Born Again

In a few weeks I will celebrate the 39th anniversary of my “Born Again” date. In certain Christian circles, the “Born Again Date” is the most important date in a person’s life. It’s the date when everything changes, and all things became new. As in new life, new creation, new family who call themselves “brothers” and “sisters.” The Born Again date is the reset button. Press it, and everything is fresh and green.

My “Born Again” date happens to be April 7, 1975. I was nineteen years old and a sophomore in college. It was springtime, and everything was fresh and green.

I recall the events leading up to that date fairly clearly. I had spent my entire freshman year in misery. My family was falling apart. My mother was a mentally ill alcoholic, my father was a serial adulterer who cared only about his dick, and I was living in Rock Island, Illinois, stuck in a small liberal arts college full of Born Again Christians who kept foisting off their Christian pamphlets on me. I stuck them in my sock drawer, and I had a rather large collection.

So I got out of there. I transferred to Ohio University, Party School U.S.A. with a world-class Creative Writing program, and partied myself into oblivion far too often, or as close to oblivion as I could get. But I kept running into Christians. I was in a new state, and I didn’t really know anybody, so I sat down in the cafeteria next to a guy with hair down to the middle of his back and a beard down to the middle of his chest. He looked safe enough, and then he pulled out a Bible. Shit. I fell in love with a cute girl who liked to party, and then she became a Christian and started toting around a Bible. Shit.

I spent six months discussing – yeah, that’s a nice euphemism for it - Christianity in overheated dorm rooms, staying up far too late. I accompanied those Christians to their worship services, and watched them raise their arms in worship, and called out “Touchdown, Jesus!” in the middle of some sappy chorus. I argued vehemently in those overheated dorm rooms. “What about the Crusades?” I would say, and “Remember when there were multiple, dueling Popes during the Middle Ages?” And they would say, “How are you doing?” and “You seem like you’re really hurting.” And they were right. They did nothing but love me when I was a jerk. So I thought I’d give their God a try. I didn’t really know what I was doing, and I think I prayed the Sinner’s Prayer ten or twelve times, trying to get in the proper mood, trying to get it right. Finally I stopped trying. This was my first real prayer: “Fuck it. I give up. If you can do anything with this mess, go for it.”

April 7, 1975. The grass was turning green. The leaves were reappearing on barren trees. Born Again.

That was 39 years ago. And here’s the current state of the union: all things have not become new. I was sold a bill of goods. I was the victim of false advertising. There was no reset button, and I’m still a mess. I see the mess constantly, every day, and here’s how it manifests itself: I am angry and I don’t even know why. I am selfish and sad. People let me down, and I resent it, and I carry that resentment around and I don’t even know how to let it go, although I pray and work the 12 steps and ask for the grace to forgive. I sing “We have not loved our neighbors as ourselves” every Sunday, and it’s always true for me. Every single time. I am the person I love best. Not Jesus. Not my neighbors.

So what do I do with this Born Again business?

All I know is that I see a lot of grey. Charcoal grey, dark grey, grey so light that it almost looks white, grey tinged with blue. But not black. Not white. I am neither a new creation nor the same old jerk. I am in process. I am becoming a Christian. Born Again-ish. Sometimes barely breathing, and in need of a slap on the ass to help me take in huge gulps of air. But not dead. Alive.

In Florida last week, in the midst of impossibly bright days, swaying palm trees, fancy cars and fancy hotels and fancy people everywhere I looked, I felt horrible. I spent my glorious, highly anticipated vacation worrying about work, where I was not present, and to which I did not want to return. I was impatient and worried and unable to live in the moment for five days, and then those five days were gone, and then I regretted that they were gone. What is wrong with me?

And then I returned to work. And I worked with people who edited my writing, turned those nice, crisp, active-voice sentences into a muddled, passive-voiced mess, and I sat there and took it, and thought, “Just give me the money. All I am is a writer. I only communicate for a living. You’re the boss. It doesn’t matter what I do or think. It doesn’t even matter that I’m here, really. But since I’m here, please pay me.”

Resentment. Anger. Here’s your Born Again boy, Lord, now creaking toward my dotage. What have I done? What have You done? And why can’t we work together? And lo, there was morning and afternoon, all through the workweek, and they all blended together, and I wasted more precious days that will never be mine again, and I waxed wroth at God, and myself, and the whole fucking universe. Charcoal grey. Dark grey. I’ll even permit “midnight grey,” which is probably just a euphemism for another color. But I’m not going to write it.

Because this also happened. When I was in Florida, preoccupied, stewing in my own misery, I talked with my niece about her paintings, which are very good paintings, and I told her so. And I was encouraging, and I meant it. And I talked with my daughter, and we connected, and we enjoyed each other’s company. I’m thankful every time that happens. Really, I am. And I met a homeless guy in a park, outside a fancy hotel, and he told me his story, and I listened, and I acted like I cared because I did, and he gave me a big hug at the end of our conversation, and I let him, and I hugged him back.

