Big Ditch Road lets listeners explore emotions

-- Bob Longmore

On a day when the apocalyptic headline in the Star Tribune told of the sun’s disappearance for the remainder of the year, a lazy, but intense whiskey voice escaped from the speakers of my stereo, commiserating with me on a sunless Minnesota morning, "Took a vacation/ to the state hospital.” Darin Wald is the lead singer of local alt-country band Big Ditch Road and as a listener might expect on an album named "Suicide Note Readers Companion,” Wald knows how to capture the mood of a gray and cold winter’s day.

"My sister came to pick me up/ take the meds from a paper cup,” Wald continues on the album’s opening track, "Seven Hours.” An acoustic guitar, in perfect time with the machine gun downbeat, is hit hard, as if it is being punched with the same frustration that bubbles through Wald’s vocals. There is another guitar filling in the space with sporadic ringing notes and the occasional cry.

"The nurses they took me in/ asked me what I was and who I’d been/ they took the laces from my shoes,” the song continues. This song and album were written on the far side of a big valley for Darin Wald. "Seven Hours” speaks candidly about his time spent in a mental hospital. Although unlike some songwriters who sing about these demons, Wald never allows himself to bathe in a narcissistic woe-is-me selfishness. Instead, he allows the listener to peer in and maybe see little pieces of their imperfect selves. He allows the listener to follow, as the emotional valley becomes a mountain leading to a peak.

"Seven hours ago/ I was really close,” the chorus repeats. There are moments that are completely and irrevocably etched into my memory. These are Pavlovian reactions to a song where I am immediately transported to a certain place and time and emotion: Sonic Youth’s "Sugar Kane” and the intersection of Granby Street and 38th Street in Norfolk, VA, where I stared out from my apartment for hours in the winter of 1993.

The CC Club on a Sunday morning listening to Queen’s "Fat Bottom Girls” on the jukebox as I drank vodka and ate greasy breakfast foods. My living room on a gray winter day where I kept turning up the volume on the stereo as Big Ditch Road’s "Seven Hours” played on repeat, so that I could feel the bass guitar rattling my insides. This song is a story of numbness to the world, induced by living life and the sometimes-painful steps required to keep on living. This is the kind of song that I want to tell everyone about, but I know that even if they might like it or even if they might really love it, they will never be able to feel what I feel when I listen to it. What I feel is an unexplainable connection to a dark mood, a cold day and the perfect soundtrack.

"What you did or you didn’t do/ Some things they have to keep away from you,” the song continues. Just as eventually the sun will sneak through a blanket of dark clouds, optimism escapes between the seams of Wald’s lyrics, "Sometimes I wish that I never left/ It’s the first night I ever….” The lyric ends and the listener is left to decide the fate of the song. Is the future hopeful? Is it miserable? Well, are you an optimist or a pessimist? The vocals give way to the aching guitar, which bleeds into a fuzzed out, echoing and heartbreaking flourish of aggressive sad tone, which shoot through your chest and shake your heart so you can hear it beating in time to the punched guitar. Sometimes hope lives in the words that aren’t said.