Poison Root

A dog barks somewhere in the room before anyone has played a note. Then a banjo starts to clatter, a guitar circles the same short figure, and a voice begins to state, over and over, that it has everything figured out. It is a strange way to open an album, and a perfect one. "Poison Root" is the first thing you hear on (Sandy) Alex G's 2017 record Rocket, and it announces a set of questions the rest of the album never stops asking. Who is talking? How much does he really know? And why does the certainty sound so much like fear?

A homemade sound, widened

Alex Giannascoli built his audience the hard way, with self-recorded albums that circulated online, and he signed to Domino after Beach Music in 2015. Rocket was his seventh album.^[1] By the time it arrived he had turned 24 and was, by his own account, getting used to the business side of being a working musician.^[2] He had also spent time as a guitarist in Frank Ocean's orbit, playing on Endless and Blonde, an experience PopMatters credits with giving him the confidence to stretch his sound.^[1]

The recording method stayed gloriously informal. He has described carrying a laptop and a microphone in a backpack and capturing himself and his friends wherever it was convenient, with bandmates Sam Acchione and John Wesley Heywood on the record and his partner, the violinist Molly Germer, adding string parts after the rest was done.^[2] That violin matters a great deal on the opening track. Critics have noted that Germer's playing lends an unsettling edge to some of the album's best moments, and "Poison Root" is the first of them.^[4]

The song itself is built from very little: acoustic guitar, a picked banjo, a fiddle, piano arriving later, and those barking dogs. PopMatters described the arrangement as so slight that it seems it might collapse if a single instrument stopped playing.^[1] Another reviewer heard the track gradually accumulate instruments before ending in a jarring crash of clashing sounds.^[5] The FADER, premiering a stripped-back performance video shot in one take inside an old puppet house, called it a hazy, woodsy psychedelic ballad that is both beautiful and unsettling.^[4]

The sound of a man talking himself up

The lyric at the center of the song is a single repeated claim of total knowledge. I will not quote it here, but its shape is easy to describe: a narrator announces that he understands everything, and then keeps announcing it. The words are plain and the delivery is murmured, close to the microphone, sometimes close to unintelligible. One reviewer found it hard to tell what tone he intended, wondering whether he genuinely believes he knows everything or whether the repetition is a kind of incantation, a reassurance that covers insecurity.^[5]

That ambiguity is the whole engine of the song. Declarations of certainty are rarely made by people who are certain. Somebody who truly understood his situation would not need to say so over and over. The repetition turns the claim into a charm, something said to ward off the opposite feeling, and the title supplies a darker reading of what that opposite feeling might be. A poison root suggests something hidden and underground that feeds everything above it. You can taste it in the leaves long before you find where it grows.

It helps to think of the narrator as a character rather than as Giannascoli speaking in his own voice. A review of the album noted that Rocket is populated by a series of characters, many of them young or not yet fully formed, and that the songwriter never reveals which of them is closest to his own life.^[5] PopMatters made a similar observation, describing figures whose sympathetic qualities slowly give way to questionable choices.^[1] Read this way, the opener introduces a first unreliable narrator, and teaches you how to listen to the others: skeptically, and with some tenderness.

Folk textures with something rotting underneath

The arrangement tells the same story as the words. Banjo and fiddle are instruments of porch music, of warmth and community, and the production leans on that comfort. Then the dogs bark, the noise gathers, and the porch begins to feel like a place where something is wrong. The Line of Best Fit noted the clattering banjo that sets the folksy atmosphere, and framed the whole album as a portrait of youth and scattered modern life, moving between love, burnout and the urge to feel alive, with hope and unease in constant balance.^[3]

This contrast between a homely surface and an uneasy core runs through Giannascoli's work. His later album House of Sugar, for instance, drew in part on Hansel and Gretel, with gamblers and con artists among its cast. Rocket is less overtly fairy tale, but "Poison Root" shares that instinct. It borrows the vocabulary of folk music, with its roots and soil and animals, and uses it to describe a mind that is quietly coming apart at the seams.

There is also a generational reading. Listeners and critics have often located the record in the territory of young adulthood, with its insecurity, self-doubt, obsession and the search for identity while looking toward adulthood.^[5] A person at that stage is often expected to act certain about everything, from career to love to taste, while privately feeling otherwise. A song about performing total knowledge fits that moment closely.

Why the opening slot matters

Sequencing an album is an act of interpretation, and putting this song first is a statement of method. Rocket goes on to swerve through country pop, dreamy folk, beat-driven tracks and abrasive outliers. Giannascoli has himself pointed to songs like "Sportstar" and "Brick" as departures from the folk-leaning material.^[2] Opening with the quietest, strangest piece sets a low-lit, intimate tone for all of that, and it quietly warns the listener not to trust the narrator of any single track.

It also fits the artist's reputation for withholding. A song built around a single enigmatic repeated claim is typical of how his records work: the words are given, the meaning is withheld, and the listener is left to supply the tone.

For fans of the record, the track has also lived on in other forms. The stripped version filmed in the puppet house, with its single continuous shot and Germer's violin, gave the song a theatrical, slightly haunted frame that suits it well.^[4] Puppets are an apt image for a song about borrowed certainty, and the choice of location feels almost too perfect. A puppet speaks confidently, and someone else's hand is moving it.

Other ways to hear it

The most generous reading treats the song as a portrait of earned confidence: a narrator who has weathered something and now states his hard-won understanding plainly. The dogs and banjo, on this view, are simply the sound of a rural life that has taught him things. But the arrangement resists this, and so does the title.

A second reading is more bleak. The narrator knows something terrible, perhaps about a person he loves or about himself, and repeats his claim of knowledge as a way of insisting he is unbothered by it. In this version the poison root is a specific truth, and the song is the sound of someone refusing to flinch.

A third reading removes the narrator altogether and hears the track as a comment on information and confidence in the modern world, where everyone is invited to hold a total opinion on everything. Seen that way, the repetition is almost satirical. It is the sound of a person who has absorbed so much that he has mistaken it for understanding. None of these readings can be proved, and the song seems built so that none can be ruled out.

What stays with you

"Poison Root" endures because it makes uncertainty audible. It is a song about the gap between what we claim and what we feel, performed in a voice that seems to know the gap is there. The folk instruments make it welcoming, the repetition makes it hypnotic, and the faint wrongness underneath makes it impossible to settle into. Nothing in the arrangement resolves the question it raises, and that refusal is part of the pleasure. Few openers manage to be this quiet and this disquieting at once. By the time the crash arrives at the end, the listener has been told one thing many times and has come to believe the opposite.

That is a lot to accomplish in an opening track with a barking dog in it. The track also rewards repeat listening, since the details you miss at first, the way the fiddle leans against the guitar or the moment the noise starts to swell, become the very things you wait for. It is also a fair summary of what makes Giannascoli worth listening to: he writes small songs, built from borrowed and humble materials, that open onto very large rooms. Listeners meeting Rocket for the first time could hardly ask for a better door, or for a stranger one.