Gregory Alan Isakov & His Sonic Teleportation Machine
The town of San Luis, Colorado lies nestled in San Luis Valley, where centuries-old dust obscures the town in a shroud of mystique.
via Uncover Colorado
Its landscape is breathtaking, but in the desert climate, there isn't much wind to animate the stately stone or prickly tumbleweeds. The few buildings that make up the small town are two stories at most, choosing to lay low rather than reaching for the sky. This is a place that feels endless, refusing to secede to the march of time.
I've never been to San Luis. However (hot take), I think that visiting a place is not the only way you can come to know it — you can experience it in other ways that give you the same, if not a more nuanced experience of the place itself. Let's explore this through Gregory Alan Isakov's song, which is called—you guessed it—"San Luis."
A single guitar accompanies Isakov's gritty, melancholic vocals, while the haunting lilt of background harmonies that sing like spirits echo behind. It's reminiscent of times gone by, of the moment of bittersweet calm after something ends, or perhaps a moment when nothing has happened at all.
I thought the use of background vocals in this song was extremely well done — as a song that centres around a specific location, accuracy in regards to the ambience of the physical environment is both difficult and extremely necessary. In "San Luis," the background vocals (BGV) are vital to creating this auditory environment for the listener By making the BGV one component of three (guitar, main vocal, background vocal), Isakov succeeds in bringing it to the forefront, as opposed to many other songs where the background vocals are in...the background.
The stylization of the BGV is just as important—they bounce, echo, moving around and cocooning Isakov's more grounded vocals in a veil that blurs all three elements together into a fog. This is perfect for San Luis—a small town in the middle of a valley, in the middle of the United States, where tradition is steeped so heavily into the town's history, every rock has meaning, where people go to hunt for UFOs, where an antique Star Drive-In still stands (fully functional). In other words, a town of ghosts, which the BGV stand in for wonderfully.
via Uncover Colorado
Sound travels farther in chilly weather — add that to the vast expanse of the high-altitude desert that San Luis resides in, and you've got an environment that lends itself to long sound. Isakov plays on this by creating a similar environment in the musical foundation of "San Luis"—barren, save for a lone guitar and the disembodied calls of spirits unseen.
"Were we somewhere in-between?" wonders the speaker in the first few lines — you could argue this pertains to their personal relationship with a significant other, but I see this line (and the rest of the lyrics) as pertaining to the overall theme of place that I have been building throughout this review. Although the singer places themselves in San Luis, it seems that physicality is a less important factor in the concept of "San Luis" than it is in other places (for example, in Paris or Tokyo). San Luis, therefore, is not so much a physical place but a state of mind—a way to exist, somewhere "in-between."
If you enjoyed this song, I have a playlist inspired by the ~vibe~ that you can check out here :-)
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