Field Guides - Ginkgo (2022)

The order of trees to which the ginkgo belongs once covered the earth, back in the Early Cretaceous, before largely disappearing. The ginkgo is its last living species, and it has hardly changed in 300 million years. But having been cultivated by humans since shortly after our story entwined with its own, the tree has returned to a wide array of environments: a living fossil you can find in your backyard. All it needs is water and time.

So it’s fitting that the ginkgo lends its name to the third album by Field Guides, the ever-adaptable project of Brooklyn-based songwriter Benedict Kupstas. Kupstas is a poet of place and memory, someone who locates profundity in the everyday, and the songs on Ginkgo are taproots of a personal mythology that flower with references to specific landscapes and events. Taking cues from the cryptic allusive wordplay of Joni Mitchell, the hushed explosiveness of Yo La Tengo, and the “new weird” songcraft of Big Thief, they map the emotional geography of what Kupstas calls “the feeling of being unmoored from the familiar.”

Take “Cicadas in the Lemon Trees,” written on a hilltop terrace in Crete amid the din of the titular bugs. Like every song on Ginkgo, this one is lushly ornamented (here, with harp, cello, clarinet, synths, field recordings, and a nylon-string guitar lent to Kupstas by the family he was staying with), and it absorbs a particular landscape (here, one haunted by centuries of Greek mythology). It also alludes to an episode of temporary aphasia Kupstas had in Helsinki. “I lost my voice while overseas,” he sings in an achy baritone pitched somewhere in Bill Callahan’s zip code, “like Hades took Persephone.” Or see lead single “Salmon Skin,” which developed out of correspondence between Kupstas, working in refugee settlements in Lebanon at the time, and a friend/romantic interest in California. It finds nostalgia and longing in physical distance, a feeling exuberantly transmitted by a coruscating saxophone solo from Adam Robinson.

In that way, Ginkgo feels accumulated, the creation of a writing process Kupstas describes as “fairly haphazard and accretive.” He collects stray lines and inspiration from the wider world (Judee Sill lyrics, Walter Benjamin quotes, factoids about trees), carrying and interpolating those scraps until they latch onto a melody. His exquisitely drawn lyrics—of love, loss, dislocation, and ultimately the effort to persevere and make meaning—can make permanent the bond between heartbreak and a peeled clementine.

But Ginkgo’s existence is also collective. Most of the record was written for a live unit of drummer Rachel Housle, bassist Taylor Bergren-Chrisman, vocalist/pianist Alena Spanger, guitarist Julian Cubillos, and reeds player Aaron Rourk, but the pandemic and the dissolution of a relationship/musical partnership necessitated a change in recording plans. Several songs (e.g. “Agios Sillas,” “Condensate”) confront that unraveling directly, a version of the band à la Rumours or Shoot Out the Lights. In the end, more than 20 musicians performed on Ginkgo (including Drew Citron of Beverly/Public Practice, Matt Evans, Carmen Q. Rothwell, and members of The War On Drugs and Stars Like Fleas). With the help of co-producers Shannon Fields and Nico Hedley, and with mixing by Eli Crews (Tune-Yards, Why?, The Fiery Furnaces), together they have created a record that sounds at once intimate and expansively collaborative—an overstory of human dramas playing out within an interwoven community that extends far beyond our own species.

—Phillip Pantuso