Singer-songwriter Cass McCombs has gotten his fair share of critical acclaim. The Fader, a New York-based music and culture publication, called him “one of the greatest lyricists of our time.” BrooklynVegan, a New York City-based music blog, called him “one of the most reliable singer-songwriters of the last 20 years.” British daily newspaper, The Guardian, called him “one of indie-rock’s finest.” Soon, he’ll be bringing his musical prowess back to the Valley.
McCombs will perform at the Iron Horse in Northampton on Sunday, March 22 at 7 p.m., highlighting his latest album, “Interior Live Oak.” Described as his most personal work to date, the album draws from more than two decades of experimentation to “cut through with a direct and clarifying light.” Jennifer Castle is set to open the show.
“Interior Live Oak,” which was released last August, was “a long time in the making,” McCombs said. He wrote much of the album in New York City, but his home state of California was never far from his mind — particularly the Bay Area and Northern California. He describes the region as “the confluence of my memories, history, and also stories of friends that are there. Some are gone, some have grown up, and some live on the street.”
Much of his work is inspired by social justice and countercultural themes. In “Missionary Bell,” McCombs asks, “Where on land could you run to / Where there’s no missionary bells?” While the song follows the story of a specific friend, it also grapples with the colonial legacy of California’s missions. It can be a “heavy burden,” McCombs noted, “for almost everybody who treads where these things happened.”
This connection to place often bleeds into his visuals. The music video for “Home At Last” features Hi8 footage — shot by McCombs himself — of students tearing down fencing at the historic People’s Park in Berkeley. The lo-fi aesthetic links the current housing development conflict to decades of youth-led guerrilla activism.
“More importantly than being important to me, it’s just an element of growing up in the Bay,” McCombs said. “It’s inherent, if you’re from there, particularly in the time that I grew up there — you don’t even think about it until you leave, and you realize that the rest of the world isn’t like that. It didn’t seem unique until I left, and then I realized what a special and volatile place it is.”
An avid reader, McCombs finds inspiration in an eclectic collection of books. His current “to-read” pile includes James Joyce’s “Finnegans Wake,” which he called “a constant problem for me for my whole life,” a re-read of “Cold Mountain,” Gnostic texts and ancient Chinese poetry.
“I have a giant pile here,” he said. “I’ve just been philandering from book to book.”
That wandering spirit extends to his music videos, which often intentionally clash with his lyrics. The video for “Asphodel” — whose name alludes to a purgatory-like space in Greek mythology purgatory — features low-resolution footage of a bird in flight. Similarly, the video for “Miss Mabee” avoids the lyrical suggestions of a dominatrix in favor of footage of water running down pavement, rows of skyscraper windows and a puddle with slushy ice, among other clips.
“Sometimes, it’s almost more interesting to me when there is a kind of a contradiction in the mix-up. If it fits too perfectly, then it doesn’t seem to work for me. I like things to be a little odd,” he said.
In the same vein, McCombs doesn’t want to give a prescriptive answer for what audiences should take away from the album.
“I don’t really want to get in the way of what people take away from [it]. That’s not really up to me,” he said. “In a way, it can be polarizing, because I think it covers a lot of ground, so I think people take whatever they take from it, as little and as much as they want, but it’s not really up to me to get in the way. My part’s been done — I wrote the songs and made them and the way that I like them to be, so how they’re interpreted, I wouldn’t want to mess with that.”
Tickets are $30 via ironhorse.org.