If you’ll permit a strained simile, Will Whitmore is like Iowa’s basketball phenom Caitlin Clark. He’s never been anything short of ridiculously excellent, and he makes it look — or sound — easy. I’ve seen him hold hundreds of drunk college kids spellbound with nothing more than a pawn-shop banjo and his voice. That kind of talent and charisma is rare.
Silently, The Mind Breaks, releasing everywhere on Jan. 26, benefits from the economy of Whitmore’s songwriting: always simple, the good kind of simple. It’s sturdily constructed with nothing unnecessary added. The production of the album has the same aesthetic: clean, clear and uncluttered. The arrangements include other instruments (bass, drums, keyboards) but Whitmore’s singing and playing are center stage. Nothing loud or flashy distracts from the songs.
Whitmore’s voice sounds as though it’s been roughed up by a lifetime of Chesterfield Straight cigarettes, but he sounded that way 20 years ago. It’s a rough-and-ready instrument, but it works for his music. It’s hard to imagine anyone else singing these songs.
The song “Darkness Comes” is the emotional center of the album. The narrator of the first verse is a dying father, giving a son his final advice. The second verse is in the voice of a neglected mother: “I don’t know what they told you, son, but the darkness comes for everyone. There’s a light I can’t see, and I hope you do better than me.” It’s a love song, but like Bob Franke’s song says, it’s hard love, the love in a family torn apart by regret and pain.
Whitmore has a novelist’s imagination, taking on the voices of the downtrodden, of people who never see over the edge of the hole they’re living in. Maybe living on the Mississippi surrounded by farmers struggling to hang on and people working jobs that will never let them get ahead gives him his insight and empathy. Whitmore is a songwriter in the tradition of Woody Guthrie. He’s not a dirt farmer, but he knows a few and has the imagination to capture their stories in words of one and two syllables.
“Bunker Built For Two” is a survivalist’s love song. It’s both funny and serious as a heart attack, a love song for the apocalypse. “Dance With Me” has the simple drumming and two-chord arrangement of a Velvet Underground track. “C’mon and dance with me, I won’t be around forever.” It’s a song that says more than it says, if that makes sense. It’s a come on, a pickup line predicated on impending doom.
William Elliott Whitmore’s excellence comes as much from the things he won’t do as the things he does. He never says too much, but he implies a whole lot. Every song has an untold backstory and undercurrents, usually of mourning regret, and loneliness. And yet he’s a Lee County boy raised on the shore of the Mississippi. Good music requires some artifice, but the artifice in Silently, The Mind Breaks stays in the background, leaving the man with the pawnshop banjo singing plain about hard truths.
This article was originally published in Little Village’s January 2024 issue.
