Luck & Courage

In Mother Night, Kurt Vonnegut coined the term "a nation of two" to describe that stage of love in which a couple seems to be creating their own self-contained world, with its own language and culture. In Franz Nicolay's haunted and redemptive new album Luck & Courage, he expands the idea and writes the history of the rise and fall of one such country, one inhabited by the titular characters Felix and Adelita - in Latin and Spanish, luck and courage. "They're untethered," Nicolay says of the protagonists. "She's a sometime bartender, he's been in the service, he's a little violent and she's a little distant; they don't really live in any one place - and they've accustomed themselves, at some point, to the idea that ultimately their lives are going to be their own responsibility, so that when they find themselves together, almost against their will, their nation of two is doomed before it even begins. They're so used to leaving things behind, they don't remember how to stay - a battle between the pull of domesticity and the habit of packing up and moving on. And so their story, and the story of their nation of two, becomes the story of a plague-ridden, Cormac McCarthyian country as its society collapses." Nicolay's band on Luck & Courage is Brian Viglione (The Dresden Dolls) on drums, Yula Be'eri (World/Inferno Friendship Society) on bass and Maria Sonevytsky (The Debutante Hour) on piano. Other guests on the record include Mark Spencer (Son Volt) on pedal steel, trumpeter Ben Holmes, guitarist Jared Scott (Demander), Ken Thomson (Gutbucket) on saxophones; and featuring cellist Emily Hope Price (Pearl and the Beard), who co-writes and duets with Nicolay on "Z for Zachariah," a love song from a plague to its victims. Luck & Courage was made Brooklyn in two weeks in spring 2010, with producer Jim Keller (Willie Nelson, Franz Ferdinand).