Young male singers won the right to be sensitive in 1963, when The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan was released. And in the 63 years since, being young and vulnerable and questing has been one of the great default settings. I’d say you can’t go far wrong singing sadly about your feelings, but of course you can, as the great mountain of discarded troubadours proves. Yet the size of that rejects mountain also tells us how alluring the prospect of baring one’s feelings to strangers can be.
Zach Condon, who works as Beirut, and Dove Ellis are at different points on the sensitive young man spectrum. Condon is 39 for a start, so the young bit doesn’t even hold true. He was part of a wave of a particular sort of sensitive young men in the first decade of the century – ones who looked outside the US rock and folk tradition, to history and geography, and who used unconventional instrumentation to bring their songs to life.
Alongside Condon in those years were the likes of Colin Meloy of the Decemberists, singing about old sailing ships and Spanish infantas, and Sufjan Stevens making elaborate baroque folk albums about American states. It was like a librarian’s convention exploding into a rave, and all owed a very particular debt to the album In the Aeroplane Over the Sea by Neutral Milk Hotel – ground zero for this sort of thing.
Condon’s was a very particular sound, woozy with horns, redolent of some mythical and non-specific place somewhere south and east of Vienna, and it’s still more or less what he and his band do.
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