While the rest of us have been busy wondering who is going to become the next president of the United States, three musicians (Jefferson Pitcher of New York, and J. Matthew Gerken and Christian Kiefer, both from Sacramento, CA) have decided instead to look back at the previous occupants of this country's highest office. The result is an ambitious musical opus Of Great and Mortal Men: 43 Songs for 43 U.S. Presidencies.

As well as writing a third of the tracks each, Gerken, Kiefer, and Pitcher also recruited an impressive cabal of guests to help them with recording duties, including Low's Alan Sparhawk, Bill "Smog" Callahan, and Mark Kozelek of Sun Kil Moon and Red House Painters. In total, there are around 100 musicians and artists credited with helping to create an impressive package that, despite the name, is much more than just a collection of 43 songs.

Which is good news, as the music would have to be pretty extraordinary to carry us through all three CDs and 219 years of history alone. As it is, there are some exceptional tracks, with the highlights ranging in style from the gentle alt-country of "Rough and Ready" (which covers the incumbency of Zachery Taylor, 1849-50) and "Helicopters Above Oakland" (Ulysses S. Grant, 1869-77), all the way to the haunting, Mogwai-esque drone of "There Was No Longer Use to Hide the Fact That It Was Gout" (William Howard Taft, 1909-13). But elsewhere the tone sometimes errs towards the overly somber and wordy, both of which are understandable sins given many of the themes being tackled (you try writing a song about the threat of secession and make it sound poppy or pithy).

Which means that if you think of this as just another triple album about the U.S. presidency, then you might end up feeling a little disappointed by the end. But to concentrate only on the music is to miss the point, as this project offers much more: quirky lessons in our history and mythology, some intriguing works of poetry (both written and performed), an entertaining series of potted presidential political biographies, and art -- an accompanying book features original illustrations printed alongside lyrics for each track. Even the song titles read like miniature historical haikus, such as the description of Thomas Jefferson as the "The Mouldboard of Least Resistance," or the image of Nixon "2 Under Par Off the Coast of Africa."

Having said this, Of Great and Mortal Men won't provide you with a particularly comprehensive history lesson either, so you might need to do a bit of additional research as you listen, to get the most from the experience. Such effort is richly rewarded though. While many listeners may be tempted to skip straight to the end to hear the verdict handed down to the man who has spent the past eight years doing his best to ruin the reputation of the presidency ("I hope I did my best. I hope my friends stay rich. I hope my dad is proud."), the most intriguing insights are found lurking in the older, forgotten corners of the Oval Office.

For example, Bill Callahan's contribution "In Hindsight" tells the story of John Tyler (1841-45), the first vice president to stumble into the big job upon the death of his boss. His legacy has been tarnished as a consequence, but Callahan could sing the phone book and give it an unexpected, quiet dignity. When he intones "I'll be a hero, back in Virginia," what is seen by many as a tale of dumb luck becomes something far more noble. "They woke me and said it was my time. By god they'll remember me now."

Elsewhere we learn about everything from George Washington's hippo teeth to Truman's doubts over the bombing of Hiroshima. These illuminations, both grand and humbling, provide fresh perspectives on lives you thought you already knew and others you'll be surprised never to have heard of.

~KQED

Politically and musically, it's the perfect time for Of Great and Mortal Men, a 3xCD anthology on which J. Matthew Gerken, Christian Kiefer, and Jefferson Pitcher write songs for each of the 43 U.S. presidents. Tomorrow, of course, marks the symbolic end of an interminable election cycle that began in earnest with Barack Obama and John McCain's speeches at their parties' 2004 conventions, and has since permeated all corners of American life. Indie rockdom itself is more than ripe for this sort of endeavor, in which the civic-minded children's theatre of Sufjan Stevens' Illinois is blended with currently popular sounds of sepia-toned Americana. Obama announced his candidacy in Lincoln's hometown, while McCain compared him to Herbert Hoover: If there were a time for a folk song about Benjamin Harrison and the tariff flap, it's now. More importantly is what this collection represents: When the electorate is seemingly more engaged with battleground states than, well, real-life battlegrounds, it's important to consider, as Of Great and Mortal Men does, that the dominant narratives we're given are woefully incomplete stories.

