Charlie Kaplan – Eternal Repeater | Album Review
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Glamour Gowns
In the months leading up to my wedding day, on numerous occasions, people would come up and tell me how difficult marriage is. It's one of a handful of clichés that you say to a young person before their wedding day—a “happy wife, happy life” type beat. My wife Morgan and I became friends in middle school, started dating our senior year of high school, dated long-distance through college, and got married quickly after graduating. We had been in each other’s lives long enough to know that we didn't have to heed the old folks’ warnings. Our marriage was going to be easy.
Morgan and I have been getting into the same heated argument for the last eight years. It's the one where I want to buy a project car, and she has not yet found our stage of life to be one that includes a project car. This difference in automotive opinion has been a frequent source of friction in our relationship. Isn't that so dumb? I love it. The project car argument has been a consistent figure in our relationship. A cyclical feature that will subside and then eventually boil up in me, overflowing into friction and repeating endlessly. Our most recent project car argument also happened to be the day I first listened to my advance of Charlie Kaplan’s third album, Eternal Repeater, and now I can't seem to dissociate the two from each other.
Eternal Repeater tells tales of human brokenness with a gentle enough touch that you don't have to be brought down into the muck to see it clearly. It is a nuanced and fun nine-track album that can be sat with and mulled over or just as easily be turned on while you and your buddies play pool in the garage. The minute-long solo guitar instrumental “Sun Come Up” leads the tracklist and spends most of its time ominously hopscotching from side to side, giving me whiffs of the Pirates of the Caribbean soundtrack. The bridge of the song is full of hope though and acts as an answer to the questions posed by the notes preceding it. This introductory track ends with a sustained note that salves the dissonance created. In just 66 seconds, it acts as a perfect representation of the album that follows and of the human experience that will exist outside of the world Kaplan created. The second song, “Everyone Calling Your Name,” reminds me of a thought that I've had many times when considering how to interact with Morgan as Kaplan sings,
Not much has changed
Everyone’s playing the game
So I’m getting out of my way
We all have a price we have to pay
I have often thought that the best way to love Morgan would be to defer to her, to take the path of least resistance. Through some wonderful therapy sessions, I have learned that this is not correct. I have learned that the most loving way I can consider her in my life is to express my true feelings in all instances and for us to work through differences, thoughtfully and carefully, together.
The album’s lead single, “Cloudburst,” is a pandemic-written song of contradiction and simple beauty. It starts with a twinkling piano that gave me immediate chills and made me wish I was watching Charlie perform it live. The song evokes the repetitive days of being at school in Colorado while Morgan was at nursing school back in Texas. During those days, I know I experienced unique interactions with the people I loved in Boulder, but looking back, it is so easy to lump it all together into a period defined by being away from Morgan in contrast to the collective weekends when we would visit each other. Years of complexity summarized through lazy memory into black or white juxtapositions of whether we were in the same room or not. But that time was still special. It was full of wonderful relationships and important experiences that I treasure, yet it is so easy for me to reduce all of that to a time of longing to be where I wasn't. This is what “Cloudburst” is for me. It reduces a period of time into a singular moment, defined by that hard-to-ignore feeling, but I think it is important to try and hold onto the nuance of times that made up that whole section of my life—the good and the bad that happened.
Past other singles like “Mescarole” and “Edie Got Away,” the last three songs of the album form a collective sonic and thematic peak. The self-talk in “Idiot” was confusing for me at first, but through numerous listens, it became a place of comfort against my failings as a partner and in the ways I have disappointed myself over the years. It reminds us that how we fail can also be proof of our possibility to succeed. “Now That I’m Older” reminds me that I am the one who is in control of my own cyclical downfalls. The project car argument keeps happening because I continue to approach the topic without care. I am pulling the same lever over and over again, expecting a different result. A part of me must not think that her feelings about it are valid enough to stop me from trying.
We are about to have our first child. A daughter. Maybe this next phase of marriage is that difficult part that they were telling us about. Maybe this next part will change our marriage and put some truth to the warnings we were given. The final song on Eternal Repeater, “In a Little Bit of Time,” is much more bombastic than the songs that preceded it, especially from the album opener. It is brash and aggressive, but the lyrics hold the same softness as all the rest. I have no clue what is coming for Morgan and me in these next years, but I know that I'll be able to pull more from this album as I grow older and learn more about myself and the world.
I believe that people are innately good. We have all witnessed and been party to the brokenness of humanity. Charlie Kaplan thoroughly exposes this brokenness and, in the midst of it, reminds us of the great potential for good that still exists. We are able to learn and improve and break the cycles that break trust and burden our most prized relationships. Our marriage is easy, our problems are real, and although I am an idiot, I will continue to become a better friend as I get older.
Kirby Kluth grew up in the suburbs of Houston but now lives in Knoxville, TN. He spends his time thinking about motorcycles, tennis, and music. You can follow him on Instagram @kirbykluth.
