The guitar work is fluid and moves effortlessly between contentment and darkness. The record’s penultimate track “Just Like Anything” is perhaps the best distillation of these elements of Frank’s music, featuring two or three guitar lines that repeat for two and a half minutes, warm yet detached vocals, and lyrics that are by turns earnest and oblique.īut the most well-known track is the opener, “Blues Run the Game,” and it’s easy to see why. His playing is at times aggressive, at others deeply introverted, yet always catchy and memorable. But his restrained voice acts as something of a counterbalance to the guitar work, which is often all that accompanies him on a track. This isn’t to say that Frank can’t sing on the contrary, his vocals are consistently great across the record. Tracks like “Milk and Honey” or “I Want to Be Alone (Dialogue)” are haunting, frightening almost, with Frank’s fingerpicked guitar lines sounding like a call for help that he can’t communicate with his voice. But like Van Zandt, his music’s overwhelming sadness never sacrificed mood to melody. But whereas Van Zandt’s music was held together by a sense of romantic fatalism, Frank’s music lacks Van Zandt’s nostalgic edge and seems to relish in its despondency. He primarily drew influence from traditional folk music, the blues, and poppier folk music a la Fairport Convention. Frank created a distinct musical style from many disparate influences while making it sound “natural,” as if this music had always existed. Like how Townes Van Zandt blended country music with folk and the blues, Jackson C. Yet Frank’s reputation remains that of an outsider, an artist who lacks the crossover appeal of a Nick Drake or the mainstream success and grand pop ambitions of an Elliott Smith (to cite two artists to whom Frank is often compared). His songs have been covered by the likes of Nick Drake, Laura Marling, John Mayer, and Paul Simon, who produced his debut album and has subsequently cited Frank as an influence on his own work. In recent years, his music has been included on some high-profile film soundtracks, such as Daft Punk’s Electroma, 2018’s The Old Man & the Gun or the 2019 film Joker, where Joaquin Phoenix’s Arthur Fleck namechecks the song “My Name is Carnival” directly. His self-titled debut album - his only official release while he was alive - is one of the most moving and heartbreaking records of the last 60 years.įrank’s music has quietly persisted across the decades due to word of mouth and a cult fanbase. An artist’s endurance stems from whether or not their work is any good, and Frank’s work more than confirms his monumental talent.
But a passing resemblance to a toxic stereotype doesn’t guarantee one’s art a shelf life of over half a century. It’s all too easy to romanticize Frank’s difficult life and early death. He experienced homelessness, paralyzing shyness, and was treated for schizophrenia before passing away at age 56. He survived being shot in the eye with a pellet gun and consequently going blind in his left eye. He sustained critical burns on over half of his body from the fire, and up until his death continued to experience chronic health problems as a result.
As a boy he survived a fire that burned down his elementary school, the result of an exploding furnace. Frank’s life and personal struggles are perhaps more well-known than his musical output, to the extent that his music is known.
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