Small things. Born Again things. Black shot through with light. Grey.
Almost forty years ago I expected this all to happen spontaneously, immediately. It has not. But this is the state of this Born Again-ish man. He has done something with the mess. All things are becoming new. All things. But oh, so slowly.

Flannery O'Connor

When my oldest daughter was born, I lobbied long and hard to name her Flannery. My wife would have none of it and, in retrospect, she was probably right. Flannery is a weird name, and my daughter, who ended up as the equally literary Emily, might have been subjected to scorn and ridicule. Who needs it?

But I meant well. I meant well because a woman named Flannery had shaken up my world, which iswhat good writers often do. I read Flannery O’Connor – everything by Flannery O’Connor – for the first time when I was in college. I’ve since re-read everything another four or five times. And she’s absolutely worth revisiting. Her writing is sharp, funny, sad, and bitingly prophetic, and she picks at scabs until they bleed. She was a bundle of contradictions; a shy, retiring woman who had an acidic tongue, a devastating wit that she rarely used on human beings, preferring instead the company of chickens and peacocks. She could, from a distance, look a bit like a misanthrope, but she deeply loved humanity, even if she couldn’t always stand individual human beings. She was a devout Roman Catholic in the middle of the southern Bible Belt. She died far too young, at only 39, and she was always thinking about eternity. But here is where the contradictions ended: she was a moral compass. She pointed True North. Always.

I first encountered Flannery O’Connor around the time I became a Christian. And Flannery O’Connor writes a lot about Christians. But in Flannery O’Connor’s world, Christians are bumblers, crackerjacks, backwoods charlatans, judgmental Pharisees and pious, sanctimonious haters in their Sunday finery. In her short story “Revelation,” which I try to re-read every few months or so as a sort of curative spiritual tonic, a good, upright, churchgoing, middle-class farmer’s wife goes to the doctor’s office and looks on with distaste at the detritus of humanity that surrounds her. A little snot-nosed kid sprawls across a couple seats, a trashy woman with too much makeup reads a gossip magazine, a cynical young woman who is obviously too educated for her own good reads what appears to be a big, uppity-looking college textbook. The upright, churchgoing wife makes snide, disapproving small talk with the other upright, churchgoing folk in the office until she is unceremoniously stopped by the big uppity-looking college textbook, which has been flung through the air, and which hits her square on the nose. “Go back to hell where you came from, you old wart hog,” the cynical young woman tells her before she is sedated and carted away in an ambulance.

True North. Revelation. Again and again. What Flannery O’Connor understood, better than any other writer, is the smugness and pride of the religious. The Holy Church of Christ Without Christ was a concept she explored in her first novel, Wise Blood, which was about an atheist and itinerant evangelist who couldn’t stop talking about Jesus, but in fact the Holy Church of Christ Without Christ was never far from her thoughts. It’s what she wrote about constantly. It was the constant subject of her prophetic voice; the hollow, ostentatious, prideful vacuum that always, always struts and preens religiously in the absence of genuine conversion. It’s still alive and well. Some days it’s alive and well in me. And that’s why I need to re-read Flannery O’Connor from time to time.

The cynical, intellectual woman who pronounced the wart hog epithet was named Mary Grace.

Today’s is Flannery O’Connor’s birthday. I’m so glad she was born.

Fred Phelps

Fred Phelps - a miserable human being who has inhumanely inserted himself again and again into the lives of hurting people at the time of their greatest need for comfort and support - is dying. So writes his son. 

I don't know Fred Phelps, of course. I think it's supremely sad that he labels himself a Christian, and I get irritated every time the media decide to give him even an iota of attention, because in doing so they perpetuate a particular narrative that is blatantly at odds with my own personal experience, and the experience of almost everyone I know. If that's Christianity, people think, then I want nothing to do with it. And they are right to reject it. But it's not Christianity. It's not even close.

What IS Christianity - at least my take on the real deal - demands that I forgive this man. But Fred Phelps is just a particular manifestation of a specific ideology. I don't like it - I strongly disagree with it, in fact - but it's no skin off my back. Fred Phelps hasn't personally injured me. He's somebody else's boil on the butt. I have nothing but sympathy for anyone who's had to personally deal with his hatred and insensitivity. But he's just a guy on the news to me. He'll soon be gone. May God have mercy on him even though he had no mercy on or for anyone else.

Here's what's much harder: my guess is that most people have an all-too-real Fred Phelps or two in their lives. They can't conveniently dismiss them or ignore them. Maybe they're ex-spouses or ex-bosses or jerky neighbors. Who knows? The point is that they have deeply, irrevocably wronged you. They are, in fact, your enemy.

