The hardest human project is change.
Whether you’re kicking a small bad habit or trying to become a better person for those around you, it’s common for us all to encounter a single hard reality eventually: our complex operating system is not easily rewired.
The world is inhabited by more people who failed to change than those who have succeeded. But wins can be found inside each lost attempt to evolve.
The latest album from 49 Winchester, Change of Plans, is itself a story of victories and defeats on the road to self-actualization. At times, the musical and lyrical cohesion reaches a level of creative excellence that it approaches the sublime. At its worst, this album delivers pleasant renditions of songs we’ve heard before. Luckily for fans of the Virginia Virtuosos (working nickname, we’ll see if it sticks), Change of Plans has more peaks than valleys.
Let’s start with the peaks.
Before discussing the music, it’s important to recognize 49 Winchester’s commitment to clarity and brevity. Except for The Wind, which has 11 songs, each of their six studio albums consists of only 10 songs. Oh, how the times have changed.
It may be a boomer take to pine for the days when albums were always around ten songs, but we owe the physical media of the 20th century a great debt of gratitude for the limitations they imposed on art. Paintings have frames, films are contained on screens, and albums used to be 45 minutes or less. And as is evidenced perhaps by the verbosity of this very paragraph, sometimes saying more does not always mean more.
Change of Plans draws strength from this self-imposed limitation. Although the album does not fit a clear macro-level narrative structure, each song carries the thesis of this album: change is difficult and has mixed results.
Of the original songs on this album (we’ll get to “Changes” in a moment), “Slowly” is the most successful. Plainly, the message of this song is that growing up and becoming the person you want to be is not something that happens overnight or linearly. It is done slowly and with one step backward for every two steps forward. The message of this song is enhanced by its clever musical construction. We begin with a guitar and Issac Gibson’s voice. A piano chord enters. The bass and pedal steel guitar follow with a kick drum in tow. Layers are added and taken away, symbolizing the ups, downs, and side-to-side movements of life. We don’t simply go through life acquiring skills and shedding weaknesses until we become unbreakable beings. Life is an interplay of cacophonous experiences that somehow have a collective momentum. The musical symbolism continues when we hear:
And I know how to walk a crooked line
Straight and narrow gets me every time
In the background, a piano melody gently draws a simple but crooked line with just four notes. A true master stroke in musical production.
This record is also a pure expression of southern rock, distilled to its essence by “Pardon Me.” The song’s D to C to G progression (mixolydian mode, for all you music theory nerds) is the native language of the American South, the same harmonic DNA as songs like “Sweet Home Alabama” and “Can’t You See.” The verse searches for salvation, and the chorus delivers it in anthemic form. The band works as one organism, six people who have spent a decade in a van together, squeezing every ounce of soul from their instruments.
Speaking of soul, “Changes.” Not much can be said about this song and this recording of it that hasn’t already been said or even screamed from an ecstatic live audience. A Black Sabbath cover, this rendition is the perfect tribute. Isaac Gibson’s truly magnificent vocal approach is to take each line as it comes and sing them as he feels them. No two vocal phrases are the same. Thematically, it is the perfect fit for this album, generously recorded by a band that knows how much its fans love hearing it live.
Much of the credit belongs to producer Dave Cobb, who has a track record of building around a singer rather than alongside one, and Change of Plans is no exception. Listen to the interplay on “Oh Savannah” and “Slowly” — it is beautiful but always ebbs and flows to create space around the vocal melody. This record sounds like the whole band is in the room together, something that’s a lot easier said than done in today’s recording industry.
There are no weak songs on Change of Plans. There are, however, songs we’ve heard before. “The Window” is a well-crafted portrait of Appalachian decline, honest, listenable, and authentic in every way that matters, but it does not score points for innovation. The coal town is dying, the train is getting lighter, and black lung is never coming through. These are true things, important things, but not new things. “Oh Savannah,” a gentle and beautiful song that wears its “Oh Susanna” debt openly (e.g., “with a guitar on my knee”), earns its place on talent, charm, and a dash of nostalgia. These songs represent the floor of this album, and the floor is very high. That is what a decade of relentless touring and six studio albums buys you: the ability to make a song that doesn’t aspire to push artistic boundaries and still sounds great. The ceiling, though, is elevated from where it was on Leavin’ This Holler, but it’s not evenly distributed.
49 Winchester makes really great music without reaching for it. Occasionally, they reach new heights through the alignment of vocal and instrumental talent, songwriting, and production, but it is never forced. Change of Plans may not be the best album of the year or win any awards, but it truly has some fantastically beautiful moments and definitely comes from a place of honesty and purity of intention. There is something heartwarming about this album. It feels secure and safe, but not in a cowardly way. It is beautiful music that delivers familiarity and newness in all the right places, and for longtime fans of this band, that is more than enough.
