Music Review: Logan Ledger, ‘Golden State’
The Nashville-based artist’s sophomore album, saturated with stories of his home state of California, deepens and enriches his already distinctive sound.
Logan Ledger’s Golden State album artwork.
Logan Ledger’s debut single “Starlight” seemed to drop from the heavens in spring of 2019, creating instant buzz about this promising young artist. With a captivating voice and a musical style that blended classic country with psychedelic flourishes and other touches from his home state of California, the Nashville artist seemed poised to capture the hearts and ears of Americana and alt-country fans everywhere.
His full self-titled debut album was initially slated to come out in fall of 2019. Ledger decided to take a little more time to perfect it, pushing back its release to…April 3, 2020.
Yeah. Logan Ledger dropped at one of the worst possible times for a new artist to put their music out. The supporting tour, opening for Secret Sisters, was postponed two or three times and ultimately canceled.
It was the worst possible timing in terms of getting in front of fans and building a real-life presence and following nationally. But it was the best possible time, if Ledger was already on your radar, to dive deep-deep-deep into that record. This isn’t a review of Logan Ledger (you can find my outrageously nerdy analysis of that one in one of my earliest pieces written for Adventures in Americana). But I do want to make a plug for it; if you aren’t familiar with it, please go remedy that right now!
I think it’d still be one of my favorite albums of all time without having been released when I was locked down with very little to do and a desperate need for distraction, but the pandemic quarantine certainly didn’t hurt in that regard. What did hurt was the feeling that Ledger’s brilliance had to some degree fallen through the cracks during the global health crisis. He deserved so much more attention and adulation than he got when the album came out and in the years that followed.
Whether or not my extremely unscientific superfan perception of Ledger being intolerably slighted jibes with reality, I hope this new album marks a breakthrough for him.
Logan Ledger backstage at his Grand Ole Opry debut. Photo credit: Misa Arriaga, 2023.
If this masterpiece doesn’t do it, I don’t know what will. Golden State, which came out September 8, 2023, is the opposite of a sophomore slump. Ledger manages to retain everything that made his debut album special while enriching and even improving his original sound, something I wouldn’t have thought possible.
I already considered him to be possibly the best country vocalist alive today, but his voice has matured and become even smoother and sweeter than it already was. On his first album I was struck by phrasing that called to mind Willie Nelson’s nuanced delivery; on this one, I can’t stop thinking of Roy Orbison’s preternatural voice and thrilling crescendos, which Ledger achieves with the same effortless feel.
Sonically, Golden State retains some of the classic country sound that drew me to Ledger in the first place, mining outlaw country, countrypolitan, and the Nashville and Bakersfield sounds and combining them with psychedelia, rockabilly and surf rock to create an irresistible fusion all his own. (“All the Wine in California” is the standout countrified track on the new record.) But Golden State pushes the West Coast elements further, leaning into lush, layered 1960s/70s country-rock terrain. One song (“Obviously”) even has an early-60s pop R&B feel reminiscent of legendary L.A. group The Platters.
The debut album contained one standout track specifically about California: “The Lights of San Francisco,” a haunting co-write with Steve Earle from the perspective of the ghosts of Alcatraz prisoners. As promised by the album title, nearly all the tracks on Golden State are explicitly set in California, with repeated references to the geography and culture of the state.
Thematically, this record scratched the same itch as Ledger’s debut by continually playing on a motif I find endlessly resonant and fascinating: the interplay between dualities, and the liminal spaces and gray areas that inevitably appear between two polar opposites. Ledger’s lyrics contain inherent paradoxes like “the kind of leaving that don’t ever end” and “I’m not here.” His narrators often compare the past to present, dreams and desires to reality, night to day.
“I give you all my loving to make something out of nothing,” he sings in “Till It Feels Right”; “It’s you and me here only I’ve never felt so lonely.” “Midnight in L.A.” takes place “out on the edge of the world between the dark and the dawn,” where “the tears are running but the time is standing still.” “The end that we’ll learn is only the beginning” is how he expresses the faint hope that an ex-lover will return in “Some Misty Morning.”
Denying a breakup in progress in the devastating “I’m Not Here” requires the rejection of reality itself: “I’m not here and I ain’t talking to you / that’s just the way it appears, but it can’t be true.” That tactic continues in “Obviously,” this time employed to put on a brave face post-breakup: “Even though I sit and watch the door / That don’t mean I love you anymore / So don’t be concerned with how I seem to be …”
Ledger’s lyrics go in loops, turning meanings around on themselves, contemplating and exploring both physical and mental spaces with no easy end or conclusion. The entire album seems to be an attempt to “reach that golden state” (a metaphysical state of contentment as well a geographic location) as stated in the title track and album opener, but the last song, the plaintive “Where Will I Go,” ends with a sense of aimless melancholy and feeling adrift: “I’m talking backwards / I’m thinking sideways.”
Golden State is a flawless creation from start to finish, an addictively listenable album whether you’re in the mood to follow the twisty trail of its lyrics or just let the gorgeous California-drenched sounds carry you on their currents.
Carol Roth. Photo credit: Dan Lee.
Carol Roth is a full-time marketing copywriter and the primary 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 T.A. Berkeley!
