Brambleland ~ By Casey Neill. July 2020.

As any music lover knows, records mark time but exist wholly outside of it. The past blurs in your head but your heart can still live inside of a collection of songs, moving in and out of your life. They surprise you again at another juncture and bring things full circle. Timothy Hull’s ‘Brambleland’ is a traveling record - in and out of time, in and out of the margins of life, in and out of love. Recorded in 1999, these songs reflect the road culture of youth activists and nomad souls that ranged predominantly over Europe and up and down the Pacific Northwest’s I-5 corridor back then. For those of us who were around for it, there was a confluence of art and revolution that all seemed to culminate at the WTO protests in Seattle only to change shape again from there. ‘Brambleland’ is not a time capsule - in a way it’s fitting that it is out in the world again 20 years later because it feels like we are just catching up to it.
Things kick off with the full band blast of ‘Ragtag’, which rings like a joyful statement of purpose. Song two ‘Rooftop’ is a picture of tranquility amidst the crush of urbanity. It’s a vision of a young woman singing Van the Man’s ‘Into the Mystic’ out into a Berlin night and you find yourself there with her. Here we are arriving again in a European town for the acoustic epic ‘Wandering Stars’. Performed solo, ‘Wandering Stars’ just might be the best song of high romance this side of ‘Remember the Mountain Bed’. You haven’t come close to recovering from the trance it puts you in and there’s ‘Nailed and Boarded’ - another traveler song laying out the hard realities of homelessness and hunger and matching it with defiance. ‘Ramble Right’ brings the band arrangements back with an uplifting anthem for activism as the antidote to despair and some fiddletunes along a riverside. ‘Indigenous Time’ follows with a cyclical groove perfect for a song about the aboriginal notion of cyclical time. ‘The Buffalo Song’ makes for a one two punch of songs for First Nations and retells the saddest story ever told.
For the proverbial second side of ‘Brambleland’, Timothy and co-producer David Malony stretch out sonically. There’s a solo toy accordion air in remembrance of eco-activist David Chain as well as the trippy psych of ‘Road’ that includes a quote from Nick Drake’s song of the same name. ‘The Cliffs Above the Sea’ sounds like the Incredible String Band if Robin Williamson had heard Stereolab. Originally a ghost track (it was the 90s still), there’s a Crazy Horse style version of a song I wrote called ‘Storyline’ that now sits happily in the main sequence. While these sorts of influences were heard more often a decade later when ‘freak folk’ became a thing, they were absent at the time of this album. Strains of Celtic fiddle amidst walls of distortion, acoustics in alternate tunings where everything feels modal and languid, and songs that reflected real people immersed in underground culture trying to heal the world and radically reimagine the future.
There are three more spare guitar songs nestled in the back half of ‘Brambleland’, each one as haunting as the next. There’s the love song ’The Hour of My Waking’, ’Wind in the Chimney’ which sounds like a Hebridean ghost story, and ‘Parables and Fables’. The later rolls out the metaphor of Moses’ leading his people to freedom as in the Spiritual ‘Go Down Moses’ or later in Joe Strummer’s ‘Get Down Moses’.
"We are backed against waters that will not part
Darkness growing bolder
’Til that last judgement day
When they’re driven all away
Strange Things are happening every day"
All over this record Timothy Hull spools out lyrics like this that feel like they speak directly to the existential weirdness of 2020. The joy and insurgency of the uptempo numbers are a reminder to pull ourselves up and take back our timeline. To meet where the roots of the world intertwine. Where a reckoning of the past can lead to a brighter tomorrow. Where we make a future out of fighting for the living.