I got an e-mail from Jason Kutchma a few weeks ago and my heart skipped a beat. Finally — more music from an artists who can’t miss ever. Given the drek that’s been winding up in there the last few months, it was no exaggeration that skipped the massive queue of waiting e-mails to hear what Jason’s been up to. His album Blue Highways is shoe-in for the Adobe & Teardrops hall of fame.
Wishing Well is a radical departure from that contemplative, spacious, astral country music. Kutchma’s wife works in global health, taking her time away as an opportunity to record a new album. But Jason’s fretting hand started killing him shortly before she left, which brought him to a more…synthesized approach here. If you were to take folk music and filter it through ’80s pop, you’d get something similar to Wishing Well — but it wouldn’t be good until you add Kutchma’s weighty vocals to the mix.
As on most of his work, Kutchma’s music seems to approach from a distant place, as if it’s beaming into your brain through a satellite. There’s a curious mix of cold isolation and the sheer force of Kutchma’s humanity, as if he’s constantly striving to break through the universe’s vast coldness and to shake us out of our doldrums. That’s most evident on the album’s keystone “Beautifully Fail”
Friend I wish you well
It’s alright if you beautifully fail
The prayer for comfort is followed up by the determined “Till the Wheels Fall Off,” an impassioned celebration of doing what you feel you must. The seemingly incongruous mix of styles feels the most blended on “You’ve Come a Long Way, Baby,” a sparkling New Wave-ish declaration that is softened by warm guitars and the love that suffuses Kutchma’s voice.
By adorning the album with iconography relating to Lincoln’s funeral, Kutchma isolates those moments of perceived failure that could be rethought — that we need to search for admiration for the process, the search for perfection, whatever the results may have been.