One thing that makes rock-and-roll American is its devotion to the open road and the freewheeling possibilities it represents. Although, some of rock’s deepest roots are in the strange, plangent sounds of who has this-or-that blues, of who’s been left high and lonesome one more time. Rock-and-roll offered up the answer of dancing, of driving away from one’s travails. Rock groups revved up the back-woods and back-street weird-folk sounds and brought broken hearts together in a spirit of unbridled mobility.

Dylan did it first, some forty year ago, but more recently some indie folkies have kinda melded the two attitudes, reveling in vulnerable, off-kilter sounds on the one hand, and authoritative, world-wise words on the other. The listener senses the singer’s existential connection to the rest of the world via the road, and to the listener himself via the intimate presentation. We travel along, relate, without leaving the room or our own experiences.

Story goes, Raymond Raposa spent four years as a teenager traveling the country on a Greyhound bus. Listening to his Castanets albums, it’s as if he absorbed the vibes of every musical nook and cranny, every character left forlorn, driftless and with a song to sing or at least a story to tell. Traveling can be about racing to leave the past behind, seizing the opportunity to live in the present, or setting off in search of a better future. Raposa must have been through all those motivations, and then some—they all show, interact, like in any given moment of faces and voices mingling on a bus.

With last year’s In the Vines, Castanets seamlessly roll us across cities, relationships, weather, the toes of mountains, with the ease of the experienced and the dread of the jarred and jilted. It starts with the simple threat of rain, the ominous and existential calm before the storm, before the eerie, unnerving rise of water washes over, as predicted but still unexpected in its power. The album ends ever humbled by that water and its effortless, soft movements, and ever confident in moving through it, letting it move over oneself, still solid and specified as a stone.

Raposa’s deep, reedy voice, whether whispering or exclaiming, conveys calmness and emotion, betraying neither and believing in both. This apparent contradiction, along with the interplay of analog and electronic instruments and the minimalist lyrics, is what makes the Castanets travelogues so compelling. The authority and the vulnerability of a man who won’t finally be run or washed or screwed over, if just by singing about the struggle to make it through the “unlearned night,” still stable, intact.

He wants to drive away, shoot some guns and shed some ghosts, but it’s because he wants to be where it all is, wants to live where that sweetness is. And besides that, not everyone makes it through the trouble with any revitalizing realization at all; many don’t make it without becoming hopelessly stalled, self-destructive, demented. Moving on doesn’t mean forgetting, only reviving himself, relating to others, remaining open to immanence.

I find comfort in Castanets being one of those “individual collectives,” popular in the weird-folk indie realm these days. Different than an individual’s stage name, it’s a band name that refers to only one constant person, whether that person is performing solo or with a rotating cast of supporting players. It gives each album and performance an added freshness, and it often makes us use the plural when referring to him. The sparse delivery of these Daytrotter songs — just Raposa with acoustic guitar and the brilliant touch of Matthew Houck (leader of another brilliant individual collective, Phosphorescent) echoing behind—accentuates the singer’s isolated determination at the long distances and the difficult waits spread out before him. That’s something we all can identify with, and something our hearts can dance to when we feel similarly companionless and abandoned.

The First Castanets Daytrotter Session

Stay tuned for the Castanets encore session coming in April