On November 30, 2010, Yours Truly published an In My Room performance of S. Carey’s “In the Dirt”. The surviving film places Sean Carey at a keyboard within a compact ensemble and lets the song unfold at conversational distance. A contemporaneous roundup posted the next morning linked directly to the dated Yours Truly page as a new S. Carey video session, fixing the film securely in the first season of Carey’s solo career.
That timing matters. Carey was widely known as Bon Iver’s drummer and pianist, while his own debut had been available for barely three months. Jagjaguwar released All We Grow on August 24, 2010, and “In the Dirt” was the clearest early example of the album’s method: a small amount of melodic material made expressive through changing texture, carefully placed percussion and repetition that never becomes merely mechanical.
The In My Room performance reveals why that method works. This is not an acoustic reduction designed to prove the song can survive without production. It is a live rebalancing of music originally constructed one layer at a time. The studio detail remains important, but the room makes the relationships among those details easier to hear.
The repetition is the event
Carey’s recurring keyboard figure does more than introduce “In the Dirt.” It remains in circulation long enough to become the song’s measure of time. Instead of abandoning that figure whenever the arrangement needs fresh energy, the players alter what surrounds it. A vocal entrance changes its apparent weight. A percussive accent gives its edges a different profile. A quieter passage makes its eventual return feel less like another cycle and more like recognition.
That design was already evident on the record. Stereogum’s June 2010 introduction to the song emphasized its substantial but understated percussion, extended repetition, unusually attractive middle section and staggered layers of Carey’s voice. The Quietus heard an even more specific sequence: Reich-like piano motion deepened by handclaps, a reflective central section, woodwinds entering the arrangement and then the principal theme returning.
Those descriptions can make “In the Dirt” sound like a studio puzzle, but the session shows that its logic is fundamentally performative. The musicians have to agree on the strength of every entrance and on how much room to leave after it. Because the song does not rely on a conventional succession of sharply separated verses and choruses, its drama comes from collective control of density and volume. Nobody can coast through a neutral backing part; even apparent stillness affects the next sound.
The performance also clarifies the role of Carey’s restrained singing. His voice is not required to tower above the arrangement because the arrangement already carries much of the emotional movement. Voices function partly as melody and partly as another family of sustained and repeated sounds. The limited lyrical material intensifies through recurrence, while the ensemble supplies changes in perspective that a more verbally crowded song might seek through additional verses.
This is why the room feels intimate without making the piece seem fragile. Close quarters expose timing, breath and the spaces between attacks, but they also show how firmly the composition is built. Remove the finish of the album mix and the governing pattern remains intact.
A debut single that stated the method
“In the Dirt” had served as the public entrance to All We Grow months before the session appeared. Stereogum presented it on June 1 as the first preview of Carey’s Jagjaguwar album. AllMusic identifies it as the record’s third track, with a duration of 5:21, following “Move” and “We Fell.” Its position is instructive: the first two tracks introduce Carey’s muted voice and layered arrangements, but “In the Dirt” brings his rhythmic thinking into especially sharp focus.
Contemporary critics agreed that Carey possessed an unusually exact ear, even when they differed about whether his influences had fully become his own. Pitchfork’s August review described him as an obsessive, detail-oriented musician working between folk song and composition. It praised the album’s ability to sound austere and lush at once, while also finding the woodwinds in “In the Dirt” and some of the record’s repeating piano figures readily traceable to Sufjan Stevens, Philip Glass and other precedents.
That reservation is worth retaining because the session does not erase Carey’s reference points. Instead, it demonstrates what he does with them. Repetition is not pasted onto a folk song as an atmospheric signifier. It determines the song’s proportions. Percussion is not decoration placed behind the harmony. It helps define when a section is stable, when it is opening and when it is beginning to withdraw. The influence is audible, but so is the practical intelligence with which Carey turns it into ensemble music.
The live version therefore makes a stronger case for “In the Dirt” than a simple showcase would. Its melodic material remains modest, and there is no attempt to manufacture a spectacular climax. The achievement lies in sustaining attention while the same elements acquire different meanings.
A drummer writing beyond the kit
Carey’s approach makes sense in light of his training, although “classically trained” can be too vague to explain it. Jagjaguwar’s biography specifies that he earned a performance degree in classical percussion from the University of Wisconsin–Eau Claire and brought a love of jazz drumming into Bon Iver. In a September 2010 Seattle Weekly interview, Carey described jazz as his principal focus before Bon Iver and connected that background to improvisation, leaving space and moving beyond routine verse-chorus forms.
His academic background was in performance rather than formal composition study. In his contemporary interview with The Quietus, Carey explained that his percussion degree included theory and history but no composition lessons. The distinction is revealing. His writing often begins from a performer’s questions: how a sound starts, how long it resonates, how one repeated cell interacts with another and how an ensemble can make a gradual change perceptible.
