Music Review: Logan Ledger

Exists Between Worlds

Logan Ledger, 2021

Ever since college (in other words for a long long time), I’ve been fascinated by dualities — the contrast between two opposites, and the gray areas or liminal spaces that often exist between them. 

Of course I’m not alone in this and many many songs are about dualities of all kinds: “Devil in Disguise” (“You look like an angel / You’re the devil in disguise”); “Move It on Over” (“Move over nice dog there’s a mad dog movin’ in”); “Folsom Prison Blues” (“I know I can’t be free / but those people keep on movin’”); “Keep on the Sunny Side” (There's a dark and a troubled side of life / There's a bright and a sunny side too”), to name just a small random sampling.

And some songs hint at dualities while focusing on only one half, like “Take a Walk on the Wild Side” or “I Walk the Line.”

But I’m hard pressed to think of another artist like Logan Ledger, who seems irresistibly drawn to dualities and whose narrators seem to exist stubbornly (often tragically) in the liminal spaces between opposites. I was initially drawn to Ledger by his fantastic voice, then by his stellar musicality, and then because he seems like a genuinely nice interesting guy (who, bonus, is a huge old-time country music nerd!). But it was his lyrics (and the lyrics of the songs he chooses to cover) that I find the most captivating out of all his many strengths, because they relate to my decades-long love affair with duality.

Right out of the gate, his first single — the spectacular “Starlight” — is about someone who’s forced to act differently with their lover in the daytime versus at night:

Oh daylight, just another time to hide away

And dream about the way it might have been

And starlight will be the only light

When I can hold you tight again

Ledger doubled down on duality in his second single, “Imagining Raindrops.” In fact he often describes it as “about the unseen world: the hidden realms that lie behind the veneer concocted by our physical senses.” Who knows, maybe that striking description caused me to look more closely for dualities in his songs. If so, once I started looking, it was impossible not to find them. Especially in this song:

I'm looking out my window

At a sunny day

But I'm imagining raindrops

And clouds of gray

In it the narrator is convinced it must be a gloomy day because he’s feeling so bad and “no sunny day could make me blue.” The narrator stays in this space between his imagination and reality throughout the song: “The world I see I don’t believe.”

So okay, that’s two songs that are firmly and explicitly about contrasting dualities. It could’ve been a fluke that those were the first two singles he released, and that maybe some of his other songs wouldn’t track so strongly with this theme. But then he released an EP called “I Don’t Dream Anymore,” and the pattern continued.

“Invisible Blue” has an impossible duality right in the title and it continues in the lyrics: “It’s a shade you can see clear through.” “Blue” obviously refers to the emotion, but he persists in color analogies (“It’s a color of the night and it lives all around”), which keeps bringing up the contrast of something that should necessarily be visible but isn’t. Except when it is: “But take a good look and you’ll see it in me.”

The next song, “I Don’t Dream Anymore,” is less explicitly duality-focused, but in describing a narrator’s attempts to dream, there’s plenty of imagery about the contrast between night and day, between being awake and being asleep (“When I fall asleep in shadows deep / They carry me through the dark”), with dreaming the missing link in between:

I bet it would be nice

To find that paradise

A world of sparkling light beyond the setting sun

But I don’t dream anymore

The other two songs on the EP are covers, but even in his choice of covers, Ledger is clearly drawn to the same themes. The Bob Dylan song “Oh Sister” is about the push and pull of treating others in the world with kindness versus turning your back on them:

Oh, sister, when I come to lie in your arms

You should not treat me like a stranger

And the final song, a cover of The Youngbloods’ “Darkness, Darkness,” is an entreaty to the night to soothe the harm caused during the day (“Darkness, darkness / Long and lonesome / Ease the day that brings me pain”), to banish tormented thoughts and fill a void (“take away the pain of knowing / Fill the emptiness of right now”). 

If I thought the duality imagery of these first few releases was strong, I had no idea! Ledger’s self-titled debut album contains seven new tracks that are even more entrenched in his fascination with opposites.

You might expect a song that starts “When my life is over” to be melancholy. But the narrator of “Let the Mermaids Flirt With Me” has big plans for his afterlife, calling into question whether his life will ever be “over”:

We'll lay all day beneath the shade

Of an old seaweed tree

And I won't be alone

In my home sweet watery home

I'll be fancy-free under the sea

Let the mermaids flirt me

If that’s what being dead is like, sign me up!

“Nobody Knows” contains a deceptive answer to a riddle right in the title. This hauntingly beautiful song is about nobody knowing where the lonely go (along with a couple of other existential mysteries about time passing), but in the very last line, it’s revealed that someone does know:

Oh, where goes the light

When the day turns to night

And the sea turns black as coal?

Nobody knows, but I know

'Cause I'm nobody

Inside this wrenching song of isolation and despair is a complex dance between the dualities nobody and somebody, between the regular world and a “land of lonely souls,” between (a common theme in Ledger’s music) day and night.

