Music Review: Little Wings, Explains

By John Lane

Kyle Field, a.k.a. Little Wings, is an enigmatic, charismatic cat, and a little difficult to pin down in a world that demands we identify, tag, and shelve everything and every individual who comes down the pike. Since 2000, Field has released 11 albums marked with near-baritone, ropey vocals, lo-fi acoustic guitars, and sometimes makeshift percussion. His songs have been one continuous quasi-folky, poetic thread. He’s a modern-day Walt Whitman with less self-consciousness.

Witness his gentle, breathy song, “Look At What the Light Did Now” from 2002, which takes delight in the most basic daily twist of nature: the sun shifting over the course of the day, and by proxy, deep within ourselves, as the experience shifts us ever so slightly. These experiences add up slowly within us at the crawling speed of tectonic plates shifting beneath our feet. This is the kind of world that Kyle Field captures.

There have been efforts to pin him down, particularly as Field hasn’t fully embraced the social media world (although he keeps a presence there out of obligation). In 2012, GQ magazine published a profile piece (“The Cooler Me”) which was part personality-safari and part-self-analysis by the author. Eric Puchner, a family man laden with responsibilities and pressures, went in search of (or to hang out with) his cooler alter ego, Kyle Field. It was a study in secretly pining for the freedom of Kyle Field’s “hipster” lifestyle.

The details are fuzzy to me now, but I vaguely recall it amounted to the following: Field gets to wake up when he wants; he can smoke doobs; he can suck down Tall Boys at whatever hour; he can paint in peace; he can attract the attentive, fawning stares of hipster women; he can crash at friends’ houses without feeling terrible about it; he can surf when the mood takes him; he can grow a Whitman-esque beard; he can wear goofy hats; and lastly he can write songs about any darn thing he wants to and those songs will magically find an audience every time. At the end, Puchner has a bit more of an appreciation for his own life, and the parting is like Dr. Livingston shaking hands with Bigfoot, and then Bigfoot galumphs back into the shadowy forest.

Prior to the GQ profile, about eight years ago, there had been a mini-documentary on Little Wings, which represents thoughtful, visual proof of Field in his natural environs: surfing, painting, gigging in intimate venues, driving in beat-up vehicles with pals, dropping in on pals (most of whom appear laden with family responsibilities), poking around a swap meet or flea market in a parking lot. Everything he does, on camera, projects an equanimous, Zen countenance. He’s a man going with the flow. And with every article, documentary, and album that he’s released, his audience is secretly trying to divine how he’s done it

Which brings us up-to-date with Explains.

Field is now rounding the corner on 42 years old. Recent photos reveal the grey steadily encroaching on his once-enviable beard. While the often playful and thoughtful beauty of his work has never left, Explains feels more mature, more middle-aged. No fake Dorian Gray nonsense here. We’re all headed in the same direction.

Start with the album cover: there’s the child-like warmth of the lettering and logo, ever-present on all the albums. The sepia-toned photograph is of a horse on a beach, with its handler just behind the animal. There’s a quiet, provocative jumble of things: we’re used to seeing the archetypal photo of a horse galloping through the tide’s edge, but here it just stands stoically with no saddle upon its back, and yet clearly harnessed. Standing somewhere on the line separating boundless freedom and discipline, that’s the horse… and that’s Little Wings on Explains.

The album opens with the acoustic-guitar shuffle and ever so wistful keyboard of “By Now,” and in typical form, it’s vintage Little Wings from the moment Field opens his mouth. What does he sing? A lilting laugh! Yet the song isn’t frivolous; it’s a direct counterpart to the album’s title and a manifesto in crayon that announces (to the listeners? To his pals? His lover?) that he’s not going to explain everything about himself, at least directly, despite the expectation which he sees in the other’s eyes.

To be clear, this isn’t Bob-Dylan-esque petulance or obfuscation; I think Field takes himself, his personality, and his whole life trajectory to task in the songs. But blink or you’ll miss it. The song “Old Apocalypse Style” feels like it has a set of pulleys and counter-balancing weights, and is almost Rube-Goldberg-like in its construction. It’s got a heavy but funny title and sad stories, leavened with “But it’s all right / no one’s to blame,” a deep thought set off by something seemingly mundane. This is not a self-conscious grossly “ironic” methodology; it’s true to how life is. We think of something profound or moving, and then our next concern is what we’re going to eat for lunch.

As ever, there is the consistent preoccupation with nature, either at the fore or as backdrop, particularly “A Blade of Grass,” “A Sky,” and “Hollowed Log.” The album ends on a grace note with “Where,” a song that encapsulates the the themes of dualism. It starts off sounding like a typical far-reaching sort of Little Wings song, and then there is a furious unexpected crash of drums, piano, and urgent guitar strums punctuating the tune that we thought was something else. Field’s voice grows with a certainty that the first ten seconds of the song didn’t exhibit.

In the spirit of dualism, the title “Where” aptly marks the shifting map of our lives, of nature, of what we know, and what we don’t know. “You are here,” he seems to say. “You thought I was a folk-y, and oh, I’m going to end this song singing perfectly like The Bee Gees. So where does that leave me? Where does that leave you? Don’t make me explain it, please.”

Explains was released by Woodsist on May 26.

Tour Dates:
7/28 – San Francisco, CA – Swedish American Hall
9/05 – Portland, ME – The Space
9/06 – Portsmouth, NH – 3S Arts Space
9/09 – Providence, RI – Columbus Theatre
9/10 – Brooklyn, NY – Rough Trade
9/12 – Baltimore, MD – The Crown
9/15 – Philadelphia, PA – Johnny Brenda’s
9/17 – Durham, NC – Pinhook
9/18 – Asheville, NC – Mothlight