Connor McGinnis

Connor McGinnis doesn’t come from a specific place, but rather from a kind of placelessness brought about by dizzying motion. Born in Boston to Midwestern parents, he was partly-raised in London, until he was moved again to New Mexico, to New York, to Colorado — and so on. These days he’s in Nashville. As a result of his own transient upbringing, Connor’s songs are similarly displaced vignettes. It’s that very sense of distance that informs his debut solo release, The Viewer.

From the near-lighthearted nostalgia of “Pink Flamingo Blues” to the biting and insightful criticism of “Black Friday,” the nine songs on the album manage to cover an expansive amount of ground. However, unlike many contemporary “American” songs, these aren’t sentimental stories of hometown heroes finding love down on Main Street — they are detached observations as out a car window, bittersweet ruminations like the empty sensation of passing through a nameless, forgotten town.

First and foremost, The Viewer places Connor as the anonymous observer, the omniscient narrator inviting us to suspend our disbelief at our own relationship to his stories. His writing, though, strikes inward as much it does outward, thanks to his calculated awareness of the wrongs of the world and his participation in them. The album is a constellation of portraits,
short snapshots of ungraceful love, bereavement, guilt, and the necessity of “letting go” when what was possible ultimately crashes against what is real.

“You think she left for good this time/flew off on some airline/as you squeeze out your lime/ and say good things never last. I know it’s been a hell of a year, collecting new regrets like souvenirs…”

The sonic palette of the record, produced by Gabe Rabben, is a departure for Connor, who formerly released two EPs with the New Mexico-based folk duo, The Zuni Mountain Boys. Though The Viewer certainly has elements of Americana, the album seems to take its cues more from the likes of Bruce Springsteen’s Tunnel of Love or Steve Winwood’s Back in the Highlife. Gated drums and bright synthesizers punctuate McGinnis’s stark, no-frills gravel, which sits high in the mix above the slick production.

Conversely, in “Black Friday,” only a lone fingerpicked guitar accompanies his direct vocal delivery. The remaining space creates room for the fierce rebuke of American consumer-culture and our plastic materialism — all while acknowledging the narrator’s own complicity. The simplicity of the arrangement is powerfully juxtaposed against its central theme: “God bless America/it doesn’t get you much.” This contrast makes the song one of the bleakest and most profound on the record.

McGinnis has moved around a lot and you get a sense of how that displacement occupies his writing; he belongs both everywhere and nowhere at once. The resulting melancholy and contemporary isolation is all over this record, which gives it a home in this modern world: at some moments a fantasy and at others just a bad dream. The strength and power of The Viewer is its narrator as its centerpiece: a lonesome observer who wants to see clearly what he is searching for, but for the most part is looking alone.

The Viewer is a perfectly postmodern, 21st -century statement: wearisome, vaguely angry, and resigned — but still not vanquished. It expresses our own current cultural moment all too well: at our worst cynical and detached, and at our best still asking the questions that hold us back from the edge of despair.