Michael Hurley
Broken Homes And Gardens
No Quarter CD/DL/LP

Although I'm sure there will be a babbling brook of archival recordings to follow, Broken Homes And Gardens is the final studio album produced under the supervision of the late, great Michael Hurley, who left the planet this past April Fool’s Day.

Hurley was a modern master of the sideways drift in terms of both lifestyle and musical composition. I knew him pretty well for over 40 years, and you rarely had a clue when or where he’d turn up, or what the heck he’d want to do once he was around. For many years he was an outright vagabond alighting for spells in Philadelphia, Martha’s Vineyard, Northern Vermont, Richmond Virginia, Southern Ohio, Western Massachusetts, and so on. He’d usually have an old sedan or station wagon, plus a guitar and a few piles of random stuff he'd like to store in your barn or garage or basement.

Once ensconced, he might decide to look for a gig or two, to scare up some art supplies to do a few paintings, or just to hang out and tell tall tales (a shocking number of which would turn out to be true). Some people would get the idea that Hurley was lazy, but that was just the way he was built, a natural and early exponent of le mouvement lent. There was just no way to rush him. Within his orbit, events unfolded at their own pace. Which makes this album a fitting capstone for a trajectory – there’s just no way to call it a career – that stretched back 60 years. Broken Homes And Gardens is not his best record, but it is an absolutely pure statement of where he was at for the last few years, and is a sheer pleasure to hear.

In many ways this is a new chapter in the story Hurley began with his last album for No Quarter, 2021’s The Time Of The Foxgloves. Like that album (some outtakes from which might actually appear hereon) the basic sessions took place at his home studio in Oregon. The players who fleshed out the tunes are drawn from pals from the northern reaches of the scene around Portland, Oregon. Four of the 11 tunes are new versions of previously recorded numbers, one is a cover of an R&B classic from the Los Angeles doo-wop scene, one covers an obscure tune by a local friend, and two are longtime live favourites. Of the three new tunes, one is an atmospheric virtual instrumental, the second a sweet duet co-written with Hurley’s biographer, the third a classic of Hurley’s personal history.

The re-recordings all feature expanded palettes. Where the originals were sometimes stark, the new versions of “Indian Chiefs & Hula Girls”, “The Abominable Snowman”, “The Monkey” and "Letter In Neon” all sound quite expansive. Percussion, violin and reeds transform them into something more like the large band Hurley envisioned in the 1960s when he was nearly signed by ESP-Disk'.

“Cherry Pie” turns Marvin & Johnny's classic 1954 single into an off-kilter clarinet-riven tune that could have been recorded for Hurley's lost album of children’s songs. “In A Dress” (written by Kenny Roby of Six String Drag) is a quiet ramble featuring some of the best mock trumpet we'll hear for a good long while. “Junebug” and “Fava” (also known as “Do Me A Fava” and “I'm An Old Hambone”) both sound much tighter than they usually did live. Like such heroes as Lightnin’ Hopkins, in solo performance Hurley tended to bend time to his own needs, expanding and contracting the blues forms that served as the basis for many of his compositions in a reckless, mesmeric fashion. By letting the other players create arrangements ex post facto, these tunes gain a kind of faux compositional clarity without sacrificing their loose underlying otherness.

“This”, meanwhile, is unlike anything else in Hurley’s canon, with dreamy wordless vocals, oddly choked acoustic guitar and clarinet. A mimed ghost story. “I’ll Walk With You”, co-written and sung with New Zealand writer Sara Illingworth, is a brightly coloured ode to summer and all that its warmth can portend. And “New Orleans 61” is a road song that details some of the privations suffered by Hurley and his buddy Robin Remailly (aka Rube The Card) when they hitchhiked to the titular spot in the time/space continuum. Remembered visions of hot cups of chicory, hogshead cheese sandwiches and bankrobbing drifters are transformed into one of Hurley’s beautiful, trademarked open-form travelogues.

Listening to Broken Homes And Gardens, it’s impossible to imagine that Michael Hurley is no longer with us. He already sounded like a man out of time when Folkways released his First Songs album in October 1964. He was fresh out of the TB ward at New York City’s Bellevue Hospital when folklorist Fred Ramsey recorded those songs on the same tape recorder he'd used for Leadbelly's final sessions. And given Hurley’s lifestyle choices I don't think many people would have predicted that he'd record more than 30 more albums. Let alone that he would eventually find fans who’d use his songs in movies and television, allowing him to have a modicum of comfort in his later years, or that his crackpot perspicacity would eventually garner him a hip, young and devoted following.

But it all happened, and I'm really glad it did. In a universe where a cuss as pointedly idiosyncratic as Michael Hurley could find an audience that sustained him, there is a glimmer of hope for a lot of people who figure they're goners. If that was the only thing Hurley had accomplished in his 83 years it would be plenty. But he also left a massive body of work that new generations of weirdos will be discovering and exploring for many years to come. So long, buddy.

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