My take on the real deal also demands that I forgive those people too. Which seems absurd and impossible. Oscar Wilde makes a game of it of sorts. Forgiving your enemies is just another way of getting back at them. But I don't think that's quite what Jesus had in mind, either. This is the hardest thing to do, of course. I fail at it miserably, all the time. I'm trying, when I fail at this, which I do routinely, to ask for the grace to do what I can't do in my own strength. And sometimes - for fleeting moments, hours, perhaps even days - I can do it. That gives me hope. And when I fail to do it, I ask for more grace and start the process all over again. I don't think this will affect my enemies at all. But I think it will make me more human and more alive. I think it will make me a better human being. So I seek to do it. I've watched plenty of people destroyed by their enemies. They end up as bitter, resentful people no one wants to be around. They end up swallowed by the black hole. This is not who I desire to be. With God's help, this is not who I will be.

All of that's a longwinded way of saying that although I am tempted to hate Fred Phelps, and to exult in his passing, I will strive not to do so.

Sun Kil Moon - Benji

Mark Kozelek (under his Sun Kil Moon moniker) has released a new album called “Benji.” Along with Joe Henry’s “Invisible Hour” - a very different kind of musical experience - it’s the album I’ve come back to most frequently during the first few months of this year. I dearly love it. It also irritates the hell out of me. In other words, it’s a Mark Kozelek album.

Let it be noted that Kozelek can’t follow a narrative worth a damn. His songs start off in Ohio and end up in New Mexico, and he doesn’t necessarily connect the dots in between. He starts to tell the tale of a young, mentally handicapped girl in Akron but winds up, in his convoluted, inscrutable fashion, reminiscing about his grandmother in L.A.

He’s also inordinately fond of his dick, and he’ll tell you stories about its adventures, and name the names attached to the female genitalia with which the dick has cavorted from coast to coast, and on several other continents. There are aspects about this man that I find thoroughly distasteful.

Did I say that I really like this album? Because I do, very much. And that should tell you something about just how astounding are the positive qualities. Kozelek’s reedy tenor and deft folk fingerpicking recall a flashier Neil Young, and I’ll gladly live with a flashier Neil Young. But it is his songwriting – yes, as convoluted and self-obsessed as it is – that truly sets him apart.

What Kozelek does especially well – better than any other contemporary songwriter, in fact – is plumb the melancholy depths of memory and loss; lost relationships, lost childhood, lost innocence, lost life. He focuses on lost life particularly on this latest album, which is a nearly unremitting chronicle of quick, unexpected death, slow, lingering death, plane rides to funeral services, the funeral services themselves, the post-funeral meals, and the shattered lives of surviving loved ones and relatives. No less than seven of these eleven songs deal directly with death and funerals. Three deal with worrying about death; one’s own, and one’s parents. The eleventh is about a dick. Welcome to the life of Mark Kozelek.

I suppose it’s also worth noting that sometimes life – complex, convoluted, shocking and surprising life – can’t follow a narrative worth a damn either, and perhaps Kozelek simply travels the meandering stream to see where it leads him. Witness what he does on a long, winding 11-minute song called “I Watched the Film the Song Remains the Same.” In the song, Kozelek the teenager goes to a mall in Ohio, watches the Led Zeppelin film named in the title, and is caught up in the wonder of the music. That, in turn, calls to mind the memory of friends and classmates who have died tragically young, and the melancholy that has followed him all his life. Those memories then conjure the memory of the death of his grandmother. That news inexplicably caused him to laugh, and he is still haunted by the incongruity of that response. That incongruity triggers yet another one; the memory of being a non-aggressive kid who was baited into a senseless fight on an elementary school playground; of feeling remorse, of wanting to apologize to that poor, unfortunate, beaten kid with the broken glasses, wherever he might be. And that memory in turn causes him to return to the present day, to recognize the storehouse of melancholic memories that has contributed greatly to his musical career, and to look forward to a visit with the man who first signed him to a recording contract, to shake his hand, to simply thank him for the assistance he has rendered. It’s an utterly melancholy song suffused with regret and sweetness.

I would venture to say that there is not – could not possibly be – another song like that one. On one level it is convoluted, meandering, nonsensical, full of non-sequiturs. But this is the way memory works, is it not? And Kozelek has simply captured the neural jumps that take place, often more or less instantaneously, and translated them to a long folk song. It’s a remarkable accomplishment. And he does it over and over again on “Benji,” just as he has done it over and over again throughout a career that now stretches back more than two decades. He’s Marcel Proust with an acoustic guitar. He is unstuck in time, awash in memory and loss, and he is pulling at the disparate strands to weave something lovely.

He’s maddening, and he’s maddeningly gifted. I can’t wholeheartedly recommend this album. But I would certainly recommend it.

La Grande Bellezza (The Great Beauty)

The central conceit of director Paolo Sorrentino’s lovely, haunted 2013 “La Grande Bellezza” (The Great Beauty) is so absurdly wonderful that I was ready to crown him the King of Directors and the worthy recipient of dozens, nay, hundreds of future Oscars before I saw a single minute of his film. Sorrentino posits the existence of – get this – a celebrity journalist. The journalist, one Jep Gambardella (played with rueful magnificence by Toni Sevillo), is 65 years old, rich, bored, and coasting from lavish Roman party to lavish Roman party, all due to the notoriety of a masterful novel he wrote some 40 years ago. He’s written little of note since then, but he’s apparently the Italian equivalent of J.D. Salinger, and the equally bored, pampered wealthy of Rome are happy to trot him out and entertain him as their token trophy writer and celebrity playboy. And Jep is happy to drink their wine, shag their women, and conduct an actual journalistic interview or two from time to time to break up the pleasant, hedonistic ennui.