Though it goes against every fiber of my critical being, I have to award this project significant points for effort. It took shape as Gerken, Kiefer, and Pitcher's effort to write 14 songs in 28 days for the fawm.org website, and quickly expanded to writing 42 songs during February 2006, saving our current leader for last, and with the promise of a new song for tomorrow's victor (we'll hope there's not a line about the Supreme Court or whatever Diebold is calling itself these days). The trio brought in dozens of collaborators to flesh out the demos, and the collection's most recommendable trait is its variety of tone-- from the post-rock muscle of the James K. Polk entry (assisted by Austin band Monahans), to the shaggy Crazy Horse riffing on the second Grover Cleveland piece, which follows the banjo-folk first effort. Rosie Thomas lends a jazz-inspired vocal to the Jimmy Carter number "A Great Beam of Light", and James Jackson Toth adds sepuchral ambience to Kiefer's Lincoln portrait, on which he pulls lyrics from his two inaugural addresses and Gettysburg remarks. Indianapolis-based Standard Recording Company packaged the final set with an booklet (hardback would have been much better, but also no doubt prohibitively expensive) containing lyrics and original commissioned artwork for each President, but that's not all: There's a blog as well, which includes production narratives and even advice for educators seeking to use the collection in the classroom.

All this would be as worthless as a yard sign on November 5 if the music weren't good, and for the most part, it is. This isn't the Capitol Steps, folks: True to its name, Of Great and Mortal Men underscores the fact that even the most lionized American political icons are made of flesh and bone, subject to strange fates and prone to making massive mistakes only visible in rearview mirrors. Many of these songs are imagined deathbed confessionals masking clever historical revisionism: Kiefer's George Washington, who elementary school history tells us never lied, divulges that "those dumb asses believed me," while a trumpet solo by Cake's Vincent DiFiore lends a nice touch of Colonial ambience. Califone was brought in to arrange and perform Kiefer's "Such a Marvelous Dream", in which Ronald Reagan recalls his term in office as a movie role through the haze of dementia, and they also lend a surreal soundscape to Andrew Jackson's defense of his Native American ethnic cleansing: "And I did it and they stood in the way of God's whole plan." Bill Callahan's signature baritone is perfect for historical storytelling, and his performance on the John Tyler song "In Hindsight" is one of the collection's finest.

The music on Great and Mortal is solemn but never blandly reverent, and frequently detours into harrowing territory. Pitcher's approach to John Quincy Adams is as stark as his Ralph Stedman-influenced watercolor in the booklet: "The icy water runs through the night and awaits my warm skin. Before the rising sun, I will bare all and enter the Potomac." Magnolia Summer contributes accordion, violin, and lap-steel to the surprisingly uptempo William McKinley offering, written from the perspective of his anarchist assassin, who asserts, "Let Emma Goldman be the judge of me." Pitcher allows a distant voice to recite reconstituted notes from one of William Howard Taft's aides, recounting the mundane horrors of the President missing a golf outing due to contracting gout. Xiu Xiu's Jamie Stewart contributes eerie vocals to the collection's chilliest number, a stark post-Great War narrative seemingly written from the perspective of a veteran. New York singer-songwriter Reid Maclean gets the collection's most resonant line, written by Pitcher about bachelor James Buchanan, whose presidency ended in 1861: "A war it will come to bury lonely me".

The most successful works here are those that stay in an impressionistic pocket, eliding too much detail and staying off the soapbox. Gerken is the most frequent transgressor in this regard, using cited quotations like a term paper (from his Harding song: "'An army of pompous phrases, moving across the landscape, in search of an idea,' said Bill McAdoo"), and drawing tenuous connections to the current moment, like noting that Martin Van Buren's wife was "scrubbed from existence in an early attempt to create history simply with talking points". It should be noted that one of the record's best moments, however, does deal with decidedly non-political material. Called "Zinger", Kiefer's ode to James Madison is a tongue-in-cheek, Sufjan-esque paean to First Lady Dolly, now "known to every sticky fingered chubby from sea to shining sea."

A bit like "Zinger" feels exceedingly appropriate at the current moment, as do Gerken's blog-like minor polemics. We're staring down the most important election in a generation, and are exhausted because it's also the most widely documented and thoroughly narrativized, with a film about our current president in theaters before he leaves office and voters asked to make decisions about the next leader of the free world based on hockey-coaching résumés, the words of would-be plumbers, and a candidate's middle name. Bush II has frequently noted that his term in office will be vindicated by historians a century hence, but here's hoping that Kiefer, Pitcher, and Gerken's mini-biography figures into that story: "We don't need the strength of the world's great minds. We'll just say we're right". Crowdsource this: Whether the trio's final entry is about a frequently downed pilot who married rich or a skinny half-Kenyan who mines rhetorical gold is crucially, in the end, up to us.

~Pitchfork