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Scivic Rivers

by Scivic Rivers

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1.
High Season 06:41
The sea is close As close as you can get to eternity It goes on Churning bodies Flat on your back on the beach Imagining Every wave drowns The bored voices around you You don’t so much Wish for their death You only want a piece Of the endless complete Soak in The only peace that power will accept Listen To the radios turned on and left You never cared to come alone Before today, my evil twin Back when you lived and loomed So large, a reflection In the sunglasses of women A shadow now like every old friend Still trying to get outside of eternity Well the first round The first round’s on me
2.
Our Kin 04:19
Sister when was the last time you truly Truly felt a spark The universe has no expression Like our father The time you tried To tell him how he was Unmarked There’s a new chill in the air As I’m crossing over Afton Mountain To see you, my family It’s only on these long drives I kill enough time Until all I’m seeing is the way I’ve been approaching forever All you all ever did was try All you all ever did was try To warn me Me and these five old sidemen Carry the body And the women serve the bereaved Tallow in plastic plates To express nothing Our kin take such pains Are you surprised We spent our lives in search Of the strongest ways to say The strongest ways to say What are we really mourning In the cinderblock walls Of a church rec room Sister you look so hung over I might have to carry you Tell me am I just stuck Behind eighteen-year-old eyes That still look down on this town Toward an escape, or am I Actually holding my own now Holding my own now to account
3.
OK I’ve got the basics down now Another hard-won view rings true And the ring’s outlasted And slowly I’m turning to Alternative routes The ways I take to get back When I am overdue When I light Out for the high countryside To be reminded how life Should really let a moment die I find the rhythm of water and sandstone Carving canyons that show A river never stops keeping time Deep time Frontier terrain forever Is all I see the whole way back Wide open country that sells Living free How this could be control Without conspiracy Is a view from this beautiful land No one wants to see When I light Out for the bright city night To be reminded how life Should really let a moment die I wonder how many years have I got left Driving back to the same old fear How do we assume the new Will make anything else clear When I light Out for the bright city night To be reminded our kind Can never let a moment die And find the rhythm of water And sandstone Carving canyons that show A river never stops keeping time Keeping the frontier line
4.
How could you not look back At your own at what you came from And find all the same ancient shame Is still the measure of how far you’ve come When I was fifteen You put all these deadbolts on our house And kept the keys and the connection to me Sorta blinked out I never understood you after that But I came to be grateful For the way that the years Let me down Now it’s easy to welcome Any light to be found And it’s around you and your new Widower now Meanwhile my own bride and I We’re looking at the odds And it’s a full-time job To keep giving a fuck It’s a cheap shot But it’s true All anyone seems to know how to do Is get caught up When it was over I signed as a witness Stared at the sight Of my father’s name I spent a long afternoon with the family Such as it was And the clear-cut lakeside view Was humming As I talked with my sister’s eldest one Abigail About leaving home as Something we were owed and About what was coming
5.
Born Outside 04:13
Put the finishing touches on A watershed year In transformation pain Mark where you stand Outside the picture now By enclosing it in this frame O little child You will never know a world That lets you forget What you’ve been When I was a boy I honestly thought I would be relieved to find out How the story ends O little child You will never know the world That let you forget What you’d been I really thought I would be relieved to find out Where I fit in For most of my life I’ve done nothing but burn through The inheritance every day Never imagining never imaging I would live to see a demagogue Finally get the keys to the United States Even though we had this coming My old man’s own notion of living free Wore down his resistance If you were born here, son Before long you were strung out All strung out on the frontier distance
6.
It’s nothing you could ever outgrow Once you’re old enough to know And so bored No matter how clear you see From this high hill Where everything is still Under the sword I had to go lie down for a while On the Shenandoah granite The slow cure for our grief Shaping, laying waste It gives my mind a little peace Well that’s where I’m standing now And from where I’m standing I don’t want to see The family beaten by time and needs Sacrificed I’m old enough to know how Every year moves the ground Silently Beneath our feet Driving down to the lights Through town to the highway pines I’m headed home To be shown that the drift has grown That it’s our labor now On which we depend Even if we’re just turning Into the bedrock in the end With the consolation that you remain my one True friend Now we’ve been scared And bored at the same time For the civilized It’s hard to feel otherwise It’s important to be kind Worry is a waste of time Because you won’t be able To avoid living through The children somehow When the world is reduced once again To the ancient sound To the rhythms of the house When you’re old enough to know how Every year moves the ground Silently Beneath our feet Driving down to the lights Through town to the highway pines Headed home To be shown that the drift has grown That it’s our labor now On which we depend Even if we’re just turning Into the bedrock in the end And you and I can find No words of consolation Left to lend
7.
Blood Vessel 05:22
I’ve been asking ever since Our blood was born What did I become What did I become a vessel for Airlifted out of the smoke Of a young man’s pride Overfed Headed dead into the middle of life Like everyone else, I try But I haven’t got the time To sit through all of it The national psychosis It takes all our strength Just to keep what we have intact And no one says a thing But they have to know They have to know what it feels like Right before you collapse They built another overpass So I went To check out the view With the boy as the lens And I remembered I knew Just how far this interstate led You can take it, I said You can take it all the way To the end of the west He was too young then To get much out of this Have I ever said a single thing Not for my own benefit When our hillside house Was in sight I saw you watching us walk Down the long, long incline A vessel of three And the only essential fact Our only course to take Down through the rolling unfolding Soft collapse
8.
The last thing I want to do Is file another field piece About what it means To raise a human being But the fact is Another one is gone to stay And I’ve long since dug in For the real reckoning That a child, a child is always on the way I wasn’t trained to be the killer I was never trained at all To game whatever could be gained The old man’s hand Was as straight as they came But instruction I had to find Every time after the fact Forever back in the back of a bored class Wandering wild A child is always on the way So for you I will take Great pains to explain And fall short Another white man scared shitless All the news will give you Is the shooter’s aim And the opposing sides you need to know To decide who you should blame No one’s ever going to try too hard To make you see What goes further than this Further than thee Our horror and beauty Are shades of the same That it’s never too late to go out And stake your own claim And a child is always on the way Wandering wild A child is always on the way Further than thee

