Planting by the Signs, S.G. Goodman’s first full-length album since her stellar Teeth Marks, travels along the ethereal folkways of modern rock and roll. Its rolling, pulsating rock can transfix you or jerk you out of a gentle slumber. It can make you think deeply or stir you up into an impulsive, emotional outburst. Planting by the Signs is, above all else, a complete experience. From opening track to close.
One things for certain, S.G. Goodman has stories to tell. Stories planted according to the signs. Once watered by the haunting, measured sounds of her backing band, her songs spring up, fully formed. S.G. adorns them with the hopes, losses, and fervent head tosses of life.
Snapping Turtle, the 4th track on the album, gets to the heart of this contemplative but forceful storytelling dynamic. The song, sprinkled with asides and acquittances from a distance past, conjures up a rural town, where the “mind gets stuck.” From a run-in with small-town kids to a lament for her long-ago friend LeAnn, Goodman imparts what it’s like to grow up in a different kind of Paris: Paris, Tennessee. A place where kids “drive before the legal age” and become mothers while still raising their “little brother.” It’s a hell of a circumstance, one I recognize in the places and people that have brushed against my own life.
While Snapping Turtle’s story unfolds like a slow burn, other parts of Goodman’s album bound forward with a determined beat. Fire Sign asks the question “who put the fire out?” while S.G. was on a grueling tour. You can hear Goodman’s combative struggle throughout the song as she attempts to shape-shift back into the songwriter she longs to be.
Living like a fire sign
I was born a seeker
Living like a fire sign
An old storykeeperThey’re killing time when I’m sewing gold
Shapeshifting through the night of life’s turn rows
Yeah, I’ve been living like the sun don’t shine
On the same dog’s ass every day
Thankfully, with her tour in the rearview, Goodman has returned to the fields tended by the “old storykeeper” within. In addition to the tracks above, her new crop of songs are deeply personal. From the aching loss detailed in “Michael Told Me” to the echoes of love found flashing in “Heat Lightning,” you get confessions from Goodman’s life vibing across a radio-soaked night. Even S.G.’s campfire duet with Bonnie “Prince” Billy feels close to the heart, despite being penned by songwriter Tyler Ladd. “Nature’s Child” is a hell of a track. One can picture it being a showstopper once Goodman finds herself back on tour. Many listeners, of a certain age, will be grabbed by one particular verse in the song. A verse that swelled up inside me like eyes of watery glass. “Nature’s Child” for that small moment, conjured up the “Leonard Cohen afterworld” Kurt Cobain alluded to years ago. Bonnie “Prince” Billy cutting in to sing the fateful lines. It’s a brilliant call back.
Come as you are
Unto me, unto me
Baring all disease and injury
Feeling bodies transpire
Burn me alive in your lake of fire
This brings us to the album’s title song, “Planting By the Signs.” It comes bounding in one track prior to the winding and deeply fulfilling closer, “Heaven Song.” Comprised of beautiful Iines like, “Plastic stars on my bedroom ceiling hanging over you” and “Trace my hands across constellations on your skin in the night,” Goodman and her duet partner, Matthew Rowan, take you to yet another otherworldly soundscape. Together they sing of planting love “according to the signs” while “the sun is sinking in the cold, dark night.” A perfect image to close out a fantastic album. An album, that finds S.G. Goodman at the center of a fertile and diverse field of music.