Yet for all that affecting prose, Oleander also knows the power that music itself can convey. The rambling rhythm section of “Stone Song” turns her dejection into hope, and “Run Your Pockets” finds belonging in roving piano. On “Maddy’s Song,” she yields the reins to bandmate Maddy Bun, whose stripped-back love song lets banjo do most of the confessing and then strikes when the heart is tender, singing, “As if love could ever be contained within a word.” Amid all the tumult, the song’s simplicity grounds crazy arms.
The band embedded that authentic perspective in the album’s creation, too. Recorded straight to tape on a 4-track in their friend’s basement, crazy arms consists almost entirely of live takes punctuated by the occasional warble of tape degradation. One of the lone dubs was a physical effort: After pushing a piano off a van and towards the house studio, the members learned it couldn’t fit through the basement door. Their improvised fix—running microphones out to the piano to track parts, while Oleander engineered with headphones in the empty studio down below—treated restrictions as an opportunity for creativity and teamwork. As Oleander puts it on “Bronco,” there’s only one real guarantee: “All that’s left, my friends, that love you chose: to ride your highs and lows.”
Whether Oleander sings about her own life or recounts the stories of others, the shortcomings and obstructions that populate the world of crazy arms are all the same. “Josephine County Blues” casts a landscape where loved ones gaze distantly from missing person fliers, residents 3D-print guns and sell dimebags to get by, and propping a chair under the trailer door is a bedtime routine. “I guess some buried treasure just ain’t meant to be found,” Oleander sings before a sanguine solo on pedal steel. In anyone else’s version of the song, this would be a tragedy. For Pigeon Pit, it’s a victory, another day where you kept yourself alive.
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