Imperfect Dreams

Souled American’s Sanctions (new record), Ross McElwee’s Remake (new film)

A week ago I was two phone calls away from checking myself in to a psychiatric hospital for the first time in ten years. I’d been wrong about almost everything — my head, my steadiness, my ability to watch myself react properly and stop in time. I made mistakes I’m still making amends for. I didn't seem to understand what mindfulness truly meant - think before you act. So I confided in my family. I looked up instead of down. The clouds didn’t clear; they just stopped cracking open with hail. That’s today's weather report. Did I mention the nightmares, the talking in my sleep? The hope that when I finally do sleep, it's a pleasant dream instead of something terrifying to where I wake up wondering if the dream carried over into reality?

Then two things I’d been waiting years for arrived within days of each other. These are the good dreams, even though there is still frailty and distortion among both. A record by a band called Souled American, their first in roughly thirty years, titled Sanctions. A documentary by Ross McElwee called Remake. Both by artists who do not release work often. Both made by human beings with their whole heart on the canvas. Neither one is perfect. Neither one is trying to be. That turned out to be exactly what I needed. I’m not going to tell you their art saved me. I’m going to tell you what it did when I played it. How it made me go, "there's hope even during the most hopeless of times."

I was sitting in my office with my best pair of wired headphones plugged into the computer, just like my dad would do in the basement on his fancy stereo complete with EQ. No Bluetooth. The carpet on the floor is a bit dusty, covered in a combination of cat litter, dander and crumbs. This had to be listened to in the dark, in the dire, in a rotten mindset that was full of regret in search of a more hopeful narrative. Like reaching for a handful of sky, feeling cleansed by the way its hits the palm of your hand and wrists.

What I can tell you is that by the third track, the bass had already missed a fret and I’d already started crying, and the two facts were interrelated. The bass misses the fret because a human being is playing it with shaking hands, and the shaking hands are the whole point. Souled American do not hide their hands or stay on key. That’s the record. Their voice shakes, the uncertainty of it bleeds then heals as a symphonic wound closing up, leaving a scar. There's a welcome patience here to the way each song unfolds, akin to the inviting waters running deep in Lake Michigan. Let your feet sink in the sand and go with whatever direction the tides decide to run. Same goes for Sanctions.

If you don’t know this band, you should. Chris Grigoroff and Joe Adducci make up the duo, with guest musicians sprinkled throughout inside a touring band of the past. Two of my favorite lyricists alive — John Darnielle and Jeff Tweedy — have been trying to tell anyone who’ll listen that this band has been one of the most overlooked acts in American music for decades. I came to them late, during lock down, the way most people come to them, and got so far inside their catalog that I ended up writing an essay about one of their old songs. I am not an objective party. Sanctions is one of the best records I’ve heard in years, and I am saying that out loud. This is one of my top ten favorite bands to where I know that in a week, when I see them play a full set live for the first time, a travel-size package of Kleenex may be used in its entirety.

"Strangers" sets the table. I heard a snippet of it on a YouTube video before release and felt the chills run up both arms; on the studio version the chills got worse in the best way. I was sniffling in recognition and it felt like the best hug from your best friend. As a fan of this band, I began to smile both inside and out. The middle of the record is where I became fully enraptured. “Freeing Wheels” is the song I would hand to someone trying to climb out of a depression, because it climbed me out. “Sorry State” is the one I’ve already sent to every music-loving friend I have, some of whom haven’t replied, which I’m choosing to interpret as the sound of people being quietly overtaken rather than the sound of me becoming the guy who sends too many links. The latter is true, regardless. The wobbly hope of self-actualization carries “Bad to Be Good” which is a song waiting for me to cover it the second I have the energy to pick up a guitar again (this one hits home the most for me lyrically right now). Followed by the unrelenting “Unforgiven” might be one the best songs they’ve made. Are you souled yet?

