The Bird Calls: A Lifetime Spent on Melody Trail

Old Faithful, the last album released under Sam Sodomsky’s long-running project The Bird Calls, ends with a track called “Metronome Song.” A hushed number about searching for some dependable source of rhythm in life, it closes out the album with Sodomsky’s gaze directed forward, if slightly downturned: “Despite all of my progress, I’m still driven by doubt,” he sings on the penultimate couplet, “But I take comfort in the progress of always kinda figuring it out.” It isn’t a purely hopeful ending, but it feels cathartic, in an understated, true-to-life way. Making peace with kinda-sorta figuring things out as you go—inch by inch, step by step—is a much more difficult, much braver and much more radical process than it may seem.

In some regards, Sodomsky’s wonderful new album, Melody Trail—his fourth release via the excellent indie label Ruination Records, released this morning—feels like that very step forward from last spring’s Old Faithful. Musically, the songs extend into more whimsical territory, greeting you warmly with a rich tapestry of lustrous synths, shimmery electric riffs and softly shuffling drums. Giving a cursory glance at its tracklist, it would be fair to forecast a joyful record, as song titles reference cowboys, butterflies, days blessed by God. It’s a decidedly more colorful record than its predecessor, but make no mistake: It’s not a happy-go-lucky account of Sodomsky finding perfect time with his internal metronome. Its hopefulness is tinged with hesitation, the brightest melodies are undercut by the darkest lyrics and the funniest lines land more as straight-faced sighs than full-hearted laughs. In Sodomsky’s own words, “There’s a lot of bracing yourself on this record, vowing to move on, which isn’t the same as moving on.” These sentiments sometimes manifest verbatim on the album: “Brace yourself for what’s in store,” Sodomsky hums on lead single “Ordinary Silence,” his burnt-out narrator reframing his last decade of life to make the present more bearable all while “the shape of the coming day” creeps in “through a crack in the doorway.” No, Melody Trail isn’t a celebration of having figured everything out—but it isn’t a buzzkill, either. This is a record of how wearisome it is to hold onto hope when you’re not even sure why, let alone what for—but holding on, nonetheless.  

Melody Trail initially came about at a time Sodomsky, himself, had to move on and keep faith that things would eventually work out. Notably, last January, he and 11 coworkers were laid off from Pitchfork when the publication was folded into GQ under Condé Nast. While Sodomsky didn’t intend to write strictly autobiographical songs, he says that his own life experiences, not the least of which being his former job and the layoff, ended up trickling into his lyrics—there’s a whole song, in fact, called “Critic Meets Artist.” “The record definitely was inspired, partially, by losing a media job,” Sodomsky says. “I don’t think I sat down to be like, ‘I want to hear a song about a guy who loved his job and lost it.’ But then, things like ‘Critic Meets Artist’ happened. And I was like, ‘Well, this seems like my feelings on it are top of mind lately.’ Maybe these are songs that speak more directly to those things than ever, just because it felt so visceral to me last year.” 

Not lessening the layoff’s blow was the fact that Sodomsky had worked at Pitchfork for eight years, beginning as an Editorial Fellow in 2016 and eventually working his way up to the position of Associate Editor. While Sodomsky admits that losing his job felt “awful”—“because it sucks to lose your job,” no matter what—he still enjoys reading and writing music criticism (over the last year, he’s written for publications including Pitchfork, The Independent and Hearing Things), and his relationship with music certainly hasn’t soured. Perhaps it’s just too elemental to who he is. His passion was ignited at a young age: “I got hit hard by hearing Springsteen,” he recalls when asked the first time a song really spoke to him, “It actually was that Kermit the Frog parody of ‘Dancing in the Dark.’ I was watching, and I just stood up in front of the TV and was just, like, completely hypnotized.” Of course, he’s since broadened his taste, but from that very moment he’s been a Springsteen diehard—as a graduate student studying creative nonfiction at Columbia University, he even wrote his Master’s thesis on the Boss. “I feel like I could just talk about Springsteen this whole time,” Sodomsky laughs. “I guess it’s in my power to not do that.”

