It's New To Me: Watershed by Grant McLennan (1991)

Detail of Seeing the New Year In by Paul Cadmus, 1939

Grant McLennan doesn't get enough credit. As one half of the songwriting team that made up the Go-Betweens, he has always stood in the shadow of Robert Forster a little. McLennan came to songwriting later than Forster and wrote straight-forward pop songs about everyday life, while Forster's songs were always more ambitious and dramatic. They were great as partners, but many people perceive McLennan as the foil to a greater talent, which isn't fair. Nonetheless, McLennan has the distinction of having written the band's best-known song, "Cattle and Cane", which was voted one of Australia's best songs of all time a few years before McLennan's untimely death a few years ago. I've started exploring the solo work of the Go-Betweens' songwriters, and I've found McLennan's solo albums to be very impressive.

It's hard to listen to Watershed, McLennan's first solo work, without feeling like you're hearing a very unbalanced Go-Betweens record. And this is a natural consequence of expecting to hear Forster's songs balancing the dynamic of the album, but Watershed sounds much better if you can put these expectations aside. Released two years after the Go-Betweens disbanded, Watershed picks up where the band's last record, 16 Lovers Lane, left off. The songwriting is strong, and McLennan presents four excellent pop songs, mixed with a variety of slower ballads and country-tinged tunes. I've read complaints that the album suffers from early-90s production touches, but they don't bother me at all (with the exception of the hopelessly cluttered "Putting the Wheels Back On".) In fact, I find that the late-90s production of his later albums, particularly his last solo album In Your Bright Ray, is much more of an issue. Luckily, by the time the Go-Betweens reunited in 2000, McLennan and Forster had settled on a more mature and timeless sound.

One of my favorites on Watershed is "Black Mule", an odd and understated song that could be considered the album's centerpiece. With a spare arrangement of guitar and harmonica, the song has a countryish sound that McLennan would later flesh out in his 1994 album Horsebreaker Star. But the lyric is more mythical folk than country, telling of a nun on a black mule that helps people in need. Amanda Brown provides nice backing vocals, and the melody and guitar hook are "deceptively simple", a phrase that is commonly used to describe Grant McLennan's songwriting. I don't think McLennan is trying to deceive anyone, and describing his songs that way seems like an attempt to elevate him to the level of Robert Forster. To me, McLennan's songs are best served by setting the comparisons aside and just listening to the songs themselves instead.

"Black Mule" by Grant McLennan