resolve to set it right, admitting his partner’s “a flight risk” “But we could be more if we decided” and asking her “Would you stay ‘till morning meets the sun.”
What staying costs is fought over at the table of a restaurant, and that fight is the best piece of writing on “HALF ON THE BLAME.” It, the reservation, is already a bad sign on, and instead of swallowing the reservation whole, he draws a line down the middle of it. He’ll take his share and then some, but “you gotta make changes too,” and he’ll “won’t be taking the guilt for everything.” He calls playing the victim her best move and says she’s “allergic to responsibility,” and walks the entire fight down into a number, “Like forty-five, fifty-five.” A live band moves with him the entire way, guitar and bass and piano, and leaving the vocal plenty of room to push back off as the fight moves down and down and down, so it has a place to land. The apology answers itself on “UNBROKEN HEARTS,” where he says more plainly than anywhere else the damage, owns it that he’ll confuse, “self-love with self-sabotage/Therapy after red wine” that the two will be, “unlearning panic from a past life,” and all of it narrowing down to one question, whether people as used to running will, “love like unbroken hearts.” he moves from confession to something approaching hope without moving back from the confession.
Hope does not remain that safe for long. A Smokey Bear PSA opens “FIREFIGHTER,” “Remember, only you can prevent forest fires,” and then it’s off to a couple who can’t stop fighting turned to weather, “We’re making love in a wildfire.” We “fight, we sex, and it’s all right.” He can’t stay, and he can’t leave, “One hand is on the door, but the other’s tryna feel your skin,” and he’ll keep both of those arms inside the burn, asking the question of love, “when we’re burning down.” Disaster climbs from the burning house fire into an all-consuming flame that sets the sky and all on fire too. On “END OF DAWN,” radio calls from somewhere out of time say that, “the sun is setting… Scientists have numbered our days,” and the governments fail while the stars and moon turn to fire. Later in the song, a verse hands him a verdict, “Medicine will help me on, but it’s only matter of days.” he answers the doctor with the very same thing he’s been asking the apocalypse since minute one, that they’ll be “still in love on the last day of the sun.”
Back on earth, he maps the distance out, a city at a time. A friend’s couch, another call to Delta, and the flight will move back one more time, “Family waiting in Texas,” a love that has “moved on to New Orleans.” But underneath it all, the line he delivers with all the finality of someone about to turn into stone in “WAITING IN GEORGIA.” That, “Nobody’s waiting for me in Georgia.” He could turn and go home any time now, he just won’t if he can’t fly it as a return trip, “I won’t fly home soon unless I fly home to you,” the closest this man gets to a solid plan. That same distance is a daydream in “SAN JUNIPERO,” wishing he could fall asleep and wake with her into an escape and never come to. “Religion, trauma, image, money,” are listed as her reasons for running. This is the one place where the writing is just about to float off with mood. Lines are pretty, a little weightless, the song a still pond at the center of moving waters.
The one time he’s not singing to the girlfriend in the same way, he is singing to his mother on “MOTHER’S CHILD.” he begins on a body, “made from yours/Water and womb,” a grown son who, despite how far he’s traveled, is “still my mother’s child.” Faith, “comes and it goes,” he says, but “love from you” does not. He turns the doubt that was born in him, the questioning he feels, toward the light: “Sometimes I’ve questioned if I’m God’s/But I know that I’m my mother’s child.” He is looking at his son, a boy who carries her smile and his frame, wishing he were her baby’s hero and trying to imbue him with a desire to love her, too. He’s the only man in the song who can’t lose the one he’s talking to.
Great (★★★★☆)
Favorite Track(s): “HALF ON THE BLAME,” “MOTHER’S CHILD,” “MEET THE SUN”