The first crack in this hazy, nocturnal existence occurs when Jep discovers that an old lover – the great love of his life, in fact – has recently died. Suddenly lost, set adrift in a world of endless intellectual babble and banality, all theory and no reality, Jep sets out to slowly, haltingly reconnect with his roots, with his former friends who were left in the wake of decades of the endless party. He falls in love, almost against his will, experiences more death and loss, tentatively seeks out some spiritual solace, and decides, at long last, to write a second novel.

And that pithy little summary doesn’t possibly do justice to the proceedings. It doesn’t do justice to the splendor of Rome, which deserves at least co-star billing beside Sevillo. It doesn’t do justice to the brilliant, sometimes deeply silly, sometimes deeply sad sendups of modern art that Sorrentino tosses in throughout the film. It doesn’t do justice to the deep, almost boundless sorrow and despair that anchors and drives nearly every character of significance. And it doesn’t do justice to the magnificent juxtaposition of spiritual vacuousness, emotional ennui, and lavish beauty that Sorrentino sets forth in almost every scene.

This is an old-fashioned film about the meaning of life. Nothing more and nothing less. There are no special effects. The characters do not neatly break down into groups of good people and bad people. There are merely broken people everywhere who strive to do well sometimes, and sometimes don’t care. It’s a film about beauty, which perhaps can save the world (Sorrentino would seem to argue so), but which absolutely makes it a better place. And it’s a beautiful film. I’m better for having seen it. Perhaps you will be too.

Remembering Gene Eugene

When I got married 32 years ago, I wrote my own wedding vows and I wrote my own wedding song, which was performed in gritty, acoustic, blue-collar Springsteen fashion (really) by my friend Mark Sullivan. I’m sure the wealthy bluebloods on Kate’s side of the family were dazzled. Great. She’s marrying someone who aspires to be a musical factory worker. It was called “When the Veil is Packed Away” and, true to its title, it downplayed the hoopla of the marriage day and the marriage ceremony and played up the gritty dance of the long haul. And, as I made clear in the lyrics, I was in it for the long haul, baby. Tramps like us, we were born to run, and then jog, and then slow it down to a manageable saunter, but we would keep it moving, and we would be at it decades in the future.

And so we are. But I’m here to tell you that I didn’t have a clue. It was easy to say the words. Perhaps it was even easy for my friend Mark to sing them. But I didn’t know what I didn’t know, and neither did Kate, and every ensuing month and year has been a process of discovery, and recalibration, and readjustment, and recommitment. I meant the words of that song, and those marriage vows, as much as I’ve ever meant anything in my life. But I didn’t know myself. I had no idea how shockingly easily my marriage – and I – could fall apart.

And I’m reminded that some people – many people, alas – don’t make it. This is an occasion for sorrow every time, but it’s especially an occasion for sorrow when I see it happening to friends who are Christians. Nobody sets out to get divorced when they get married. Everybody goes into it assuming that it’s going to work. But there’s a particular weight of authority about Christian marriage, and perhaps a particular stigma about divorce. In any event, it’s a tragedy. It’s a matter for tears.

Here is a song by a Christian man who called himself Gene Eugene. He was the lead singer and songwriter for a band called Adam Again, a band that created and sold music within the narrow confines of the Christian music industry. It was very good music, and I don’t say that too often about songs associated with that particular industry, which tend to be simple, upbeat, and formulaic.

This song is none of those things. It’s a song about a Christian man going through a divorce. It’s a terrible song; terrible in the pain it elicits, terrible in its beauty. How does one communicate about something that is supposed to be life giving, life affirming, and that is instead a source of sorrow? How does one communicate that incongruity? All you can do is grope through sad, fantastic, inconceivable history; pull out strange but perfect metaphors, like the Cuyahoga River on fire. And then let the song slowly fall to pieces.

Gene Eugene died of a brain aneurism at the ripe old age of 39, six years after his divorce. He passed away fourteen years ago today. I miss him.

Assholicity

What's the word for the quality of being an asshole? Assholicity? Assholishness? Sin? The latter is an old-fashioned one, but perhaps still serviceable.

This may be the weirdest musical commentary you ever read, but basically I look for songs that exhibit assholicity. They are the Holy Grail of the musical world for me. I look for them not so much because they cut to the chase, but because they cut away from the chase. The chase, in this case, is everything and everyone that distracts you from an honest look in the mirror. The chase can be the pursuit of love, or just plain sex; money, power, greed, that ephemeral buzz that numbs reality or gives you a false sense of well-being. It can come from working too much, or shopping too much, or watching too much TV. Even listening to too much music. Ultimately, it's whatever pulls you away from the metaphorical mirror.

