The song that's never over
Ty Segall's extraordinary new album Three Bells charts a journey inside and out
Ty Segall has cast a spell on me.
Over the many years I’ve been listening to his albums and seeing him live, both solo and with his great bands, I’ve become more and more bewitched by his potent blend of thoughtful psychedelia and noisy glam-stomp. He’ll move between being quietly introspective and amped-up exclamatory, sometimes, often, in the same song. But his magic as I hear it occurs in the spaces between those two poles, where, tumbling in a minor key or moving breeze-like in the major his melodies and instrumentation chart an often hypnotic journey from the inside of his body to the inside of mine.
I’ve discovered that Segall’s songs are hard to write about; they playfully evade description, their movements slippery, tantalizingly so. Herbie Hancock has remarked that “Music happens to be an art form that transcends language.” (If only I were inclined to agree! It’d be a hell of a lot easier.) I do want to get at the heart of Segall’s new album, yet I may need to learn another language to do it. The fifteen songs on Three Bells sound like the inside of Segall’s head at 3 am as he regards the ceiling: stray thoughts, abstractions, philosophies, images, snippets of favorite songs commingle in kind of a sonic epistemology, what the mind knows, what the body feels.
Three Bells opens with “The Bell,” virtually an album in itself. Multi-segmented, sprawling for what feels longer than its five minutes, the song sets the album’s introverted mood and gets its ideas in motion. Driven in part by Yes’s Fragile/Close to the Edge-era expansiveness and Marc Bolan’s spacey feel for time and place, “The Bell” offers classic Segall imagery, which at its most expressive feel both private to him and personal to his listeners. The opening lines—
Walk in lines, they form a circle
The destination is where you have been
—get at what preoccupies the singer for the album’s hour-plus: the way out is nearly always the way in. (“Arrive without traveling,” sang George Harrison, whose brand of gracious psychedelia is another touchstone for Segall.) The most powerful songs on Three Bells feel and sound like snippets of overheard conversations between mind and body. The body’s what we use to move—toward others, toward loud music and dancing, toward the horizon. The mind’s what we use to reckon with all of that the movement.
In a sublime moment in the middle of “The Bell,” navigating a hilly terrain of expressive chords, Segall describes standing against a wall where “Holes appear, and, from them, hooks so I won’t fall,” and then
Outlines form arrows, they stay straight and do not bend
They point at numbers
and at that point Segall, in three voices, chants a litany of random numbers, smaller to larger, larger to smaller, digits tumbling together, and the effect is of time collapsing on itself, requiring that see the very notion of chronology fresh, or weird, again. It’s these kind of visions that Segall scores on Three Bells, where revelations inside pretty melodies do battle with jarring time signatures within elbow-throwing arrangements. Moving through Segall’s best songs can be unnerving, exhausting, and liberating at once.
As is the case on most of his sprawling discography, Segall handles the bulk of the instrumentation on Three Bells, playing drums, guitars, and bass on nearly every track. His playing throughout his remarkable, especially his supple and elegant drumming. “I have a different language with drums than I do any other instrument,” he said to Krysta Fauria at AP. “It’s kind of the only instrument I can really, I don’t know, express intuitively or in like a raw, outside-of-my-brain kind of way,” adding, “I think of drums sometimes as like singing where I can almost sing the drum part in my mind.”
Crank up an early Segall album, say Twins (2012) or Manipulator (2014), or one of his really loud live records, or, more to the point, the pummeling Slaughterhouse (2012), and you’ll hear Segall bravely marching through the ear-ringing maelstrom while being careful to not let things implode or, depending on the song, explode. His sonically tamer albums, of which Three Bells is a superlative example, offer a different Segall, a softer-voiced, more ruminative studio-bound musician who chases exquisite major/minor melodies and who’s open to subtle shadings—disparate guitar sound textures, evocative keyboard washes, challenging time signatures, playful stereo panning.
“The point where we begin and die / There is no separation,” Segall sings, his accompaniment striving to translate that insight into song. “The Bell”’s segments—acoustic ballad to agitated double-time to something that feels it’s in between to four-on-the-floor, propulsive drive—never contradict each other, instead they move, curiously, from one idea or association to the next. (“It’s fun to be like, ‘There’s these three mini songs. Let’s put them together into one’,” he said to Fauria.) Like many songs on the album, “The Bell” begins softly and ends loudly, a poignant quest from reflection to insight.
I’ve seen Segall live many times—most recently here, here, and here—and his shows, even the noisy, careening rock and roll shows, feel less physical than spiritual and interior. This has something to do with Segall’s mild demeanor onstage—he’s not one for showiness or spectacle between songs, and, playing, he often looks wholly preoccupied—but mostly with the nature and mood of his demanding but thoughtful songs. As with much powerful psychedelic music, the drama happens inside of them.