One cover on the album, written by Ledger’s collaborator and producer, offers a new kind of duality: “(I’m Gonna Get Over This) Some Day” is a Schroedinger’s cat of forgiveness, a masterful overlay of future and present, in which the narrator acknowledges that he’ll eventually get past an unspecified conflict with someone else, suggesting to himself that he could “get over it now,” but acknowledging “at the moment I don’t know how.” The song is rife with lyrics of what he doesn’t want, which tacitly implies something he does want without being able to articulate what that happier future state might look like, other than one brief notion about “taking flight”:

I don't want to be the judge

And I don’t want to hold a grudge

I'm gonna get over this someday

I might as well get over it now

I don't want to fight with you

I want to take flight with you

I don't want to say goodbye

Cry for you the whole night through

Had enough of duality? I never will, and Ledger is just getting started — the final four songs on the album are perhaps the most explicit thematically about the friction between two realities or two worlds.

“Electric Fantasy” is one of his most fanciful songs and one of my favorites, even though it’s miles away from the country sound I was initially attracted to. Told from the point of view of a being (computer? Android? Or just a person on the other side of an online dating app? My theory changes practically every time I listen to it) entreating someone who’s definitely human to be with them. The interplay of machine and human, the impossibility of being both at once, are so thickly woven throughout this quirky but poignant song that it’s almost impossible to choose just one excerpt, but here goes:

I'm just a traveler through this weary land

And I do not know what for

I've got a hunger I can't understand

And it brought me to your door

I'm made of flesh and blood the same as you

I want to fall in love with someone who

Won't be like all the others who have passed me by

I could be more than ones and zeroes if I tried

Wow. Just wow.

“Tell Me a Lie” reminds me of “(I’m Gonna Get Over This) Some Day” in that it features a narrator existing in a present state that they know is going to end in the future. This hapless person knows their relationship is effectively over but begs their lover to keep pretending a while longer. The duality here is between falsehood and truth, between ignorance and knowledge:

Tell me a lie

I promise that I'll believe

Look me in the eye

I'm so easily deceived

What's the big deal, why make me feel

The cold creeping into my heart?

Whatever you do, spare me the truth

It'll only tear me apart

The next song is a cover, but so true to Ledger’s outlook that it could easily have been one of his. Originally recorded by Henson Cargill in the ‘60s, “Skip a Rope” is a doozy: biting social commentary about the hidden cruelties and bigotry that parents carelessly pass along to children who overhear them. But the song flips that cleverly on its head: We’re overhearing the children as they parrot the things they’ve overheard. The bouncy rhythm mimics their jumproping but, as we lean in to listen to these cute kids, we realize they’ve internalized some dark lessons from the adults in their lives:

Cheat on your taxes, don't be a fool

Now what was that they said about a golden rule?

Never mind the rules just play to win

And hate your neighbor for the shade of his skin

I mean, can’t you just hear that as a jump rope chant? The duality of innocence and playground fun contrasted with cynicism and hatred is brought into even starker relief by the peppy melody. This catchy, upbeat-sounding song sends a chill down my spine every time I listen to it.

The last new song on the album is possibly my favorite, though it’s so hard to choose. And it uses San Francisco as a backdrop — one of my favorite places to visit as well as the setting of several favorite stories and movies. Including two that expertly explore the gray areas between sanity and delusion, present and future, and more: Hitchcock’s Vertigo and Gertrude Atherton’s short story “The Foghorn.”

But I digress. Ledger’s song, “The Lights of San Francisco,” is a master study of the liminal spaces that link seeming polar opposites. You quickly ascertain that the narrator is a prisoner in Alcatraz, as he contrasts his imprisonment to the tantalizing freedom of the boats that pass by and his loneliness with the vibrant life he envisions happening across the bay in the city. So it must be set in the past, you think. Not so fast: By the end you realize this narrator is a ghost, still imprisoned, in death even more envious of the living world outside the walls of his cell.

Again, it’s painfully hard to choose just one verse — just go listen to the whole song! But here’s a taste:

There, across the water, lamps are burnin'

Dreams are born and pass away

In the darkness, I am yearnin'

For the lights of San Francisco 'cross the bay

Freedom vs. imprisonment, time passing vs. being in stasis, light vs. dark, life vs. death...this song truly has it all.

With a focus this unrelenting on duality in his output thus far, I feel certain this is a theme Ledger will continue to return to in subsequent work. And I for one am here for it, because he finds so many unique and creative angles that it gives all his work a similarly haunting and restless feel without the material ever feeling repetitive or stale.

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Carol Roth. Photo credit: Dan Lee.

Carol Roth is a full-time marketing copywriter and the main music journalist and social media publicist for Adventures in Americana. In addition to studying the guitar and songwriting, Carol’s additional creative side hustle is writing self-proclaimed “trashy” novels under the pseudonym @taberkeley!