I think that's the reason I love Jason Isbell's album "Southeastern" so much. It's a case study in assholicity. It's a long, hard look at the wreckage of a life. I live for albums like that -- and books like that, films like that -- at least as long as they don't become ends in themselves. Because they remind me to look in the mirror.

In 12-step programs, the fourth step is deceptively simple: "Made a searching and fearless moral inventory of ourselves." That's it. It can take you a lifetime to get it right.

Here's Jason Isbell's musical take on Step 4: Drank way too much. Behaved like a jerk. Lost a wife. 

Favorites of 2013

Okay, ten, in no particular order other than alphabetical, because the idea of ranking the big band music of Darcy James Argue ahead of or behind the honky tonk stomp of Vince Gill and Paul Franklin is frankly ludicrous. And my favorite album of 2013 is not listed alphabetically because it’s the best. So there.

Every album here has a couple flaws. I heard no 5-star efforts this year, which is a little unusual. But, as is the case every year, there were many albums that thrilled me, moved me, made me sad, made me want to jump on the couch cushions and play air guitar (not recommended; just ask my wife), and made me very, very thankful. Here are the albums I loved the most.

Aoife  O’Donovan – Fossils

O’Donovan is the lead singer/songwriter for Crooked Still, an alt-country band that has impressed me up to this point only with their wild inconsistency. But on her first solo album, she blurs the lines between Americana and Celtic music, the accordions nestled up against the pedal steel, and delivers ten finely observed and beautifully sung ruminations on love and loss.

Darcy James Argue’s Secret Society – Brooklyn Babylon

Working with an 18-piece big band, Argue delivers another slab of steampunk jazz. Or something. Good luck finding a label. There’s an electric guitarist here who thinks he’s Jimi Hendrix. There are tight horn arrangements here that yield to avant-garde squonking and squealing. There are snatches of old Croatian folk songs, The Art Ensemble of Chicago, Count Basie on Saturn. Whatever this is, it’s bracing, startling, and often lovely.

Jonathan Wilson – Fanfare

Take every early ‘70s album you’ve ever heard and put it in the musical blender. Wilson’s lyrical approach is primarily drawn from the introspective, stoned navel gazing of 1971 Laurel Canyon. Think Jackson Browne, Joni Mitchell, and Crosby, Stills, and Nash. But sonically, this album features Pink Floyd spacerock, winding, jagged Neil Young/Crazy Horse guitar workouts, epic ELO pop orchestration, sophisticated Steely Dan jazz rock. It’s a sprawling mess; nearly 80 minutes of “Look ma, I can compress the ‘70s into one album.” The astonishing fact is that he does it.

Mikal Cronin – MCII

The garage rocker cleans up the scuzz, discovers production, melody, hooks, and choruses, and delivers the best power pop album of 2013. There’s still a delightful garage rock rawness about the proceedings, but Cronin makes the most of his three chords and ends up with that rarest of albums; 38 minutes of infectious rock ‘n roll without a second wasted.

North Mississippi Allstars – World Boogie is Coming

Delta blues and southern rock ‘n roll. That’s it. There will be the inevitable comparisons to the White Stripes and the Black Keys because of the minimalist lineup, and because Luther Dickinson is a genuine guitar hero, but in truth these tunes owe more to R.L. Burnside and Muddy Waters than the Rust Belt boys. This stuff just roars and stomps. If you’re looking for subtlety, go elsewhere. But, as Sam Phillips (the producer, not the female singer/songwriter) once said, this is where the soul of man never dies. It’s alive and well in North Mississippi.

Over the Rhine – Meet Me at the Edge of the World

Place gets short shrift in most contemporary music. The usual pop hit could emanate from anywhere. But imagine the music of The Beach Boys without southern California, or the music of Bruce Springsteen without the Jersey Shore. Place, for husband-and-wife team Linford Detweiler and Karin Bergquist, is a farm in southwest Ohio, and these lovely songs have dirt under their fingernails. This is incarnational music in the best sense. It’s rooted in time and place. It’s about real people with bodies. The love songs, which are here in force, are earthbound. Nevertheless, they soar.

Son Lux – Lanterns

Ryan Lott, the restlessly creative spirit behind Son Lux, has always been a musical alchemist, mixing the most seemingly disparate materials together; hip-hop beats and samples from Maria Callas, industrial clanging and what sounds like Rachmaninoff piano sturm und drang. The creative alchemy is still very much in evidence, but “Lanterns,” Lott’s third album, is more rooted in traditional song structures, and “Lost it to Trying” actually sounds like it could be a massive club hit. It’s an impressive pop move for a mad scientist.