Growing up in a small town in Reading, Pennsylvania, Sodomsky only knew a handful of people with whom he could discuss the music he loved. Reading music criticism, then, became a way for him to engage with like-minded audiophiles, a space where his own music fanaticism could be mirrored back to him. “When I read websites like Pitchfork, it didn’t even occur to me, the whole snarky, holier-than-thou pretentious thing people associate with Pitchfork,” he says. “I just saw it as a place where everyone thought music was the most important thing on Earth and was excited to talk about it. It was really magnetic to me.”  He wrote music blogs throughout his undergraduate years at Syracuse University, where he studied music business, but his time at Columbia marked a major turning point in how he understood the art of music criticism. “It wasn’t really until some creative writing classes I took when I realized that counts as, like, writing,” he laughs. “I thought of it as just, like, ‘Look at this amazing thing.’ But then I read amazing critics, and read their work as criticism and not just tertiary to the art they were describing. And, yeah, it totally blew my mind.” 

Sodomsky was one such writer who opened my own eyes to what music criticism, as a craft in its own right, could be. He’s been doing it for a long time, and he’s gotten really, really good. To highlight one example, I’ve never forgotten how precisely and poetically he reviewed Sparklehorse’s latest posthumous release, Bird Machine, for Pitchfork—specifically, how he described the track “Evening Star Supercharger” as having a “seasick breeze.” If you haven’t heard the song before, I insist that you pause to listen—you will feel something like a salty sea breeze blow through its woozy harmonies and burbling electric keys. Maybe it was a throwaway line for Sodomsky, but to me, it was revelatory of how close one can get to capturing the essence of something as visceral as music through just the right combination of words, how the perfect simile can articulate a once-ineffable sensation. I admit to Sodomsky that interviewing and writing about him is a bit daunting, as he has years more experience than I in both of those areas, but his kindness and encouragement assuage my nerves. He generously offers advice on the music writing field, and we relate over the somewhat similar trajectories of our last year or so: starting last year on a pretty crappy note, being in better places now, but feeling wary of getting too optimistic for the future. He’s sorry I had a tough year; I tell him the same.

What remedied, or at least tempered, my own particularly bleak episode last year were the creative projects I threw myself into, so I’m not surprised to learn that making Melody Trail provided a source of grounding and served as a creative reset for Sodomsky after going through the whiplash of some major life changes. He hadn’t necessarily planned, however, to release an album so soon after Old Faithful, given that it was an uncharacteristically long-term project (attesting to how prolific he is, Melody Trail is the eleventh Bird Calls album released just within the 2020s).  Anyway, he was already uncertain as to what was ahead of him, understandably so. 

But then, last March, he wrote “God Bless These Days,” which would eventually become the opening track to Melody Trail. “I was pretty content to have ‘God Bless These Days’ as the only song I wrote that year,” Sodomsky reflects. “It just felt big enough to me and different enough that I was satisfied creatively.” But inspiration had struck, and the songs kept coming. Come July, Sodomsky brought “God Bless These Days” and three other songs to his friend, producer and multi-instrumentalist Ryan Weiner, and by the end of the summer, Melody Trail’s ten tracks would be recorded. The process proved to be heartening and restorative—just what Sodomsky needed. “I wanted a new project to immerse myself in, something to make me feel like myself again,” Sodomsky remembers. “And I feel like we inspired each other. It was really joyful and inspiring pretty much the whole time.”

“God Bless These Days” immediately distinguishes Melody Trail from the sparser, heavier-hearted Old Faithful with its rollicking rhythm and hearty twang—you can hear the exhilaration that was coursing through Sodomsky as his verses crest atop undulating waves of banjo and synth. But listen closely: You won’t find your narrator in a sun-dappled barn or open plain, but rather “on a street where there’s always construction.” Later on, his smiley, country-boy prayer—“God bless these days”—deflates into a wearier plea—“Forgive these long nights.” The album’s next Western-motifed song, “I Don’t Wanna Be A Cowboy Anymore,” likewise begins with the promise of something joyful, even goofy, to come ( Just look at its title! It does deliver on being wickedly catchy—it’s been in my head more days than not since I first heard it), but, like “God Bless These Days,” it doesn’t quite live up to the whimsy of its name. Just play back its opening line: “Dead as the dogs from the films we loved as children.”

There’s something humorous to how Sodomsky deadpans the macabre lyric, but its underlying grimness packs a punch, if felt as a delayed reaction. Other such emotionally disarming moments are laced throughout Melody Trail: tucked between cushions of cozy strums and percussion are knife-to-heart one-liners that cut even deeper when sung in Sodomsky’s sweet, soft lilt. It’s not that these songs are sad, per se—at least, they aren’t just sad. It’s more complex than that—they try with all their might to achieve some sense of contentment, but turn up empty-handed more often than not. At heart, they aren’t as inundated with grief as they are achingly aware that the “bare minimum keeps getting barer,” to borrow a phrase from “Butterfly Strokes Home.”

