March 8, 2024 / By: Josh Kitchen
When Angel Olsen stopped by Jonathan Wilson’s studio recently and heard Grace Cummings’ vocals on her upcoming album, Ramona, she was floored. “I remember feeling so activated and surprised by Grace’s vocal capacity that I actually felt my body brace itself against the wall.” I think Olsen is underselling it. I can attest to a similar reaction when I first heard Cummings’ cover of Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds’ Straight to You. When I heard Cummings’ latest single, "Common Man," I had to get up, pace around my apartment, and then I quickly had to sit down. The last time a song like that hit me, funnily enough, was Cave’s otherworldly Jubilee Street.
"Common Man" is a declaration and a yearning for life. In the same tradition as the outlaw songs of Marty Robbins, shimmeringly produced Glen Campbell songs about the California west, and more recently on Bruce Springsteen’s 𝘞𝘦𝘴𝘵𝘦𝘳𝘯 𝘚𝘵𝘢𝘳𝘴, "Common Man" is a cowboy song. But where “going country” is the latest trend to take over popular music, "Common Man" is about demanding freedom and agency from an unfulfilled life. “The blanket on my bed has never kept me warm/just swimming in my bed was an image of the dawn,” Cummings cries out near the songs final crescendo.
Cummings mentions talking about a friend who wrote a song about finding the joy in the mundanity of the 9-5, and peaceful repetition. Cummings banishes the thought. “I wrote about wanting to be a cowboy instead, which to me represents complete freedom and detachment from this mundane world.”
"Common Man" starts with a familiar galloping, Chris Isaak flavored drumbeat, and Cummings’ powerful, raspy vocals are equal parts Lucinda Williams and Weyes Blood, yet entirely her own. Cummings’ singing immediately seizes on your every nerve, you must stand at attention. Hers is a voice so deeply filled with smoke and sandpaper, so fully encapsulating that you’d believe anything she sings you.
By the time the song’s chorus breaks crashes with, “I am a cowboy/I ride and I ride/my idea of heaven is a pistol by my side”, I was a converted believer. You will want to put on your boots, chaps, and ten-gallon hat and go on a cattle drive. Or a baseball hat, a la Billy Crystal in City Slickers.
To quote Cummings’, “I don’t need to understand any common man.”
Ramona is out on April 5th on ATO records, and if the rest of the tracks are anything like "Common Man," it’s going to be a stone cold classic.
Grace Cummings will also be playing a show at the intimate Gold Diggers in Los Angeles on May 1st. You do not want to miss it.
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