Vetiver / To Find Me Gone

Dicristina Stair Builders

To Find Me Gone is the second album by Andy Cabic’s ever-evolving band Vetiver, released two years after the debut self-titled release. Andy has since toured the world, usually as a member of Devendra Banhart’s band, and sometimes even with Vetiver. In those two years, Vetiver has expanded into a full-on singer-songwriter band/project, aided and abetted by some of the best players (and usually his best friends) in the extended family of which Cabic finds himself a member. Cabic explains, “This album sure has a lot of folks playing on it, same as on a Bobby Charles or Jerry Jeff Walker record, all good folks and friends.”  Once again skillfully crafted, produced and mixed with Thom Monahan (as on the debut), To Find Me Gone is a much different, more free and mature effort, reflective of Cabic’s growth as a songwriter over the last two crazy, wonderful years. According to Cabic, “I feel the new album embodies the swirling duality of these last two years, the duality of presence and absence, both in how protracted its birth has been, and in its lyrical themes. There are scenes in the songs where figures come back from far away, to changes and time itself rolling by in their absence. To Find Me Gone has songs of remembrance and recollection, all made in order to conquer absence. It’s a different kind of album, in that I think it’s the kind of album you can get serious about and carry with you for a long time. In the end it’s about the songs, how they all run into one another, and ran over all of us, as we churned up this album.”  Musically, there’s a dreamy Topanga Canyon vibe on select songs (maybe that’s the pedal steel calling on “No One Word”), and there’s also plenty of crunchy candy for those who have appreciated Cabic’s recent nod toward the magic of ’70s-era Fleetwood Mac (check out the screaming guitar outro of “Red Lantern Girls”). Yet everything is simply, amazingly Vetiver, not anything else; To Find Me Gone is Andy Cabic’s own original statement, one that many will consider as one of the finest albums of 2006. 

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