about

​Scivic Rivers is the musical nom de plume of American singer-songwriter Randy Bickford; the new self-titled album is his seventh LP.

Bickford's songs have earned him wide recognition from fellow lifer musicians and critics alike. Pitchfork described his writing as "tracing a single thought or sketching a single image throughout the course of several bars, building suspense and making you wait patiently for the pay-off".

Scivic Rivers represents the next epoch of Bickford’s work. In retrospect, it makes sense: he released his initial output as the Strugglers, often emergent and spare as the bones of his songwriting hardened. In time, he found himself upright and walking in his craft, releasing a pair of albums under his own name, Brice Randall Bickford, still personal but now breathing with life and rich arrangements. But all walking is controlled falling, and the coming years would invite and even require a new horizon.

David Berman, one of Bickford's favorite singers, once gave him some unsolicited advice: as a way to be heard, consider a pen name that can’t be ignored. While recording new songs with longtime collaborator Scott Solter and a group of veteran NC Triangle musicians, Bickford spontaneously wrote down the words “Scivic Rivers.” It was an homage to Berman’s Purple Mountains, and partly inspired by the Wild and Scenic Rivers System. A portmanteau pairing human governance with natural rhythms, it hints at a world off-kilter. For Bickford, these new songs felt like a high-water mark, and warranted a new name that gestured to failing infrastructures and the impassibility of nature reflected in the material.

While writing what would become the new album, he and his wife welcomed their first child into a world whose fissures were already revealing themselves. Trusted institutions, both civic and personal, proved themselves to be fragile, as the plates of society shifted underfoot and Bickford’s father passed away after a six-month struggle with lung cancer. The songs shared a common thread: the labor of starting a family in a society experiencing slow-rolling collapse.

The resulting record pulls together disparate elements in both its arrangements and lyrical themes, flowing with ease through the pages of the American songbook. Featured instruments such as harmonica, pedal steel, and John Pffifner’s array of guitars finish each other’s sentences. The pointillistic arrangements, reminiscent of Talk Talk and Japan, oscillate around the central, guiding character of Bickford’s voice, which glides from rich baritone to expressive tenor.

The slow canoe ride of the first track, “High Season,” establishes one of the record’s motifs: an ongoing shift between the micro and the macro. “Our Kin” focuses on the former, offering the first of several family vignettes across the record. Moving from the elegant disco of “Frontier Forever," with its study of the layers of the country's natural and political history, to a portrait of family conflict from the perspective of middle age in “Caught Up Blues”, the album turns its focus to the coming generation and new beginnings in its second half. "Shenandoah Granite" again weaves together the global and the intimate, hearing intimations of climate grief as a couple slowly drifts apart. And "Blood Vessel" – in some ways the record's definitive statement – mingles family warmth with dread for the future, facing feelings of helplessness in the midst of horror: "I’ve been asking ever since our blood/ was born /What did I become, what did I become/a vessel for?” The final track, “Instruction After the Fact,” takes on the timeworn genre piece of offering advice to the next generation, in the context of the narrator’s unfinished, still unfolding past, set to the disquieting pulse of an Optigan synth.

Scivic Rivers marks a new chapter for Bickford, but also stands as the culmination of a life’s work in songwriting, a reinvention through patient labor and deep time.

credits

released February 9, 2023

All songs by Brice Randall Bickford
Produced by Scott Solter and BRB
Engineered and mixed by Scott Solter
Recorded in Winston-Salem and Durham, NC
Mastered by Brent Lambert in Carrboro, NC

Played by:
BRB: voice, nylon-string guitar, electric guitar
Charles Cleaver: piano, Wurlitzer, Rhodes, Hammond
Daniel Faust: drums, percussion
John Pfiffner: 6 & 12 string acoustic guitars, electric guitars, dobro, mando guitar
Jimmy Thompson: bass
Solter: dark fire

Featuring:
Wendy Allen: voice on 1-3 and 7
Rich Bennett: acoustic guitar on 4
Alex Lazara: clavinet on 3 and 7, crystalline piano on 2
Pete Pawsey: harmonica on 1, 4, and 7
James Phillips: optigan on 1, 5, and 8, percussion on 6
Libby Rodenbough: violin on 3
Whit Wright: pedal steel on 4

Photograph by Ronny Khalil
Art direction by BRB and Ronny Khalil
Overlay by Charles Chace

Thank you: all players and collaborators listed herein, Ash Bowie, Jason Currie, John Harrison, Karthik Shyam, Perry Wright, the Khalils and the Bickfords.

All songs © 2022 Let the Thing Turn Over Music (BMI)

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Scivic Rivers Durham, North Carolina

Scivic Rivers is the musical nom de plume of American singer-songwriter Randy Bickford; the new self-titled album is Bickford’s seventh LP.
** scivicrivers.com **

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