Winter 2003
Beaver Nelson
Andrew Dansby, Texas Music, Issue 13

Beaver Nelson bellies up to the bar at New York City's the Cutting Room, his shoulders sloped and his eyes drawn south, as if pulled by fishhooks. He's sipping water and looking as though he spent the night with kryptonite dangling from his neck. Nelson, Scrappy Jud Newcomb, Adam Carroll and Steve Poltz played San Marcos last night before hopping on a jet—cushioned by a single hour's sleep—to play NYC's CMJ Music Marathon Festival, 1,800 miles from home. And the foursome still has miles to go before they sleep, with a gig on tap tomorrow in Boston, a good five hours away.

The Austin-based singer-songwriter is hardly a sight worthy of his new album's title, Legends of the Super Heroes. But buoyed by a beer and his turn on stage, he takes his crispy rasp, his bag of roots-rockin', hooky melodies and his contemplative and detail-laden songs and owns the stage for 30 minutes.

Super Heroes is Nelson's fourth album in as many years, a rabid pace that might be self-sabotage were it not for the consistently excellent collection of songs included in each. It might also be the result of a creative whiplash sparked by nearly a decade of well-publicized missteps with various major labels before he darted for the independent back roads.

How Nelson arrived at Super Heroes is a tale that others likely find more interesting than he does. Born in Oklahoma, raised in Houston, a teenage Nelson was turned on to music at a Christian youth camp. He quickly began to devour songs, drawn particularly to the works of Bob Dylan, Bruce Springsteen and Townes Van Zandt. He relocated to Austin in the early-'90s, enrolled at UT and found regular gigs. There were some homespun cassettes that pulled in a cult following. A publishing deal followed, as did a contract with Columbia. Rolling Stone hit him with a "prodigy" tag, all before he was a score old. The record deal turned south quickly, as did a subsequent one with Sony. For most of the '90s, unless you saw him performing live, Beaver Nelson's songs were a falling tree in an empty forest.

Frustrated and resilient, Nelson moved forward and finally recorded The Last Hurrah with Newcomb in 1998. With the release of Little Brother in 1999 and Undisturbed last year, he seemed to be working those frustrations out through the rigorous practice of his craft. "We do things and things do us," he says. "And that did me. But you deal with it, you move on. It's just constantly a process of reassessing possibilities and adjusting goals and redefining what success means to you at any given moment. I've climbed back up on the horse I don't know how many times. It's just what I will do."

With the release of Super Heroes he dusted off his backside and dropped a foot into the stirrup once again. Nelson released Undisturbed in September 2001, usually a fertile time of year for new albums, with holiday shopping just weeks away. But like many other albums released on 9/11, his album suffered listener indifference, as people, understandably, had their minds on things other than music. Acutely self-aware, Nelson knows that the artistic dead zone of late 2001 hardly compares to what transpired that month. "I do not consider myself a tragic figure in what happened," he says. "It was just a consequence, like somebody losing their job at a hotel because people aren't travelling."

So he set about to getting back to work. With a friend's offer of studio space, Nelson began recording shortly after Undisturbed's release. Super Heroes was made in convenient burst of five hours over the span of nine months, working around the work schedules of friends, as well as his own regular itinerary as a father and husband.

Not one to pluck album titles from a standout song, Nelson's choice of Legends of the Super Heroes is telling and layered. There is, first, the surface, the immediate feeling that arose from the sessions themselves. "I felt like everyone who played on the record was like a featured guest star," he says. "Every time anyone came in, they were kind of like invading our little cave where we concoted our plan. We'd bring them in and we're like, 'This is what the inside of the cave looks like.' And then they would do their really, really great thing. And off we'd go and fight our own battles elsewhere."

