S.G. Goodman, 'Planting By the Signs' Album Review

S.G. Goodman Buries Introspective Seeds While Planting By the Signs

Call it moon gardening, agricultural astrology, or, if you prefer your pseudoscience complemented by an Appalachian drawl, planting by the signs. No matter what you name it, the practice of sowing crops according to the lunar phases remains in scientific method limbo. The likelihood is low that S.G. Goodman, an essential fixture in contemporary Americana, will sway opinions in either one direction or another on the subject. (Ancient Mesopotamia, however, would like a word). Her own relationship to that old tradition cuts back to her Kentucky upbringing, though, so her choice to make it her new album’s namesake makes sense.

Fair warning to all the softies in the crowd: Planting By the Signs is a deeply mournful piece of work—characterized broadly by unhurried drum patterns and fretwork with an inner core where Goodman contends with her darkest hours in 2023, the year that Howard, her dog, and Mike Harmon, her friend, mentor, and influential force in her career, both died. Rock and roll’s uptempo hallmarks are uncommon in Goodman’s style to begin with—though tracks like “Work Until I Die” and “All My Love is Coming Back to Me” from her 2022 sophomore effort, Teeth Marks, as well as “Supertramp” and the title track of her 2020 debut, Old Time Feeling, are the exceptions that prove the rule. Maybe describing Planting By the Signs as “relaxed” by comparison to its predecessors is unconstructive.

But there’s an unshakeable, contemplative purpose to the songs assembled here, born out in the deliberacy of Goodman’s pacing. When the people we love die, their absence sticks with us—not for a day, a month, or a year, but forever; the other side of that coin, just as inevitable as the first, is that our memories of them stick with us in perpetuity, too. If Planting By the Signs is constitutionally about wrangling one’s grief, it’s likewise about accepting its circumstances, agonizingly beyond our control as they are. We all meet death eventually. If we’re lucky, we’ll make acquaintances indirectly to start, as in the passing of a distant relation, before we learn what it means to “goodbye” to a familiar one. But because all of us will come to know that acute pain in time, what matters is our response on the day that we do.

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Planting By the Signs is an object lesson in serendipity. Goodman took a staggering hit in 2023 with Howard and Harmon’s respective deaths; she siphoned the blunt force emotional impact of that blow into her art. Old Time Feeling and Teeth Marks manage the impressive feat of generating authenticity. At no point on either record does Goodman seem like anything other than her truest self, an effect almost certainly felt even by listeners who discovered the latter before the former. But because Planting By the Signs is so rooted in Goodman’s contemporary life and times, while simultaneously speaking to the atmosphere she grew up in, the record reveals the most of her heart yet.

“Living like a fire sign / Yeah I was born a seeker / Living like a fire sign / An old story keeper,” she falsettos on the bridge for “Fire Sign,” providing a buttressing astrological motif for the record’s backbone. (If Goodman herself is a fire sign, she’s totally a Leo.) In keeping with the conflagrant metaphor, “Fire Sign” represents Planting By the Signs’s impassioned side by way of a beat worth strutting to; it is surpassed in confidence and attitude by “I Can See the Devil,” the next song on the tracklist, which happens to boast some of the album’s most violent imagery. “I can see the devil and he’s beating on his old lady / But that just means I can see the sunshine,” Goodman snaps, transitioning from the chorus to the outro: “Keep on walking in the sunshine.”

That’s a surprisingly positive note to end on, snuffed out immediately by “Snapping Turtle,” where Goodman reflects on her small-town upbringing with a remembrance to LeAnn—an old friend and classmate who became a guardian to her younger brother as well as her own child, at just 18 years old. “Snapping Turtle,” being focused on Goodman’s past, seems to divert from the subjects of Howard and Harmon, but the track explores another kind of grief. You might get the sense that she’s working through a version of survivor’s guilt, as the person who got out of that small town, which LeAnn remained anchored to. “God could have thought up a better way / To teach me just how small I am / To teach me the other side of luck,” Goodman muses, heading into the song’s home stretch, over the ringing of her and Matt Rowan’s guitars, and the hazy hum of Craig Burletic’s bass.

She’s not wrong: God could have written Goodman a kinder study guide for humility. So it goes for so many of us. Deprived of such in her youth, she’s composed one for herself in the present day, with chapters for meeting life’s hardships in her own way—largely, it should be noted, sans the need for divine intervention. Goodman closes Planting By the Signs with “Heaven Song,” wherein she alternately embraces and appraises her Baptist background in her biggest, swingiest ballad to date, a lost soul’s plea for a reason to believe, backgrounded by an organ’s celestial pitch. But the record’s driver isn’t her confrontation with faith; it’s Harmon’s spirit, paid tribute to on “Michael Told Me” five tracks prior. That’s the ultimate proof of what he meant to her, and of how the convention invoked by the album’s title shapes her thinking. Most of us recognize death only as loss. S.G. Goodman, on the other hand, saw Harmon’s as a beacon.

Bostonian culture journalist Andy Crump covers the movies, beer, music, and being a dad for way too many outlets, perhaps even yours. He has contributed to Paste since 2013. You can find his collected work at “his personal blog.” He’s composed of roughly 65% craft beer.

Watch S.G. Goodman’s Paste Session below

S.G. Goodman Buries Introspective Seeds While Planting By the Signs

If the Kentuckian’s third album is constitutionally about wrangling one’s grief, it’s likewise about accepting its circumstances, agonizingly beyond our control as they are.