“Well the first dance cost me a quarter and the second dance cost me my heart.
Now I'm here on this bar stool 'n like a circle it ends where it starts
And it goes something like this.
Always a swing and a miss

“Well I ain't seen you so I drank all night
now my eyes are black cause I fought all night
I come stumblin home to sleep alone and it's alright, yeah it's alright
and it's hard to tell what it is and what its not
until it is something you ain't got”

The lyrics to “Something You Ain’t Got,” open Cracker’s new Cooking Vinyl release Greenland and, with them, quickly sets a very different tone for the usually self mocking, irreverent band. Cracker’s Greenland is far from a promised land of green and plenty.

“That song was like a punch in the stomach,” Cracker’s lead singer/songwriter David Lowery explains after hearing it played for the first time. “It didn’t matter that I’d hadn’t written the song, it was just the way the album needed to begin. The record tells a story and each song ended up exactly where it needed to be on the record.” Greenland begins with a bottle of scotch and ends with the bitter dregs of wine.

Greenland was one of the most difficult albums to write for Cracker singer/songwriter and co-founder, David Lowery. In the studio, his core band surrounded Lowery: Johnny Hickman on guitar, vocals, co-writer/co-founder; Frank Funaro on drums and Kenny Margolis on keyboards and accordian. Lowery sang lead vocals and played guitar, keys and bass. Also joining them in the recording process was David Immergluck from the Counting Crows as well as Mark Linkous from Sparklehorse and John Morand, among other guest players and musician friends of the band.

A palpable sense of darkness amongst seemingly carefree environs permeates Greenland. Lowery takes the listener on a ride across vast spaces, from an autumnal high school dance to standing alone on a mountain top in “I’m So Glad She Ain’t Never Coming Back.” We find him sitting in a Mendicino County bar where “…I saw Thomas Pynchon at the end of the bar, no that’s just Rob Brezny writing his ‘Free Will Astrology’ column,” and then evoking his inner Hemingway with images of Spain and the African sea, drinking wine and pondering forgotten loves in “Sidi Ifni”. “…we drank wine and toasted to the day when she was the queen before the long decay, we drank wine slept off hangovers lethargy decay and forgotten loves.”

Still, Lowery has not lost his humour. On “I Need Better Friends” he sings “I was drinking jasmine tea when the goon squad came for me, it was all my drunken friends, they kicked down my front door again. “ But, even in the humour, the foreboding undertone is hard to miss. Greenland speaks of times of great turbulence, destruction and change, of losing and finding oneself again, perhaps in a most unexpected place. This time, Lowery is the lone man at the end of the bar.

“This album is the most personal and is the most directly about my life, my own experiences, and those around me,” he shares. “I found myself asking whether I wanted to continue to be a musician and keep writing songs. Those questions were answered by writing this record.”