To make a really good singer/storyteller record, you need to have some pleasing melodies and at least a couple of cool lyric lines to make your listeners nod in approval. To make a great singer/storyteller record, you need to be able to compress a novel's worth of story into four minutes, while still retaining enough space to use timing effectively. With his second solo release, John Vanderslice has made that sort of a great record. While the album achieves continuity through musical interludes between its tales, the wonders here lie entirely within the individual songs. Poetic, evocative and stirring, Vanderslice weaves short stories that paint detailed and glowing pictures in the space of a few lines. Melodically, Vanderslice's choices bring to mind the aquatic feel of Ween's The Mollusk; he uses instrumentation that furthers the mood created by the lyrics, with smashing results.

As an example, consider the opening track, "You Are My Fiji". Here, Vanderslice recasts the traveling musician as Captain Ahab over top of a deranged guitar line. Like Melville's protagonist, this captain is a lost and tragic soul searching for the white whale of musical success. Along the way, he loses his Queequeg (this time to the strip clubs of New Orleans) before it all falls apart in a final battle with the whale. When Vanderslice sings that the "fucking whale sunk my van/ and took my shipmates into the sea," it is easy to see this as the same inevitable self-destruction that fuels all those episodes of "Behind the Music". That Vanderslice manages to capture one of the most brutally long reads I have ever attempted, and does so in two minutes and ten seconds, is impressive; that he manages to nail the mood perfectly is astounding.

Vanderslice's other tales may not boast such direct literary ties, but they're just as impressive. "My Old Flame" is the sort of knife-in-the-gut sadness that Thom Yorke dreams of. This ode to a marriage failed sets itself up with the opening: "My old flame, my wife/ Poor ghost, old love/ One day in June I drove by our old house in Maine/ Everything changed." Sure, after a telling pause Vanderslice adds "For the better" -- but by then, the tone of his voice and the sighing strings tell you that very little has improved. The title track dreams of the knowledge that time travel could bring, until it hits the caveat that even then, there will be a point at which no one knows what happens next. This sense that improvements still don't change the situation is echoed elsewhere on the album, as in the political debate of "Do You Remember?" and the regret of "Emma Pearl". Even the morbid revelation of "Everything Changed" gives the impression that this is merely one stop on a round-trip journey.

What this pop psychology says about John Vanderslice is beyond me. What I can say, however, is that Time Travel is Lonely is an excellent, intelligent piece of work, placing him squarely among the best pop storytellers currently making music.