STEVE GUNN - DAYLIGHT DAYLIGHT - NO QUARTER

“We’re nearly there,” Steve Gunn sings on the first song of Daylight Daylight, the latest album in a discography too unruly to reduce to numbers. He sounds optimistic as he strums steadily through ascending chords. The string section behind him is patient, sitting with each note for as long as the harmonies will allow before moving to the next one. Gunn’s guitar, too, rests on certain chords for longer than you’d expect, lingering in their gentle tension and release. The song never really tells us what’s there, what we’re heading toward. It’s possible that the weary journeyer who narrates Daylight Daylight doesn’t exactly know himself. But we get the sense, after the seven gorgeous songs that follow, that it’s still just around the corner, awaiting our arrival, whenever we’re ready.

Daylight Daylight is Gunn’s first album for No Quarter, after years of releasing his earthy indie rock travelogues on Matador. The move to a smaller label, home to peripatetic kindred spirits like Will Oldham and the late Michael Hurley, suits him, an artist inclined to ramble far from the arrow-straight career path that the professional high echelon of indie demands of its aspirants. There are the exploratory instrumental duo albums with drummer John Truscinski, as essential to the Steve Gunn canon as his marquee songwriter records; the recent excursions into ambient music; the habit Gunn has of turning up on ad hoc improv gigs at humble community-oriented venues around New York alongside his headlining shows in much bigger rooms. Settling at No Quarter afforded him a certain freedom to make the kind of record he wanted to make, one that could fold in his entire personality as a musician rather than segment it off into various ostensible side projects.

With Daylight Daylight, Gunn wanted to capture something of the intimacy of playing solo, the sense of possibility and discovery that sparks when he sits down to write, while also creating a rich sonic world for the listener to inhabit. Rather than pulling together a band to flesh the songs out, as he’s done on previous albums, he enlisted a single primary collaborator: producer James Elkington, an old friend with a long list of credits—Jeff Tweedy, Joan Shelley, the list goes on—and an equally long tenure as co-conspirator with Gunn. Elkington is known as a guitarist, but Gunn asked him to contribute arrangements of strings and woodwinds, inspired in part by their mutual love of the great Italian film composer Ennio Morricone. They soon found a fruitful working process: Gunn would record solo demos and send them to Elkington, who had free rein to develop the arrangements on his own.

Sometimes, they would continue adding from there—a whisper of a synthesizer, a guitar overdub, a muted percussion line—but they were committed to the relative spareness of their initial approach. In addition to Morricone, they drew inspiration from the haunted atmospherics and singular blend of composition and improvisation in Talk Talk’s late masterpieces, albums that provide perhaps the clearest antecedent for Daylight Daylight’s rippling surfaces. They also talked about a less immediately apparent reference point: the Fall, not for their outward sound so much as their confident minimalism. “This is the music,” Gunn says of the attitude he wanted to glean from the English post-punk legends. “It isn’t anything beyond what we’re doing right now.”

As a result of their committed focus, Daylight Daylight feels like a series of contemplative angles on a single diaphanous subject, one that remains elusive even when you’ve fixed it in your gaze, as if obscured by the brilliant lens flare of the cover photo. The tempos are relaxed, prepared for the long haul. The guitar work is elegantly restrained, with lead lines appearing like an occasional breeze at your back. The string and winds—performed by Macie Stewart, Ben Whiteley, Nick Macri, and Hunter Diamond—sometimes hang back and sometimes offer resounding interjections, tracing oblique angles in response to Gunn’s imagery. The elusive subject of the music, to the extent that it can be glimpsed and named, is something like death. Gunn’s songs and Elkington’s arrangements treat it not with apprehension or violence, but curiosity and acceptance. “There’s ideas of death, but it’s not a darkness,” Gunn says. “It’s more about a hopeful death, a death where you don’t have to be afraid of renewal.”

One song embodies this theme with particular poignancy: “Meeting on K Road,” a meditation on serendipity, friendship, and loss based on a cyclical fingerpicked acoustic guitar that gathers momentum as it goes, with the chamber instruments weaving inquisitively in and out. Gunn wrote it after running unexpectedly into an old friend on the other side of the world: Hamish Kilgour of New Zealand indie rock heroes the Clean, who had been living in New York since the late ’80s. Gunn was in Auckland, up early after a show the night before, when he caught sight of Kilgour ambling along the titular main drag. The two caught up, got coffee, went record shopping. At a certain point, after hours of conversation, Kilgour “just kind of walked off into the shadows.” That was the last time Gunn ever saw him before his death in 2022.

In “Meeting on K Road,” Gunn sets the scene with elliptical images: a “painted leather jacket,” “songs made of glass.” The music is deeply mournful, but colored as much by Gunn’s awe and appreciation for this final opportunity to shoot the shit with an old comrade before he passed on, a coincidence too sweet to be coincidence alone. Ultimately, his open-ended approach to the writing helps the song to transcend its specific origins and become a balm for anyone who has loved those who reach for life’s darker corners, or reached for those corners themselves. Gunn’s voice is tender and hopeful when he reaches upward for the refrain: “Worried for you/Worried for me/Where did you go?/Calling on you anyway.”

Not every song addresses death’s mysteries so directly, but a sense of departure and rebirth, of death within life and life within death, becomes nearly omnipresent once you know to listen for it. In “Loon,” a sprightly ode to birdsong and entreaty to pay close attention to the natural world: “Before the curtain’s down, I feel the morning on the rise.” Amid the eerie stillness of the title track: “Water’s cold/Sun continues to shine.” Or, more plainly: “Darkness, darkness/Another form of light.” Even when the weather on Daylight Daylight turns stormy, Gunn’s songs never lose their hard-won acceptance nor their patient and confident gait. We’re nearly there, as he sings on the opener. There’s no need to rush.