Cover illustration of Naylor Pluming and Heating's Nationaline Planalog, c. 1947
I like it when musicians decide to "go country" for a minute - I'll admit that I prefer songs like the Magnetic Fields' "Fear of Trains", the Rolling Stones' "Dead Flowers", REM's "(Don't Go Back to )Rockville", and the Field Mice' "Canada" to a lot of legit country classics. But I was skeptical about the idea of the Green Pajamas making a country album - their potent mix of late-60s psychedelia, urgent pop hooks, and Victorian-lit fetishism is just right for the kind of psych-rock material they've churned out since the mid-80s and "Kim the Waitress", but how does that style adapt to country music? I was surprised how well it works - one key thing is that Jeff Kelly's penchant for Victorian melancholy is only a few degrees separated from the gin-soaked sadness of a country singer.
The other key is in something that producer Tom Dyer has said: "I don't think [Jeff Kelly] was so deliberately trying to be psychedelic, he was just making cool records." With a few tweaks, the songs on Green Pajama Country! could be squeezed into any Green Pajamas record without note - they're not that far from the band's psych-rock wheelhouse. But the arrangements and certain new lyrical imagery (the songs are festooned with whiskey glasses, truck stops, and smoldering cigarettes) put these songs into territory of their own, with Kelly's yearning voice and fluid guitar parts fitting to the new style perfectly. Songs like "Dark Water (in the Wires)" and "Last Night Was Like the End of the World" are already Green Pajamas classics in my estimation, and the rest of the album isn't far behind. The album's first single is "Pass Me Another Whiskey" - it has a few spots where the rhyme scheme annoyingly breaks down, but it'll give you a good sense of the sound the Green Pajamas are going for with their foray into country.
"Pass Me Another Whiskey" by the Green Pajamas
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