“Butterfly Strokes Home,” a standout track, is a perfect synthesis of Sodomsky’s knack for subtle gut-punch lyrics and Weiner’s propensity for crafting lush, vibrant soundscapes. With its sugary pop sensibility, scintillating guitar chords and dynamic beat, it easily ropes you in; you might find yourself bobbing your head to the beat, singing along—and then, realizing that you’re asking God the difference between “an endless depression or a passing fog.” “I thought that song was really sad when I wrote it—and I continue to think that song is really sad—but when I showed it to Ryan, I had this idea to give it a girl-group beat,” Sodomsky explains. “And then that made him think about surf-rock, and it ended up being this really whimsical thing that we just leaned into. The complexity of having these different attitudes in the song and these different characters at play made me think of it differently, and made it feel like it gave a certain electricity while we were making it that was so exciting.”

Being an English literature major myself, I spend much time studying the relationships between texts’ form and content—essentially, how the style in which a text is written upholds, conveys or contradicts its meaning—so I was thrilled to parse out Melody Trail’s musical and lyrical mismatches with Sodomsky. The difference between what the sounds and words evoke raises the question: What do happiness and sadness really sound like? The truth is, they aren’t as binary as we like to think. It’s a truth that’s difficult to reconcile, not to mention, it’s one that’s rarely told—but Melody Trail tells it. These are songs in which doing what you love for a living means you’ll never love a day in your life, in which worst fears come true, and then nothing changes. Oftentimes, that’s how life goes—the passions that fuel you can become draining, and when things fall apart, the world keeps turning, whether you want it to or not.

Portraying such emotional complexities was towards the top of Sodomsky’s mind as he wrote and arranged the songs. In fact, this sort of nuance almost played out directly between the album’s name and cover art: When I ask how he chose the album’s name, he reveals that another title he considered was Happiness, which would have been a striking complement to artist S. Wallace’s melancholy cover artwork—a cool-toned painting of a lonesome man, as impressionistic as Sodomsky’s lyrics. “For songs that felt so much about practice, and songs that felt so unresolved, to present Happiness alongside that, as something you’re in pursuit of—I like that idea, and I think that still maintains on the record,” Sodomsky says. Given that our conversation falls just a day after David Lynch’s death, he then recalls an impactful Lynch quote he’d recently seen shared on social media: “True happiness is not out there. True happiness lies within.” “It sounds like a comforting attitude, but, like, that actually makes happiness even harder,” Sodomsky laughs. “Because I’m like, ‘Oh God, I wish I could just find it.’ A lot of people do that. You aspire toward finding the thing that makes you happy, but coming to peace with yourself is a much harder trip.”

Searching for happiness from within undoubtedly complicates the journey—there is no map to the self, after all. And yet, we might still find glimmers of humanity, reflections of ourselves and those whom we love, along the physical roads we traverse. Poetry reminds me of this—that a simple scene or turn of phrase can be a well of deep emotion—and so do the lyrics to Melody Trail, which masterfully imbue the external with potent emotion. It’s easy to place oneself in the vivid scenes that Sodomsky sets—to name a few, a tiki bar, a Spanish lost-and-found that’s home to a lost lover’s journal, a midnight drive in a “pimped out popemobile”—and it’s nearly impossible not to feel out the emotional contours of these images, even when the feelings that color them are left unsaid. I wasn’t shocked to hear that Sodomsky considers The Bird Calls to primarily be a “writing project,” nor that he had been reading and writing more poems than usual as he worked on Melody Trail. He cites prose poet Russel Edson as a particular poetic inspiration, noting his admiration of how Edmonson’s “imagery is sort of what makes [his poems] come alive.” What makes any work of writing special, Sodomsky believes, is when it’s transportive, which he kept in mind while writing the songs. “I’m really focused on trying to write things that feel evocative on the page. I think I’m less easily impressed by songs that say how I’m feeling or, like, what happened today,” he says. “I’m more impressed by songs that conjure something in me, where I’m like, I don’t know why it feels good to say, ‘The king and I on a midnight drive in a pimped out popemobile.’ It feels resonant to me; it puts an image in my head that feels triumphant enough to move from dejection to momentum.”