Superchunk – I Hate Music

North Carolina’s bratty punks have now been dragged kicking and screaming into middle age, and they’re facing middle-age problems, including the brutal reminder of the death of friends who are too young to die. They’re still bratty, and their strident but infectious rock ‘n roll is no less raucous, but they’re howling in grief and disbelief. And they’re alarmed that life, impossibly, goes on. The “don’t let go/let go” tug-of-war that dominates opener “Overflows” will resonate deeply with anyone who has ever experienced the sting of death, and the incalculable loss of memories that cannot be fully retained.

Vince Gill and Paul Franklin – Bakersfield

Ten songs from Merle Haggard and Buck Owens, done straight up Bakersfield honky tonk style. No frills, just miles-deep soulfulness and superb pedal steel.

And yes, my favorite album of 2013:

Jason Isbell – Southeastern

The biographical details surrounding this album – alcoholism, rehab, the implosion of a marriage, cautious hope, new love – are well chronicled. Jason Isbell is too savvy of a writer to dwell in straight-up autobiography, and it’s worth noting that on this album the first-person narrative can’t always be assumed to be about the songwriter. That said, some of these details are too harrowing to come from anyplace other than the deepest, darkest personal experience. This is confessional songwriting at its best, sung by a soulful choirboy, and there isn’t a maudlin note, or a note of self-justification. This is a Portrait of the Asshole as a Young Man. And an artist. That, too.

Will Gray - Broke

Columbus friends, this is a reminder that filmmaker/hip-hop/Americana artist (yes, those ideas do fit together) Will Gray is at Wild Goose Creative tonight. That's 2491 Summit St. in Columbus. Doors open at 7:00; film at 7:30.

Will's film "Broke" will screen first, followed by a concert and Q&A. If you're a musician, or simply care about music, you need to check this out. With radio playlists as constricted as ever, with a traditional label system in the terminal throes of meltdown, what's a young, struggling musician to do? How do you simply get noticed? Here's more in the current issue of Columbus Alive. 

Paul Buchanan - Mid Air

Paul Buchanan, lead singer and songwriter of Glasgow mopesters The Blue Nile, is known as a meticulous craftsman. He’s released a grand total of five albums in a 31-year recording career. To say that he makes every note count might be an understatement. Considering the paltry output of his band and the minimal arrangements of his songs, he averages about a note per month.

Now at age 56, without a band, on his own musically and relationally, and possessing a lifetime of loss and regret, he’s released his first solo album Mid Air.

Buchanan has not lived an extraordinary life. He hasn’t staggered through decades of rock ‘n roll debauchery or careened from one high-profile jet-setting relationship to another. He’s merely lived in Glasgow, a mile or so from his bandmates of 30 years, and awakened day after day. And through the mysterious entropy of time and the vagaries of the heart, he’s simply grown apart from those who were closest to him. Friends have died. The love he swore would last forever and withstand the buffets of the harshest of circumstances has somehow, inexplicably, drifted like smoke in the wind. And so he sits down at the piano and tries to work it out, wondering what the hell happened:

The buttons on your collar
The color of your hair
I think I see you everywhere
I want to live forever
And watch you dancing in the air
All lies and make believe
The very thing that one day leaves
But I can see you standing in mid-air.


The girl I want to marry upon the high trapeze
The day she fell and hurt her knees
And only time can heal it
But it’s the wind that blows away the leaves
For everything that life was worth
The fallen snow, the Virgin Birth,
Yeah, I can you standing in mid-air.

Start with one piano playing blocked chords. Mix in a hint of ghostly strings from time to time. Add a cracked and broken voice that barely rises above a whisper. And there you have Mid Air.

I’m fairly certain that it’s one of the finest albums I’ve heard this year. Those of you who are familiar with Buchanan’s old band know that he has a quietly devastating, soulful voice. He uses that voice here – a little frayed around the edges, and all the more effective for it – to superb effect. The songs are sad but never lugubrious, tinged with regret but never awash in cheap nostalgia, and surprisingly, almost shockingly, full of hard-won hope and promise. It’s a flat-out gorgeous album, resplendently beautiful.

And it has nothing to do with rock ‘n roll. The musical antecedents here are Sinatra’s 3:00 a.m. ruminations from the late ‘50s (without the over-the-top string and horn arrangements) and Tom Waits’ beat poetry and anthems from the late-night saloon. Consider it a minimalist musical masterpiece that confronts the deepest and darkest chambers of the human heart, and finds a bit of light in the inner recesses. I’ll settle for that formula any time. Paul Buchanan is welcome to take as long as he likes and needs.

Double-Barreled Brooce

I offer a double-barreled dose of Broooce today,. with my review of Wrecking Ball, and a new monthly column in which I ponder Springsteen and the gospel. Both at Christianity Today Magazine.

Leonard Cohen - Old Ideas

My review of Leonard Cohen's superb new album Old Ideas is up at Christianity Today Magazine.

And All Who Believed Were Together

Apparently my friends and I are the subject of this week's cover story from Columbus' Other Paper. Thanks, Joel Oliphint.

Jesus Freak Reunion

Jesus Freak Reunion, at Image Journal.

