There is a music that is made for me. I’m a girl who drives infinite miles on long dusty roads in an old 4×4 in search of treasure. My profession is to hunt the high deserts for rocks, gems, and fossils, and eventually lead people to the places of their hiding. I am often adrift in such lonesome country, but I am never alone. Pedal steel is my copilot.
I am a windows down, volume up, washboard road, pedal steel junkie. But it’s not honky tonk emanating from my crackling speakers, rather something strange and lovely. Somehow, this twangy table ‘n’strings has reincarnated into the new deity of ambient music. Some are hailing this moment as the birth of “ambient country” (particularly a podcasting gentleman by the name of Bob Holmes) and just as many are slapping back against such a moniker (particularly the musicians). It’s a box they don’t consider themselves sitting in. Or maybe they worry the term is all hat and no cattle. Niche subgenre hand wringing aside, there is an epiphany of beautiful pedal steel music awaiting our ears. Jump in.
I say this is a music that is made for me, but really I think it’s made for the rocks, for the wide open vistas, for mineral landscapes untainted by our horridness. If you could only drive a few hours with me, I would insist we listen to Barry Walker Jr.’s album Diaspora Urkontinent in its entirety. The work is undoubtedly geological, charting the birth of our planet from its earliest days. Tracks like “Accretion,” “First Life,” and “Ediacaran Moonrise” set the tone for an evolving planet and the miracle that is life. Earth is the only body in the solar system that has active plate tectonics—these tectonics drive evolutionary change, and evolutionary change is what led to us. I very much believe that it’s a lonely universe out there. We are all we have.
This makes our existence here all the more miraculous. Just look at us rolling together on this sweet earth with a plume of road dust rising behind us. The stuff getting kicked up by the tires is a cloud of infinitesimal quartz and feldspar and mica. This mineral cloud makes me think of the sonically stunning album Balsams by Chuck Johnson, which we will also listen to in its entirety. Tracks like “Moonstone” and “Labradorite Eye” invoke the very best of the ambient canon. I can’t help but think of Michael Strearns’ “As The Earth Kissed The Moon” or Iasos’ “Formentera Sunset Clouds” when I listen. However, Johnson adds a sweeping emotional dimension to his music, a kindredness that most early ambient musicians couldn’t quite conjure. His pedal steel playing is consuming and personal and vast.
Pedal steel as dealer’s choice for experimental compositions isn’t necessarily new. Maybe it’s more that the attention it’s getting is new. (Blame Bob?) We should really listen to some of the great pieces of ambient pedal steel music that have been around for a while like Bruce Kaphan’s “Clouds,” Daniel Lanois’ “Desert Rose,” and what I consider to be the most perfect tune of all: Harold Budd’s “Afar.” If another Voyager space craft gets sent to outer space carrying a golden disc, these are the three songs I would put on it. I hope this music would convey that our sweet blue marble is also a lonesome, dusty place; that Earth is a long, echoing song.
You may start to worry that I suffer from the Great Forlorn, but nothing could be farther from the truth. Out here in the dust, I see a rocky world teeming with life. Rabbitbrush blooming sulphury yellow, sunstones sparkling on ant hills, and coyotes trotting through the sage. Even the rocks are crusted with fluorescent lichens that feather over petroglyph carvings from much earlier peoples. I have never felt more part of Earth than I do out here. My wife, Dreamy Lisa likes to remind me of what the great scoundrel (and lion of desert literature) Edward Abbey once said: “Instead of loneliness, I feel loveliness.”
There is a loveliness in this ambient country-esque music, too. Even though the road is getting bumpy, we should listen to the slow burn of pedal steel player Will Van Horn’s 2022 recording of “Attwater.” I would be remiss if we didn’t queue up Golden Brown’s entire Gems And Minerals album right after. This crystalline suite features lap steel rather than pedal steel, but the spirit is one and the same. (Lap steel, which looks much like an electric dulcimer, embodies the twang but lacks the wobbling changes in pitch that define the pedal steel sound.) If we’re going to stray away from strictly pedal steel (and we should!), then let us listen to guitarist Marisa Anderson’s spectral, country-influenced album Into The Light. There is none like it. We keep driving.
By now you’ve probably noticed that there are leaf fossils in the glove box and topaz crystals in the ashtray. Sunstones litter the floors of the old 4×4, and chips of petrified wood rattle on the dash. If we pull over and look under the seats maybe we’ll find that single precious opal I lost track of last summer. But there’s more road to drive and more beautiful music to listen to. We’re heading for the badlands, the dry creeks, the canyons. Rocky treasures await us. Spreading out on the horizon before us is a precious world worth fighting for. Each prairie dog, each dung beetle, each speck of dust is deserving of our most fervent attention and protection. We are guardians of this place. Of all the rocky planets, ours is the only one known to cradle a symphony of life, and as far as I know, it’s the only one with pedal steel.