Just as powerful as what Sodomsky narrates, though, are the gaps left for the listener to fill in. “That quality is really important to me in songs,” Sodomsky says of leaving things to the imagination. “Like, all of us listen to Bonnie Raitt, ‘I Can’t Make You Love Me,’ and we’re in the song. All of us are either the ‘I’ or the ‘you’ in that song. How do you do that? You have to just leave enough space and, I don’t know, capture something really true to make it work.” Sodomsky does make it work on Melody Trail. Hear, for example, his pause after singing “I never thought I’d never see you again” on “Butterfly Strokes Home.” The sparkling electric guitar and buzzy organ continue their sprightly dance, only deepening the silence Sodomsky sinks into—you feel his narrator’s realization of a relationship’s end as it hits him, leaving him speechless. Or, catch the title track’s allusion to “Heaven Knows I’m Miserable Now.” Sodomsky sings the start of a lyric we all know and love—“I was looking for a job, and then I found a job”—but instead of delivering the punchline we expect, he trails off with a sigh—“and you’ll never guess what happens next.” The misery underlying his bruised, bitter sarcasm is only hinted at, but it stings all the more. 

Melody Trail doesn’t offer clear-cut answers as to where happiness hides, or how to wrestle it down for good once you catch it. Yet, throughout the record, Sodomsky remains determined to chart a way forward, with or without it in his grasp. On the title track, after singing a series of verses centered around “trying to get [his] life back,” waves of gentle acoustic strumming usher him towards the final lyric’s revelation: “Time to move on.” Building with quiet determination, the song feels like a breakthrough on a record rife with uncertainty, but even its optimism is markedly cautious: On the final verse, Sodomsky beckons fate to “keep the good times coming,” but does so “against [his] better judgement.” If this hesitation seems antithetical to the song’s heart-bursting catharsis, let me remind you of that Lynchian summation of happiness: It comes from within; there is no linear path towards it. In real life, breakthroughs often are followed by breakdowns; the things we think will propel us forward sometimes cause us to backtrack.

I’ve heard very few songs about the journey towards happiness, for all its complexities, so “Melody Trail” has quickly become an invaluable song to me. Reconciling the temporality of happiness is an ongoing challenge. When I catch myself feeling happy for an extended period of time, I can’t help but dread when the rug will slip out from under me—I get what it feels like to hope for good times against better judgement. It’s a paradoxical state, but a very real one, and having a song about learning to be content with this tangle of emotion—one that celebrates not having reached an end goal, but simply “moving on the right track,” for all the bumps in the road—is profoundly meaningful. Upon first listen, it was clear to me that “Melody Trail” is a very special song, which Sodomsky himself felt as he composed it. “When I wrote the song, it was, like, a really big moment in the studio, and even writing it felt very cumulative to me,” Sodomsky says. “That song crystallizes a lot of things I’d been wanting to write.” 

That Melody Trail captures the convoluted nature of happiness, without ever ceasing to aspire to it, regardless, is what makes it such a singularly beautiful record. Learning to make peace with the endless cycle of hope, dejection and everything in-between—really, learning to make peace with oneself—is what Melody Trail, as a title, is all about. “All these songs, to me, take these kind of winding routes, which is something Melody Trail signifies to me,” Sodomsky says. “Like, going where the song leads, to present something to you.”

“Going where the song leads” is exactly what Sodomsky plans on doing in the near future. “There will always be new songs in my head,” he says. “I’ll always want to make something new, and there’s always stuff to write about, and always better ways of articulating the things I want to say.” When I ask if he has any general life goals, it comes down to this: “I want to be, like, a happy guy. That’s kind of my focus, you know? That’s a big one,” he grins. “I think I’m a happier person than I was this time last year. And that’s kind of all you can ask for.” Sometimes, happiness can feel like a lot to ask for, being the dizzyingly complex, woefully temporal thing that it is. And yet, if you keep on the trail, finding fragments of beauty and inspiration within yourself and around every bend in the road, haven’t you got to be getting towards someplace better? As sung on the saddest girl-group anthem that never was, “You get lost along the way.” But, equally true, “you get lucky now and then,” too.

Anna Pichler is one of Paste’s music interns. When she’s not writing about music, she’s working towards an undergraduate degree in English Literature from The Ohio State University. You can find her on X @_Anna_pichler_ and Bluesky @annapichler.bsky.social, where she mainly shares her work and reposts her favorite Bob Dylan memes.