That’s where a music critic would tell you why you should be. I’m not going to. Not because I can’t — because the why is not the point of this record. The point is that two people made something in a country that is increasingly forgetting how to make anything by hand, and the mutability in their playing is the proof that two people were in a room together, exchanging chords and notes even when they don't quite match up. We are living in a year when more of what we read and hear and watch was generated by a mindless machine trained to approximate feelings. Sanctions cannot be approximated. It sounds like a fragile, dark pair of eyes learning to find the lights of a strangers face comforting. It heals the way two people can who come into your life unexpectedly to say the right things when you least expected to hear them. People who have lived long enough to know what a bad year feels like and have agreed to tell you about it anyway.

Find this record. Let it baptize you without the religion.

“For years, only a few people could say they’d seen Souled American. Last year they emerged from long seclusion and entranced a select few audiences with a type of music that only they play: that only they ~can~ play. The chance to see them do what only they can do should not be missed by anyone who cherishes the true alchemy of music.”

– John Darnielle (Mountain Goats)

“REMAKE,” like all of McElwee’s personal cinema, embody the passage of time itself"

- Vikram Murthi (Indiewire)

REMAKE (2026) (dir. Ross McElwee)

I won’t say much about Remake. Ross McElwee’s remarkable new film is playing Doc10 here in Chicago, and the publicist has asked for the capsule take since it's not officially out yet. Short, sweet, then: Remake is my favorite film of the year so far. It is about fathers and sons and addiction and grief and the complicated ethics of pointing a camera at your own family, and it does not resolve any of those questions, and that is the point. At one moment — and I may be misremembering the speaker — Ross’ mother says she doesn’t understand the appeal of the technology in his hand. Why is the camera his paintbrush? His musical instrument? His pen? He spends the rest of the film, in effect, trying to answer. He doesn’t arrive at an answer. He arrives at the film.

McElwee’s Bright Leaves quietly strolled into my top ten favorite films in the last five years, largely on the strength of a single shot composed through a hotel room window. Remake has that same thing — the sense that a human being is behind the camera making a choice in real time about whether to keep filming or stop, and choosing, painfully, to keep filming. It's more than a moving meditation of a father trying to hold onto his son--and the difficulty of letting him go. It's what it means to have a life immortalized in archive form and you were the cameraman. You used to call yourself a filmmaker. You used to call yourself a father. For anyone serious about documentary as more than just a series of talking heads telling a story, this is essential. That’s all I’ll say until it’s yours to see in wider release.

Remake is essential viewing regardless if you love this approach or not, as hard as it must've been for Ross to sit down and put this all together. Watching him edit this too, a sequence I won't soon forget. Not to mention there are huge laughs throughout especially at the idea of Sherman's March being, well, remade. All the while dealing with the loss of a son who overdosed the day before Christmas. There's not a clear sense of catharsis or closure, nor should one expect that. Just expect honesty, empathy and even ethical challenges regarding how much one should or should not film.

Two imperfect, important works of art made by people willing to be seen and heard. A bass that misses the right note to match the guitar chord being strummed with hesitation and confidence at the same time. A title card that arrives a beat too early. A studio deciding to remake a documentary that might've turned into another Welcome to Marwen?? (If you see Remake, you'll get what I mean by that). There are poems to be read by patrons to make you feel less alone. There are Apple Music links sent to friends who didn’t reply. A film that refuses to close its own loop. A record that sounds like Linus' warm blue blanket.

A week I almost didn’t survive. If you are where I was a week ago — don’t. Find the record. Find the film. Find anything made by a person who left their hands in the frame. I almost forgot that was a reason. It turned out to be enough. Sometimes life, even with all the mental and physical pain and anger and confusion and disappointment that one can stomach, is still worth living as long as you are loved deeply. Not to mention that there is art out there to remind you that everything probably isn't going to be alright, but you'll live through it anyway.

Buy Souled American's masterpiece here and see them live on tour!

Be sure to catch Ross McElwee's REMAKE here on May 2nd at Doc10. You can use the following ticket discount code for 10% off the ticket: JIM L