Travis Wiggins, 4 TRACK SOUL (Love Harder)

[May 16th, 2007] [POP] My early life, like a lot of kids', was largely soundtracked by my mother: Otis Redding, Al Green, John Lennon and Dwight Yoakam were in heavy rotation. Then there was my Uncle Russ and his bedroom-recorded masterpieces. These cassettes were his relief from the smoky life of a gigging musician: A Missoula, Mont.-based bar-rocker by trade, he played originals, Buddy Holly covers and old jazz standards...usually sung in hushed tones as to not wake the neighbors. The warmth and soul in those recordings colors the way I hear music to this day.

Portland songwriter Travis Wiggins' 4 Track Soul reminds me an awful lot of Uncle Russ' old tapes. It's Wiggins recording his favorite covers and originals that don't quite fit into the formula of his psychedelic-pop outfit, Please Step Out of the Vehicle. I doubt whether much of this material was originally recorded for "release" (the Love Harder label usually presses 50 discs), which is precisely what makes it special. The incoherence of Wiggins' Hendrix cover (apparently recorded with some rusty showerhead/microphone combo), "If 6 was 9," is sung with the kind of misguided majesty that only comes from a 2 am flash of drunken inspiration, while his Casio version of Neutral Milk Hotel's "King of Carrot Flowers" demonstrates a charming absence of what folks in the industry call "production."

Wiggins' low-fi, beat-fueled experimental tracks (he uses the Super Nintendo game Mario Paint, for chrissakes) serve as intros and outros to stark acoustic-guitar tracks like Wiggins' Daniel Johnston-esque version of the Silver Jews' "Trains Across the Sea," which finds him singing David Berman lines like "Half hours on Earth/ What are they worth/ I don't know." Like most of the cover material on 4 Track Soul, Berman's are lines that sound natural coming out of Wiggins' mouth, which speaks to the influence artists like Olympia folkstress Kimya Dawson and Hendrix have had on him as a songwriter.

Travis Wiggins' 4 Track Soul is his audio diary of sorts, complete with nods to friends (in the form of an Alan Singley cover) and family (Wiggins' little brother and father both contribute) alike. And while the material therein stretches multiple generations and four track machines, it all adds up to a pretty compelling portrait of the songwriter as a young man.