Carey also identified concrete minimalist models rather than invoking minimalism as a synonym for quietness. He named Steve Reich’s Clapping Music, Music for Pieces of Wood and Electric Counterpoint among works encountered through percussion study. In “In the Dirt,” that influence emerges through persistent cells and the redistribution of emphasis. The pattern does not need to transform dramatically; the listener’s perception changes as other parts align with it, depart from it or fall away.
Jazz supplied a complementary lesson. Where the minimalist pieces offered systems of repetition and texture, jazz encouraged Carey to trust improvisation and vacancy. The two traditions meet in music that is carefully organized without sounding sealed shut. A section can feel composed and exploratory at the same time because the players are responsible for shaping its internal balance.
Carey summarized his larger goal in a September interview with Dazed. He wanted simple melodies and forms to move through ambient, improvised and minimalist passages, creating journeys rather than predictable verse-and-chorus circuits. “In the Dirt” is an unusually legible realization of that plan. Its route is easy to follow once completed, but it does not advertise each turn in advance.
Putting the Bon Iver connection in proportion
The story of Carey joining Bon Iver is striking enough to threaten every discussion of his own music. After mutual friends told him that Justin Vernon was assembling a band, Carey spent roughly two weeks learning the drum and vocal parts of For Emma, Forever Ago from songs posted on Myspace. Both Carey’s Seattle Weekly account and Jagjaguwar’s album history describe how that preparation led to him playing with Vernon and joining the group.
There is an accidental rhyme between that bedroom apprenticeship and the title In My Room, but the session is valuable because it moves beyond the anecdote. Learning somebody else’s record demonstrated Carey’s discipline and ear; “In the Dirt” demonstrates what he chooses to build when the material is his own. The shared qualities—layered voices, patience, wintry space—are audible, yet Carey’s emphasis on pitched percussion, cycling keyboard motion and ensemble geometry establishes a separate identity.
All We Grow was not hurried out to capitalize on Bon Iver’s ascent. Carey developed the album over about two years, recording during breaks from touring and using time on the road to reconsider the accumulating parts. Jagjaguwar says Jaime Hansen and Brian Joseph engineered sessions conducted intermittently at home and at April Base outside Eau Claire. Carey told The Quietus that tracking was completed in the previous autumn, after which mixing continued and a deadline finally stopped him from adding material.
Nor was the album literally a solitary performance. AllMusic’s credits list Jeremy Boettcher on electric and upright bass, Nick Ball on guitar and percussion, Shannon Carey on vocals, Aaron Hedenstrom and Chris Thomson on woodwinds, Ben Lester on pedal steel and Mike Noyce on viola. Carey remains the composer, lyricist, primary performer and central arranger, but the record’s palette came from both overdubbing and collaboration.
That background makes the Yours Truly film more than a stripped-down alternate take. It brings a composition born through gradual accumulation back into a situation where the layers must coexist in real time.
What changes when layers become people
On the album, Carey could listen between tours, add a part, remove another and wait until the next recording period before deciding what the piece required. In the room, those decisions become immediate and social. A player must judge an entrance by hearing the others; a quiet section works only if everyone protects its scale; a return has to gather force without the assistance of a new studio edit.
The session’s tension comes from that mutual dependence. The repeated keyboard motion is stable, but the performance around it is alive to small differences. A note held fractionally longer alters the available space. A vocal blend can soften the percussion without changing its volume. When the texture thins, the listener becomes aware of how much momentum the group has been producing without an emphatic rock beat.
Carey avoids the easy solution of turning the final passage into a display of drumming or vocal power. The arrangement expands and contracts, then allows familiar material to carry the accumulated memory of what has happened. Its payoff is architectural: the listener understands the opening figure differently because the intervening sections have changed its surroundings.
That is also an answer to the criticism that the album’s refinement risks becoming merely pretty. In performance, softness requires precision. The musicians cannot hide uncertainty beneath volume, and repetition exposes rather than conceals an inattentive entrance. “In the Dirt” holds together because its restraint is active work.
Why the film matters
Three months after All We Grow appeared, it was still tempting to describe S. Carey primarily by his place behind Justin Vernon. The In My Room performance supplies a better introduction. It shows a musician whose experience as a drummer informs every level of his songwriting, including the parts with no conventional drum pattern at all.
“In the Dirt” succeeds through proportion: recurring piano, discreet percussion, blended voices, strategic absence and a return that gains force without becoming bombastic. Yours Truly’s close setting makes those proportions visible as human choices. What emerges is not a sideman borrowing the spotlight, but a composer-performer with a distinct way of organizing motion and quiet.