At the close of “The Bell” Segall sings, “Goodbye to my head.” Is he freaked out or relieved by this development? It’s hard to pin it down, though an answer’s suggested in the next song, “The Void,” an answer of sorts to “The Bell” and every bit its powerful equal. “It’s almost the thesis statement of the whole record, those two songs back-to-back,” Segall acknowledged to Dan Epstein at Flood. “The Void” ‘s a song about moving from your brain to the world outside, a path travelled often on Three Bells. “No more reason / Only joy,” he demands, and in the album’s imperative,
Stop conversation
And experience joy
And walk outside
Outside, the air is new, the world’s bright and dewy. Yet within a few lines, the mind intrudes again—
In here I realize
It’s all fake, what I’ve seen outside
Behind the doors I call my eyes I walk
“In here”? Where’s that? A room, Segall’s mind? It’s one and the same, I think, the place where he can see through a mirror to something clearer, where “stones are made of dust / And the metal is only rust.” These insights suggest that Segall’s world is, finally, immaterial, or real only in his head, except when he leaves his head for the material world (and back again).
That kind of circularity winds its way through the album, and the music, so flexible and dynamic, matches it in form. Segall’s lyrics on the album are mostly abstract, philosophically-tinged as if only in aphorisms or fragments can we deal with monumental discoveries. The movements in “The Void” create the song’s world, which, finally, seems to be the most dimensional place of all for Segall, and, as in “The Bell,” the song’s energies ramp up from gentle to strolling to stomping. Noise issuing from Segall’s guitars is the most tactile thing.
For the last few days, in between spins of Three Bells, I’ve been listening to Alice Coltrane’s Ptah, the El Daoud (the sublime “Blue Nile”!) and a bunch of stuff on the Space Rock: An Interstellar Traveller’s Guide compilation, so I’ve been on the right wavelength for Segall’s complex arrangements and shape-shifting forms. Not that mn all of the songs on Three Bells are as interested in interior states and physical planes as are “The Bell” and “The Void.” Segall likes to play and have fun, too, he always has, so we also have “My Best Friend,” with its Television-like tautness and brittle funk possibly the coolest song ever written about a dog, the sexy, New Wave-ish groove of “Move,” the album’s sole full band performance, recorded with his Freedom Band, and “To You,” a love song, and “Denée” a sweet, Lennon-esque tribute to Segall’s wife, who co-wrote the lyrics to five songs and also sings on the album (including the lead vocals on “Move.”)
At an hour and five minutes, Three Bells meanders a bit in its final third, and might’ve benefited from one or two fewer songs. Some of Segall’s less-focused lyrics drift from the abstract and metaphysical to the plainly mystifying, likely more personally profound to Segall than to a listener. That’s the risk of translating an interior life—sometimes the words just aren’t there. Asked in Flood if there is an overall concept to the album, Segall replied, “Before people have the chance to either put their own meaning into it or try to figure it out a bit, I wanna leave it a little bit more abstract,” adding, “I like to think that most of my records have a loose concept or through line; but this is me trying to dive as deep as I can, and I think I dove pretty deep.”
Speaking with Erin Wolf at Radio Milwaukee, Segall discussed this more fully, identifying a theme that he’s been working with “for years…which is just really reflecting on oneself and more the relationship to oneself … whatever that means for any individual.”
I do love that idea that everyone has a relationship with themselves. And it’s a cool concept to kind of sing about, really—a concept everyone can kind of understand and put their own kind of relationship into that a bit. And I think it’s kind of a bit more of a philosophical or deep dive into the ego, into oneself, kind of an album where I tried to write … well, I have written a lot of songs that kind of deal with that. But, to me, this was kind of the point of this one was to go as deep … deeper … go deeper.
Throughout much of Three Bells, Segall’s either preoccupied in the middle of a room, or he wants to escape that joint; by the time the mid-paced groover “My Room” arrives in the middle of the album, you wonder if a room hasn’t taken on figurative meanings, another way for Segall to “go deeper.” In the song’s stirring chorus, he confesses that “out there” he is nothing, that he’d rather stay inside his room (“the walls they are too comfortable”). A mysterious you is often addressed in Three Bells. In “My Room,” the singer waits. “Will you come?” he asks, promising, urged by an insistent guitar riff, that he’ll leave his door unlocked, that he’ll “just keep waiting by my door / In case I hear you knocking.”
Sixty years ago, Brian Wilson sang in his room where he locked out worries and fears, where he cried and sighed about yesterday. “Out there, I am nothing,” Segall sings on his song. “I am something inside my room.” But the door’s open, and he’s hoping, and the ringing guitars in the end feel like celebration. Three Bells ends with the lines, “I know what to do, me and you.” It’s the clearest and warmest discovery yet, an intimate, poignant close to this astonishing album.