Nicole Dollanganger
Married in Mount Airy
Self-released
Listen Below
Mount Airy, North Carolina is known as the “real” Mayberry, the fictitious town made famous by The Andy Griffith Show, a town synonymous with idyllic small-town life, traditional values, and the American Dream. It’s been 55 years since Andy Griffith left the show, and yet Mount Airy’s sunny promenades, manicured lawns, and quaint old-timey Main Street still attract tourists half hoping for a glimpse of Floyd the Barber or Barney Fife. And the town obliges, offering up a plethora of schlocky tourist attractions and spectacles.
Last year, CBS News visited Mount Airy as both an exercise in innocent curiosity and to ask passersby whether or not they regarded the 2020 presidential election as legitimate (ballsy!). One man told Ted Koppel, "I think the generations now long for that simplicity … of Andy being real with his son about stealing or doing the right thing, and [the] godless society that we see today is longing for a simple life. Back when neighbors were neighbors, and they provided for everybody else.” In other words, it’s probably safe to conclude that the MAGA crowd has a huge, throbbing boner for Mayberry. But that’s a bit of an oversimplification—“Mayberry” has always been shorthand for innocence and a very specific type of kitschy, gee-whiz, pre-sexual revolution Americana.
The town also serves as the backdrop of Nicole Dollanganger’s just-released seventh album Married in Mount Airy, an album that paints over Mount Airy—and, by default, Mayberry—with a dark, Lynchian pall. It begins with the lullaby-like song “Married in Mount Airy,” Dollanganger singing in her signature saccharine tone, “I was married in Mount Airy / In its prime, sometime in the late ’60s / Where he carried me into a lover’s suite / And we made love / Beneath the mirrored ceiling.” The song immediately picks up the theme of Dollanganger’s previous album, 2018’s Heart Shaped Bed, which saw Dollanganger visiting abandoned love motels in the Poconos for inspiration.
“I went there assuming it was still this land of love,” Dollanganger told Stereogum. But when she arrived, she found the area in a state of decay and disrepair. “A lot of the abandoned resorts developed weird reputations of being, like, unsavory swingers’ joints, and it developed a seedy reputation so they all shut down,” she said. The detritus of tenants still litters each abandoned motel—forgotten keys; customer complaint forms; broken mirrors, sagging tinsel, and dirty satin-covered beds. Dollanganger meticulously documented the strange, squalid splendor on her Instagram. “Everything is love-based, but it’s broken down and destroyed,” she observed, “which is one of the coolest paradoxes that you can find.” (Heart Shaped Bed ended up covering harrowing topics like incest, infidelity, and ambivalent marriages.)
Dollanganger often pairs the beautiful with the brutal, the gorgeous with the grotesque. On all of her albums prior to Mount Airy, she sings with seraphic sweetness about horror, true crime, illness, eating disorders, abusive relationships, and all aspects of life’s seamy underbelly. However, she also sings candidly about female sexual desire, a longing for true love, and a playful curiosity for kink, sidestepping the male gaze that so often dominates the horror genre. Dollanganger manages to make no topic seem too taboo, so that there’s something oddly therapeutic—particularly for women—about facing it all head-on through song. It’s likely what inspired Dollanganger’s fellow Canadian Grimes in 2015 to create a record label, called Eerie Organization, specifically for putting out Dollanganger’s record Natural Born Losers. “It's a crime against humanity for this music not to be heard," Grimes said.
Listen to the Album:
With Dollanganger’s well-established predilection for sinister subject matter, what stands out most about Married in Mount Airy is that it’s surprisingly devoid of graphic content or gore. Its darkness and horror are more of the David Lynch variety: a murky sense of aching loneliness and impending doom lurking around every corner and hanging ominously over the small town. When considered as part of an evolution, the album’s vague menacing earmarks Mount Airy as Dollanganger’s best, most nuanced work yet. (It’s also the most sophisticated and polished in terms of production, with Dollanganger enlisting longtime collaborator Matt Tomasi to co-produce).
Married in Mount Airy examines the death of the American Dream through lonely interiors—a satiny long-gone honeymoon suite, sure, but also a remote mobile home, as well as a kitchen that’s stuffy with the blood-tinged aroma of steak. Even a brackish backyard pool clotted with leaves becomes claustrophobic as Dollanganger describes a woman standing at its edge after having (possibly) murdered her husband. It consists of little snapshots of individuals and couples and odd characters, fusing them together to form a memorable impression of the town itself.
