Night Moves

Night Moves

Double Life Bless its battered body, but the Night Moves tour van is a piece of shit. It is your standard-issue blue Ford E-350 now months away from its 25th birthday, the sort of vehicle that occasionally prompts so-called normal folks to give the grimy musicians inside suspect stares. The catalytic converter has been stolen three times, so its now permanently straight-piped; the exhaust leaks through the holes and cracks in the sides, slowly gassing anyone inside. The wheel wells are shambles. And while John Pelant was writing Double Life, Night Moves fourth LP and first in six years, someone swiped the license plates just after he had paid for new tags. God fucking dammit, he remembers thinking. Who the hell steals a license plate?

But Pelant soon sublimated his frustration, turning his vision of a thief who had borrowed the plate in order to commit more crimes elsewhere into one of the most winning tunes in Night Moves country-soul-psych-rock catalogue, Daytona. As sun-swept synthesizers and pedal steel curl around stuttering drums, Pelant offers an empathetic portrait of someone doing whatever is necessary to reinvent their lives.

Daytona, you only wanted a win, he opens the final verse. Daytona, no chance I'll see you again. There's irritation in his voice, sure, but mostly there's acceptance, an understanding that he cannot comprehend someone else's difficulties and that he has plenty of his own. That is the spirit that animates and enlivens Double Life, a cozy and cool LP built largely from a string of very rough breaks that Pelant and Night Moves have navigated in recent years. There was the unexpected death of a father-in-law, then a drummer whose skin sloughed off during recording due to contact dermatitis. There were friends arrested for making mistakes in troubled times and assorted pals struggling with sobriety and sanity. And there was, once again, the ever-vexing question for artists about when they're supposed to step into the responsibilities of adulthood and maybe away from the lifelong compulsion to create, especially as Pelant started thinking seriously about marriage for the first time in his life.

Pelant is the sort of songwriter who starts with the music inspired of late by Glen Campbell and Bobby Caldwell, Cleaners from Venus and early 90s country, Panda Bear and (as ever) Gram Parsons and then writes lyrics only after he's sat with the tune a spell. But this time, these songs are direct documents of Pelant's life as he searches for silver linings or at least valuable meanings during a moment when very little seemed golden. Double Life is about moving through, not moving on.

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