Girls - Father, Son, Holy Ghost

This is a terrific, sweet, uplifting album. I've ignored it for a while, mainly because I thought that the debut offering Album was a promising mess, but still more of a mess than promising. But Father, Son, Holy Ghost is better in every way -- more focused, tighter songwriting, better production, and less beholden to influences.

On first blush, this album seems like just another retro throwback -- Beach Boys sunny pop, early '70s Laurel Canyon singer/songwriter navel gazing, the early '00s indie pop goodness of Beulah and The Shins, with occasional nods to '90s slacker guitar heroes Pavement and Dinosaur Jr. But the minute you start to play "spot the influence," lead singer/songwriter Christopher Owens has already moved on. And it misses the point. Owens is the kind of guy who has absorbed the DNA of 50 years of rock music. You can separate the strands if you like, but the reality is that he does what great songwriters always do -- rearrange those strands into something unique and compelling.

It's the sweetness that ultimately wins me over, and makes me smile. This is a guy who writes not one, but two songs about his mother. It sounds as if he likes her. And "Forgiveness" gets it exactly right. I have no idea what this guy believes or does not believe. But it's refreshing to encounter someone who holds out the notion that bitterness, cynicism, and recrimination are not the answers. What a lovely second album.

Reunion

It is happening again. And because it is happening again, it is time to resurrect an old blog post.

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Every December 28th a group of about 50 middle-aged geezers, a few of them now slouching past middle age, meet at a friend’s house to catch up on life. Thirty years ago the geezers were just hippies, and they all lived together in what passes for the ghetto in Columbus, Ohio. They bought a handful of houses on 17th Avenue, crammed husbands and wives and kids and single folks together, along with homeless people off the street and cats and dogs and goats, shared their stuff, pooled their incomes, and set up shop as an official New Testament Church, living in community, guaranteed to get it right this time, correcting the errors of 2,000 years of church history, ministering to the poor and needy, focusing on loving one another and the world around them. I was one of those folks, and spent eight years in their midst. I met my wife in that ghetto. The best man and ushers at my wedding all came from those motley crusaders.

Thirty years later, it’s evident that they got it wrong. And thirty years later, given the sizable turnout that will show up at my friend’s tonight, and given the fact that many of these people will travel great distances to be there, it’s evident that they got a lot right.

It was a silly, naïve notion. “Stupid,” as my friend Jeff told me a couple weeks ago over lunch. Jeff and his family are now firmly established in a nice denominational church. He wears a suit on Sunday mornings, and his hair is short, and he prides himself on being part of a long and vital church tradition. “I look back on those ‘Let’s all hold hands and be the church’ days with some embarrassment,” he tells me.

And I understand. I recall the interminable wrangling over every theological issue imaginable, the need to re-invent every single doctrinal stance and claim it as our own, the inevitable hubris that accompanies any attempt to be “the New Testament Church,” and the underlying disdain for all the poor brothers and sisters who have had it wrong for lo these two millennia. It’s not a shining legacy. And it wasn’t all peace and love. Some of the naïve hippies got robbed at gunpoint; a couple of the women got raped. Camp’s Carryout, across the street from the first apartment I shared with my wife, was held up almost every Saturday night.

It turned out to be a pretty lousy place to raise a family. And the naïve hippies grew up and got married and started having kids, and they figured out pretty quickly that toddlers and crack dealers on street corners weren’t the best combination. One by one, they left. Why? Because they could. Because they had the education and the job skills and the wherewithal to abandon the sinking ship. Four families pulled up stakes and moved out to the country, where to this day they’re still living in community and raising goats and growing grapes for wine. Everybody else scattered, some across the country, some to the relative comfort and safety of Columbus suburbia. The irony isn’t lost on me when I realize that from that tiny house church a suburban megachurch of 7,500 people emerged, and that the massive parking lot is filled with SUVs and minivans. Old hippies never die. They just become Republicans, and put W stickers on the back bumpers of their Beamers.

And so I wonder about the legacy. Is my friend Jeff right? Was it all for naught? Was it all just a silly, idealistic, misty vision that faded once people grew up and got some sense? Did we dabble in radicalism, only to become dreaded Average Americans?

Maybe. But I don’t think so. The fifty people who will show up tonight tell me No. They are doctors, lawyers, professors, engineers, along with those who have never been able to hold down a steady job, and those who have suffered from debilitating mental illness, and those who have lost their marriages, and those who have watched their children walk away from everything good and important and choose addiction and enslavement. Life has a way of battering the shit out of you, even if you are the incarnation of the New Testament Church.

Every one of them will be on equal footing. They will be greeted warmly. They will laugh and remember together. They will be cherished as people who shared a common life together, as friends and brothers and sisters in perhaps the best and most inclusive sense. I would like to think that this is something different from Average America.

I look forward to this time, as I do every year. And I feel challenged, as I do every year, to work through what our common vision now means in middle age, in the midst of a successful career. I desire and pray for the generosity of spirit that characterized those turbulent, wonderful years.