But the flip side to Nelson's musical Bat Cave is songs that put an eye on the day-to-day detail that might include the doings of a super hero's mild-mannered alter-ego. Endlessly analytical, Nelson's music makes an investigation out of actions and reactoins, a collection of data compiled through his own experiences. The album's first track, "Clean It Up," is Super Heroes' cornerstone. It's a call for responsibility, despite the ease in passing the potato: "I got to ride in the big parade/but tickertape must some day land/ I'm still smiling, broom in hand/I'll have to clean it up by myself."

It's an observational mood also echoed less personally in one of Nelson's catchiest songs, "Government-Sanctioned Hayride." Irked by a news report about a law that prohibited riding in the back of pickup trucks—except in the occurence of government approval—Nelson inked a protest song which, like his best work, isn't shackled to any one thing or event in particular. Instead, it speaks in a more abstract, timeless manner. "It made me so angry," he says, with a laugh. "That combination of words was so powerful and spoke volumes to me about a huge paradigm shift in the thinking of the general populace: that those words were acceptable. Because it implies that there are non-government sanctioned hayrides and we've got to do something about that. But it was written to be for people to apply to whatever they might want to apply it to."

Nelson's approach lends some credence to Bob Dylan's suggestion that "he not busy being born is busy dying." Whatever the topic at hand in any given song, he seems disinterested in nostalgia and yesteryear, instead always looking forward. His lyrical images are frequently peppered with references to time, be it a smashed watch at the outset of "Clean It Up" or the slow climb of an oak tree in "It Seems So Simple." But he keeps said obsession on a leash, refusing to be defined, and depressed, by it. "I have a pretty healthy Christian hope in things," he said a year ago, "but at the same time there are physical realities that we have to deal with and one of them is no matter what we do with ourselves, there are limitations we cannot overcome."

And now, a year later, he still tries to define the parameters of his experience, in conversation as well as in songs like "Anything Easy Left," on which he sings "Every time I feel half/ I think of something whole in the world." "I've spent some time over the past year, just kind of thinking about attitude," he says. "I think you can kind of pick your mood a lot of the time. Just imagine you're driving down the highway, and on the left side of the highway, it's beautiful. And on the right side is just trash and rubble and dirt. Are you gonna look left or right? Because you're going to the same place, but do you want to be in a good mood or do you want to be in a bad mood? Do you want to be hopeful or do you want to be despairing? That's the way I'm looking at certain things in life now."

It's a time-honed seasoning and one that perhaps comes by putting smaller failures beyond his control (like label dealings) in context, compared to bigger successes like say, running a church youth group or being a father. "Part of it just has to do with having a child," he admits. "It's amazing, and it will change you whether you want to be changed or not. Part of it is looking at him and thinking, 'I want my kid to be happy.' The kid's not gonna be happy if the imprint he's getting off you is that you're always tired or ruminating or something. You know, he's gonna smile if you smile, and that's the deal. And I understand being happy isn't the end all, be all. It really serves no high purpose. Getting things done, helping people, those are the things that serve some kind of purpose. But I think you help more people and you get more done if you have a good attitude instead of a bad one [laughs]. Just the simple, obvious things that we forget."

So Beaver Nelson raced into the phonebooth and the songwriter emerged again. With Legends of the Super Heroes, there's no sense of the underdog, no prodigal son and no comeback—each approach would require corrective lenses for hindsight. As in song, Nelson continues to abuse his time-pieces. More like a river, he moves forward, and he writes songs. Too few people heard the last collection of them, and he set about to write and record another batch, all the while absorbing the experiences, good and bad, as part of some learning experience to be assessed later. Which isn't to say that the payoff of his best album to date wasn't without risk.

"Undisturbed had just come out," he says of Super Heroes genesis. "The money had been spent, you know? [Laughs]. Daddy Warbucks hadn't shown up to fund this project, and it had to be treated that way. Nobody knew if it was going to come out or if anyone was gonna get paid. That's the logistics. But the actual recording process was an incredible amount of fun. I did stuff that I would never have done in a million years in a real studio just because there were no time constraints. I learned a lot about what the other guys in the studio have to do. I just never thought about it in any kind of practical way. There was no reason not to at least try."