The Bellwether

A 14-time Grammy winner and Billboard Century Award recipient, Emmylou Harris’ contribution as a singer and songwriter spans 40 years. She has recorded more than 25 albums and has lent her talents to countless fellow artists’ recordings. In recognition of her remarkable career, Harris was inducted into the Country Music Hall of Fame in 2008 and earned a Grammy Lifetime Achievement award in 2018.

Harris is known as much for her eloquently straightforward songwriting as for her incomparably expressive singing. Admired through her career for her talent as an artist and song connoisseur, Harris shook up country radio in the 1970s, and established herself as the premiere songwriter of a generation selling more than 15 million records and garnering 14 Grammy Awards, three CMA Awards, and four Americana Awards.

Harris is one of the most admired and influential women in music. She has recorded with such diverse artists as Linda Ronstadt, Daniel Lanois, Bob Dylan, Mark Knopfler, Neil Young, Gram Parsons, Willie Nelson, Dolly Parton, Roy Orbison, Ryan Adams, Beck, Elvis Costello, Johnny Cash, Lucinda Williams, Lyle Lovett and Rodney Crowell. Few artists have achieved such honesty or have revealed such maturity in their writing. Forty years into her career, Harris continues to share the hard-earned wisdom that—hopefully if not inevitably—comes with getting older, though she’s never stopped looking ahead.

A longtime social activist, Harris has lent her voice to many causes. Most passionately to animal welfare. In 2004 she established Bonaparte’s Retreat with the goal of rescuing shelter dogs and adopting them into forever homes. To this day, Bonaparte’s Retreat continues to save dogs most in need at Metro Nashville Animal Care and Control and at municipal shelters in surrounding counties.

When asked to describe himself, Whitmer Thomas—comic, musician, skateboarder, infamous Blink182 stan—will tell you, “I’m always gonna be the one whose mom called him ‘the Golden One,’ right before she died.” This is where his debut HBO comedy special, The Golden One, finds Whitmer: age thirty, investigating this sense (curse?) of destiny-as-identity. It’s been thirteen years since he left Alabama for LA, becoming a linchpin for LA’s young, independent comedy scene with Power Violence, the monthly show he hosted with friends. But he became haunted by the question: had he already peaked, just like his mom, singer in a local band with big ambitions that never made it out of the Flora-Bama Lounge in Gulf Shores? Rather than shy away from all that messy self-mythology, Whitmer tapped the source of it all through writing this one-man show featuring his own original music. Songs from The Golden One, a companion album of songs from the special, features Whitmer’s darkwave bangers, synthesizing relatable-content: millennial anxieties, therapy-speak jokes, and the annals of his own childhood tragedies.

Songs from The Golden One feature ten cuts of borderline-John Maus cosplay with spasms of pop-punk absurdity. Thomas uses the gothy, nasal vocal drone as a tool of comic detachment to cover thr funny-’cause-its-true territory of awkward sex, crippling insecurity, the shame of ambition, and the long tail of abandonment traumas. Each song is a capsule of initial therapy breakthroughs: those realization-zingers where suddenly it all makes sense, how each fucked variable from then makes up the weird shit of now. When you see it all for what it is, it looks like some sick, clever joke from the universe, driving you desperate to revise the comedy so that if you have to be reality’s punchline, at least you can write the jokes.

Original tracks from the special include the shimmering, synthy euphoria of “Eat You Out,” a glorious admission to performance anxiety and the ol’ magician’s cloak of cunnilingus move. There’s “The Codependent Enabler,” a whole jungle gym of toxic relationship rationale where “I can only get it up if you are down,” and the sadboy sobriety anthem “Partied to Death,” about when you’re young in LA and you have to tell people that you’re not *Cali sober for wellness*, but because your mom actually died from addiction, so.

At first pass, Whitmer’s special and album make a relevant, hilarious articulation of one tragic childhood, of the messiness of masculinity, of the timeless qualms of being broke with a dream in Los Angeles, and the humiliation inherent in having “a dream” at all. But in flashes of unexpected weirdo wisdom, Whitmer weaves a deeper story of a person finding reconciliation and forgiveness alongside finding his own self and voice. He faces his darkness with darkwave, writing the story of his objectively insane youth through a Venn diagram of cool guy music, goofy dude jokes, and sensitive boy reflections that hit in a way that feels bigger than the sum of its parts. Whitmer will say that he made The Golden One out of desperation, but there’s something about the show feels a lot more, instead, like destiny.