Peter And The Wolf 'Lightness' album

What kind of music would you want to hear if you and your baby were the last two people on a post-apocalyptic, godforsaken planet? If you were sitting by the sea, for example, watching that vast expanse of empty water crash upon the sands and then recede, knowing that this was all there would ever be. Who would you want singing from that beat-up tape player you just managed to save from whatever catastrophe it was that doomed the rest of us? Let me make a suggestion: Austin-based troubadour Red Hunter.

The first, self-titled album by Hunter’s Peter and the Wolf is absolutely mesmerizing, seducing listeners with dreams of freedom, adventure, collapse and rebirth. Through it all, Hunter’s voice – plaintive, dry as dust, desperate, yet strangely hopeful – casts his fragmented stories in a sepia tone. Songs like album opener “Under the Apple Tree,” with its magnificently understated pseudo-chorus, “How lucky to be so unusually free,” glint like shards of Depression glass, seeing their first light in decades.

The first part of the album evokes scenes from the new lives of survivors of some unnamed apocalypse – post-Armageddon folk songs. “The Fall” describes learning again the most basic survival skills: how to build a fire, how to look for water in the desert. In “Red Sun,” Hunter sings, “In my dreams I saw a thousand empty cities, papers blowing through the air,” and you get the feeling that there’s a frisson of energy linked to that destruction. The thrill is in what isn’t mentioned, the lacunae: the apocalyptic event, the future. Now anything is possible.

The last third of the album diverges slightly from the thematic path with “Dear Old Robyn,” a fun pirate number that details the picaresque life of a traveling band and ends with the promise that “tomorrow we return to the sea.” “Silent Movies” proves an almost-bubblegum ballad with Hunter crooning, “I truly believe we’ll fall in love again someday.”

The real stunner of the disc, however, is its last track, called “What Happened Up There.” At just over four minutes, it’s the longest song on the album and it begins with a voiceover about the Spanish Civil War before proceeding into heartbreaking obsessive terrain made beautiful by the interplay of voices – Hunter’s desolate and Dana Falconberry’s angelic. The first part of the song ends with an apt description of the whole record: “a waterfall suspended in the light.” Then there’s a break before the song slowly builds up again into a quasi-Guided by Voices fantasia of fizzy pop strangeness. The cumulative effect is bracing and leads you right back to the first track to start the whole magical journey again.

When it comes right down to it, Peter and the Wolf is Red Hunter, but he estimates that he’s had over 100 collaborators over the short lifespan of the band. On his newest offering, Experiments in Junk, he says, “It was all about playing with different groups of people, musicians and non-musicians, trying to get different bodies of sound. Because a certain sound has a specific momentum that even non-musicians can play along to, so you’ll hear a song and there’ll be 5 or 6 musicians on it and then 5 or 6 non-musicians.”

Hunter says that he just collects people in each city he plays and then they all get up and start playing music. I ask how he controls the songs and whether they ever get away from him in a live setting. “It’s important not to have it become a free-for-all,” he says. “There have been a few times when, well, let’s just say crazy drunks get up there and start doing their own thing. I try to keep it to the people whose music I’ve heard of people who are friends or friends of friends – some kind of frame of reference makes it work. And it does work. It’s amazing.”

Mainstream news providers have gushed over the latter part of this summer’s Peter and the Wolf tour, largely because it will be done via sailboat, amounting to what some call a statement about the rising costs of energy. You get the feeling, though, talking to Red that the sailboat tour (traveling along the Atlantic Intracoastal Waterway, which runs from Key West to Boston) is just another adventure. Here he is in an online interview with Paper: “The gas-price thing that ABC and MTV picked up on was really their idea, but that’s cool, too. I honestly don’t know the mileage a boat gets per gallon. And what if we’re going against the wind? I don’t care. I just want to have big adventures, to be out battling the elements, and to travel endlessly like a good old-fashioned troubadour.”

I talk to Red from Portland where he played the Towne Lounge on Wednesday and he admits that traveling itself invigorates him. “I pretty much live on the road,” he says and laughs. “I’ve tried to settle down and live in an apartment a few times, but I just can’t do it.”

It’s good news for us, because it means we’ll be seeing a lot of Red Hunter. And we won’t even have to wait for the end of the world.

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Peter And The Wolf - Lightness