The album begins with the aforementioned dreamy title song about newlyweds making love in a honeymoon suite, and although the couple is in Mount Airy “in its prime, sometime in the late ’60s,” we get the impression that they also might be the sort of “swingers” who led the Poconos resorts to their decay: “Don't recall what we were drinking / But I remember thinking / There was something very strange in the air / Don't recall what we were singing / But I remember swinging / With my hands caught in the curls of his long hair.” The sense of something strange in the air, paired with crashing, stormy sonic interludes, imbues the album with an early foreboding.
The next song, “Gold Satin Dreamer,” takes us to another time and place, far from that swinging ’60s suite. We’re in an airless home, where light bleeds through the curtain’s lace. “I feel the bath, while I dream of a lake / I can smell blood purged from raw steak,” Dollanganger sings. She has a remarkable knack for painting vivid atmosphere through lyrics, of slowing down time and making the listener keenly aware of every sight, every smell, every detail of every room and interior thought. Time speeds up again, or returns to normal, and it’s nighttime and the narrator finds her husband sitting in the living room in the blue light of the TV. She loves him, we learn, but that might be lost on him: “All of those dreams left out in the sun / They run like syrup and clot like blood / Disfigured beyond recognition in the sun.”
“Dogwood,” with spare guitar and subtle orchestral swelling, probes a relationship that’s imploding due to addiction—“I try to stop him from using that shit / But there’s no telling that man what to do.” The protagonist begs God not to take her man through overdose or suicide, a prayer no doubt whispered all over modern-day America, particularly in pockets affected by the opioid crisis. In seeming contrast, the next song, “Runnin’ Free,” is a shimmery dream-pop ballad with radio appeal, but its sunniness overlays dark lyrics about a lonely, self-harming woman in a remote mobile home whose lover has abandoned her. Delusionally, she still believes in his love—“If I told him I'll die out here if I stay / He would hold me in his arms / And he’d love it that way.”
Gorgeously meandering and melodic, “Bad Man” is easily my favorite song on Mount Airy. It’s about a woman whose lover has died under undisclosed conditions, but most likely she murdered him and now she’s conflicted. “I wish he didn’t have to die / But he was a bad man,” goes the chorus, Dollanganger’s voice floating through the cool night, the vague regret, and the soft fingerpicking.
Next, “My Darling True” is a stormy interlude with wailing electric guitar about a mindfuck of a relationship with a verbally abusive boyfriend, while “Moonlite,” ticking with muffled, syncopated beats, offers another painful snapshot of love with a volatile drunk. At this point in the album, the listener gets a distinct sense of gliding over Mount Airy like a nightbird, peering into lit windows and witnessing all the individual and collective dysfunction.
The dark, whispery “Sometime After Midnight” offers a glimpse of a young woman getting ready for a date, picking out what she’ll wear while examining her own naked reflection in a three-way mirror. The scene’s simplicity offers a break from the town’s dysfunction, yet in true Lynchian foreboding, the song ends with an anxious pang in the woman’s stomach. (“Wondering if I should just ignore it / But I was told when something bad happens / It's usually at night.”)
“Nymphs Finding the Head of Orpheus” takes us to the side of the aforementioned leaf-clogged pool, where another woman contemplates the death of her dreams, or the death of her husband. As on the rest of Mount Airy, relationship dreams and the American Dream blur into one. An appropriate follow-up, “Whispering Glades” is a wispy acoustic-folk eulogy for a lover who’s only imagined as dead. “With a face made for daytime TV shows / You’re a nightmare disguised as a good dream,” Dollanganger sings, and it’s hard not to think right away of the original Mayberry.
Married in Mount Airy concludes perfectly with “I’ll Wait For You To Call,” a song that brings to mind that sad woman in her remote mobile home still pining for a lover—or maybe just a particular time—now long gone. “I’ll wait for you to call / And if I wait my whole life / It won’t be wasted at all.”
Notable Tracks: “Bad Man” | “Gold Satin Dreamer” | “Runnin’ Free” | “Whispering Glades”
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