I tell you everything, just not out loud.by .Sue Ann Harkey

https://sueannharkey.bandcamp.com/album/i-tell-you-everything-just-not-out-loud

Genre: Freak Folk

Rating: World Treasure

I wish I were a better writer so I could really give this the review it deserves. My first exposure to this was in 1987. It came along with an issue of the cassette culture zine Sound Choice.

It soon became one of my favorite records of all time. Harkey, who’s still kicking up in Seattle as far as I know, created something very unique and beautiful in her own musical language with this one. She plays mandolin and guitar in a very abstract but in a far from random style. It’s folk music and it catches melodies and hooks like more traditional folk music but the sound is highly dissonant and deeply in the avant-garde. The main influence, if I’m having a guess, is Joni Mitchell, but much stranger. But maybe not, it’s also reverberting with a interpretations of the sounds from the African records from Nonesuch Explorer Series.

I don’t think anyone with an once of hippy or punk in them heard the name, CITYZENS FOR NON-LINEAR FUTURES and didn’t think wow. It’s almost impossible not to think of Mark Fisher and “Lost Futures”

One of the lyrics provided is slightly incorrect through omission and I think it might be the most important thing she sings on the record. Corrected by me, what the to We Speculate On Our Urgency on this verse are as follows with corrections in italics: because we know that they know / they have all the guns we’ve made for them for us / and we know that they know that only as active pacifists can we achieve peace for them for us /// – end of lyrics – At the start of this verse one of the instruments sound, to me, like an upset dog. Like the dog is trying to warn us, perhaps telepathically that this is what we need to understand.