Any album with guest appearances by Bill Callahan, Okkervil River’s Will Sheff, and Daniel Johnston is automatically going to be worth a listen. But, notable as they may be, the contributions of those three artists aren’t the most compelling things about Ivy and the Wicker Suitcase. It's actually the form: The project is a combination of song, narration, sound effects, and incidental music, all gathered in a package that includes a CD and a fully illustrated hardcover book—sort of like a cross between a 1930s radio play and vintage Disney read-along book. It’s masterminded by the veteran Austin-based musician/producer Brian Beattie, who’s worked with Callahan, Sheff, and Johnston in the studio in the past, along with everyone from Patty Griffin to the Dead Milkmen.
Ivy is illustrated by Beattie’s wife, Valerie Fowler, whose lush, black-and-white artwork is both whimsical and haunting. But the star of this “sonic drama,” as Beattie likes to call it, is young Grace London, the voice of the titular main character. Ivy is a ten-year-old girl who falls down a well and into a surreal world that’s part Wonderland, part Oz. There she meets an array of extraordinary characters, such as Callahan’s droopy-lidded deity, known only as Everything.
None of it would work of Beattie’s music didn’t back it up—but it does, beautifully. Blues, folk, country, and psychedelia all meld into a panoramic whole. On “Nobody Understands Me”, Johnston—who plays the Big Boss, Lord of the Underworld—is improbably paired with a track of stomping hard rock; hearing him belt out lines like “Gentlemen, ladies /Welcome to Hades” over Zeppelin-esque riffs is something to behold. Sheff’s character of Mr. Kirby, on the other hand, sings more sensitively of bureaucratic angst on “Busy, Busy, Busy”, a song that still manages to swagger like an amalgam of Preservation-era Ray Davies and Hunky Dory-era David Bowie.
Beattie is just wrapping up Ivy's East Coast tour, a series of what he calls “low tech immersive multimedia happenings." Performances include a visual component called “The Crankie Show”, a series of 30-foot-long illustrations that Fowler hand-cranks as Beattie plays—“a sort of hand-drawn video,” he explains.
“By far the hardest part of making Ivy was the sheer quantity of details that needed to be tended to,” admits Beattie, who started working on Ivy in 2008. “Especially if I was going to do it right. I’m all about hand-making and doing it yourself, so I learned the [cinematic sound-design] art of Foley. I analyzed what makes the incidental music of late-1930s film so unique. I probably watched a hundred movie musicals. Valerie did about fifty illustrations, most of which took ten days or more, each. My family wanted to kill me.”
Luckily, Beattie survived the five-year process of creating Ivy, which was crowdfunded via Kickstarter. His and Fowler’s tour has been a long journey; operating outside the established paradigm of band-record-rock-venue isn’t easy. But the scale, ambition, and mad joy of creation behind Ivy and the Wicker Suitcase is well worth the immersion—and the imagination—needed to experience it.