Val Stöecklein
Grey Life

Guys, this time it's about songwriting, I think it's worth spending a few words on an extraordinary yet misunderstood musician like Val Stoecklein. From Kansas in 1965, he founded the Blue Things, a good garage-folk band. He left the group after a single and an LP, only to arrive in Los Angeles in 1968 in the guise of a songwriter due to inner necessity.

Artistically and humanly, he was quite unfortunate, thus at the edges of historical recognition, his work certainly does not belong to anything important, it hasn't influenced musicians or singers at all, but it represents a moment, a paradigm where the boundaries between art and life blur, merging into one, producing an inseparable symbolic coagulum.

Val Stoecklein is a forgotten artist, perhaps never considered, “Grey Life” is an underrated work, a collection of folk songs, written for just acoustic guitar and voice as its author wanted, but forced by the record company Dot to endure the orchestral arrangement diktat with the addition of strings and trumpet sections, with the hope that this would make the result more commercially appealing. The songs are essentially a melancholic outcry on his inner condition and intimate reflections of a mind irreparably fragile. Val Stoecklein was affected by bipolar disorder, imagine what that means, a mental illness that erratically propelled him in life, to psychiatric hospitals, from heaven to hell.

The album has the reputation of being a lost classic, placed in the Pantheon of melancholy masterpieces along the lines of "Oar" by Alexander "Skip" Spence or "Scott 4" by Scott Walker, and also Nick Drake and Syd Barrett. An irreparably "gray" sound, a voice with an excellent timbre, subtly breaking in modesty, with a faint anguish, for a series of seemingly innocuous folk-pop vignettes about love gone wrong ("No, she won’t come back, she doesn’t love you, she never loved you...") that at first listening seem to draw from the melancholic dimension of Pearls Before Swine, but as the tracks continue, this dimension exponentially intensifies. Where Ochs and Drake find resignation, Stoecklein finds only anguish and torment. The listener is surprised to find almost nothing that shines, everything is gray, life is a desolate swamp, a journey through one's frustrations. However, like many works with an existential component, "Grey Life" is a treasure chest of its author's innate crystalline class, enclosed in the attempt to achieve one's own "salvation" through music, as a thaumaturgical practice of the "representable," to redeem that "dark evil," a kind of inner mirror in the room of one's feelings. In this regard, I'd like to mention just the last track "Second Ending" when the record ends with the words "I feel like I'm dying," which would be a premonition of an end not imminent but the beginning of a tortuous road that would crumble his soul until it finally led him to the precipice. However, great art does not follow man's fate; it remains beyond the mirror and reflects its effects on our consciences, which is the most important thing.

"Grey Life" is a bridge that links drama to the sublime, where the listener travels the two-way path with no escape, making him a protagonist in the transfer of a "mortal embrace." There's no way out of the gloomy "walk" without savoring a "pleasant" dose of sublime depressive aesthetics. Drake's pessimistic introversion, Barrett's hallucinatory persecution, Ochs' dissociative disturbances, Spence's self-destructive obsessions are all contained within the desolating monochromatic normality of Stoecklein, so well depicted in the cover photo. After other musical ventures that are anything but negligible, Val Stoecklein would retire to his home in Kansas and was found dead in 1993 at the age of 52 (rumors suggested suicide).

The work that its author loved so much, which contains the seeds of his unfortunate fate in itself, today, at the edges of historical judgment, without receiving justice, can be a source of delight. Recommended only to true lovers of vintage songwriting.