‘A Little Lost’ and the afterlife of Arthur Russell

This blog post was originally published on my WordPress site, https://willatk.wordpress.com, on November 14, 2019.

Arthur Russell’s “A Little Lost” has had a long afterlife. You won’t find the original track on Spotify (for more on that, see my last post). But what you will find, in its place, is a sampling of the many cover versions that have cropped up over the last two decades: everyone from bigger names (Sufjan Stevens and Jens Lekman) to slightly-less-big names (double-bassist and former Dirty Projector Nat Baldwin and Welsh ambient duo Group Listening) has tried their hand at “A Little Lost.”

It’s hardly the first Arthur Russell track to receive the cover treatment—the Sufjan Stevens interpretation comes from a 2014 compilation dedicated to Russell that also features Robyn, José Gonzalez, and Blood Orange. Yet I find the longevity of “A Little Lost,” in all its many forms, and in spite of its relative inaccessibility in 2019 ( relative being the operative word here, because sitting through a 15-second ad on YouTube is easy enough), to be particularly representative of an artist whose body of work can feel like a gift that keeps on giving. You think you know Arthur Russell, until you realize you don’t—and this is exactly what makes his music so rewarding.

Russell only released one solo full-length album, 1986’s World of Echo, and it’s from this record that his influence is most widely felt. It even made a surprise appearance, most recently, on Kanye West’s The Life of Pablo. (He wasn’t actually saying “30 hours.”) Somewhat ironically, World of Echo is one of the most self-evidently “avant-garde” works in Russell’s canon. Its mix of percussive, distorted cello, heavy use of delay effects, and his distinctive, nearly-unintelligible vocals placed Russell in an entirely unique realm of sound, one that has sometimes earned him the always-dubious “outsider artist” label.

On the surface, this distinction seems to hold up: there’s the requisite languishing in obscurity, the seeming childlike innocence that permeated his lyrical content, the disregard for formal rules, all common to so-called outsiders. And Russell may have been an outsider to the pop world, but he was no naif. In reality, Russell was about as “insider” as one can be, at least within one small circle of the music world. A classically trained cellist and composer, Russell became involved in the world of avant-garde music in mid-1970s New York, eventually serving as the music director of influential downtown art space The Kitchen. It was there he was exposed to the emerging punk scene through groups like the Modern Lovers and Talking Heads. Before long, he was enamored by disco. A string of side projects and collaborations followed-the various guises under which he recorded include Dinosaur L, Loose Joints and Indian Ocean. Russell even achieved modest success on dance charts with tracks like “Kiss Me Again” and “Is It All Over My Face.”

His disco projects were viewed with skepticism by the pop-averse crowd at The Kitchen, even as their skewed translation of dance music ultimately limited their commercial viability. Dinosaur L’s 24↠24 Music is a project in disco deconstruction, splicing up session jams into a collage of recurring motifs, abrupt jump cuts, and bizarre interjections of club signifiers with lines like “I wanna see all my friends at once / I wanna go bang!” Loose Joints’ “Tell You (Today),” meanwhile, is a refreshingly organic and brilliantly restrained take on disco; the first chord change in this seven-minute track occurs just past the three-and-a-half-minute mark, cueing an exuberant chorus from Russell.

Despite the plainspoken simplicity of many of his lyrics, Russell was an exacting perfectionist, often to the point of creative paralysis. For this reason, the great majority of his solo experiments—many of which went beyond disco and into pop, country, and even hip-hop—either remained unfinished or unreleased by the time of his death due to AIDS-related illnesses in 1992. “A Little Lost” is one of those songs, only materializing two years later on one of the first posthumous compilations of the tapes he left behind (of which there were, apparently, thousands).

The song is one of the sweetest in Russell’s canon, which may account for its enduring popularity as cover material. Yet even a chorus that, in another artist’s hands, could easily come off as insufferably twee—“‘Cause I’m so busy, so busy / Thinking about kissing you”—assumes a newfound weight in Russell’s performance, in large part due to his ability to stretch out phrases, stressing syllables and extending measures where it’s least expected. The song is highly structured, a verse-chorus form that rides the same chord progression throughout and has an earworm of a hook, but it manages to sound almost improvised, fluid, somehow difficult to follow on first listen. Whether Russell goes “disco” or “pop,” his sonic identity remains intact. “A Little Lost” doesn’t come from an entirely different world than World of Echo. It’s the same one, just seen from a slightly different angle.

Earlier this year, I wrote about Patrick Cowley, another disco pioneer who was gay, who was incredibly prolific, and whose accomplishments are only recently seeing the recognition they deserve. Russell, too, was a member of the same generation of gay artists, many lost to history, whose careers were cut short by HIV/AIDS. But his legacy has experienced a similar kind of redemption as Cowley in recent years, as every new compilation and cover attests. (As it happens, at the time of writing, I’ve discovered there’s another one coming out—tomorrow.) “A Little Lost” has been in the world for over 25 years, and it somehow only reached my ears last week. By next week I’m sure I’ll have been surprised by Arthur Russell once again.