Favorite Albums of 2011, With a Bit of Commentary

Here we go again:

Ambrose Akinmusire – When the Heart Emerges Glistening
The Black Keys – El Camino
Richard Buckner – Our Blood
Ry Cooder – Pull Up Some Dust and Sit Down
Dropkick Murphys – Going Out in Style
Peter Gabriel – New Blood
Josh Garrels – Love and War and the Sea in Between
Joe Henry – Reverie
Van Hunt – What Were You Hoping For?
King Creosote and Jon Hopkins – Diamond Mine
Lydia Loveless – Indestructible Machine
Laura Marling – A Creature I Don’t Know
The Milk Carton Kids – Prologue
Over the Rhine – The Long Surrender
Paul Simon – So Beautiful or So What
Southeast Engine – Canary
Craig Taborn – Avenging Angel
tUnE-yArDs – Whokill
Veronica Falls - Veronica Falls
Gillian Welch – The Harrow and the Harvest

A bit more commentary ...

Ambrose Akinmusire and Craig Taborn made my favorite jazz albums of the year. Akinmusire approaches his trumpet from a more mainstream hard-bop tradition, but his original compositions are lovely and fresh. Taborn mixes jazz and classical chops on his long solo piano album. It's a little of both, and a little of neither. Think of it as improvised Debussy and Ravel, with some Bill Evans thrown in for good measure.

The Black Keys made my favorite rock 'n roll record of the year. There's no curveball here; it's just straightforward soulful blues and boogie, and it's a lot of fun.

Richard Buckner, Lydia Loveless, Gillian Welch, and Southeast Engine cover my much beloved alt-country/roots territory, albeit in distinctive ways. Buckner's still an indescribably sad, poetic folkie mopester, while Loveless tears it up. She's like Neko Case's foul-mouthed cousin. Where Neko went to art school, Lydia went to a lot of punk concerts, drank too much, and got pregnant at an early age. She's been disappointed by and looking for love ever since. Gillian Welch and partner David Rawlings continue on their iconoclastic ways, writing and recording songs that sound like they should have emerged from the Dust Bowl, but emerged from 21st-century Nashville instead. Southeast Engine's album is a lovely fiddle and banjo-driven song cycle set in southeastern Ohio during the Depression years; years which sound a lot like 2011.

It was a good year for the old coots. Paul Simon released his best album in a couple decades, and Peter Gabriel rediscovered his old songs but put a distinctive spin on them; rerecording many of his best-known works with a decidedly non-stodgy symphony orchestra. The new arrangements make all the difference.

Ry Cooder made a non-didactic protest album at least partly directed at my current employer, which makes it the most interesting kind of protest album. His guitar work, when it shines through, is still a wonder of economy and soul.

Laura Marling (shown above) made a muted, beautifully sung album that was scary in its lyrical intensity. Merrill Garbus, AKA tUnE-yArDs, made a loud, in-your-face, cut-n-paste album stylistically that turned out to be a fair amount of fun lyrically.

Van Hunt did for R&B what Janelle Monae did in 2010. He made an album that fits within an easily identifiable genre, and he did it by exploding all preconceptions about that genre, and incorporating influences from all over the map.

Joe Henry made another dark, mysterious and lovely album -- part lounge music, part blues, and all poetry -- from his late-night saloon.

The Milk Carton Kids managed to simultaneously conjure memories of The Everly Brothers and The Louvin Brothers. And they did it without being brothers. The Jayhawks, too, but they're not brothers either.

Veronica Falls did trashy '60s girl group schmaltz with a gothic twist. They were my favorite guilty pleasure of the year.

Dropkick Murphys continued to do what they do, which is combine The Ramones and The Clancy Brothers into something that vaguely resembles The Pogues, but which rocks harder and is a lot more humorous.

King Creosote and Jon Hopkins -- one a dour Scots folkie, the other a British electronica artist -- made my favorite album of the year. There, I picked one. Creosote's songs here -- about aging and mortality, and losing the best thing in your life -- are simply ravishingly sad and lovely, and perfectly augmented by Hopkins' found sounds and gentle tape loops.

Finally, Over the Rhine and Josh Garrels made my favorite faith-based music this year; the former a smoldering, soulful meditation on love over the long haul, and the latter an astonishing amalgam of hip-hop, folk, and soul that manages to be both poetic and forcefully prophetic.

The Faces - Five Guys Walk Into a Bar ...

.. and all hell breaks loose.

I wasn't prepared for the sonic onslaught of the boxed set that bears that name. I don't know why. Rod Stewart during the Rockin' Rod years (roughly circumscribed by 1968 - 1973) was arguably the greatest throat to ever tangle with power chords, but I think I still expected more in the way of throwaways and decidedly inferior outtakes than I got.

What I got was the equivalent of a half dozen great new Faces albums, somehow left in the vaults for decades. An astonishing 45 of these 67 tracks were previously unreleased, or released as B-sides to long-gone singles, and the revelations are many and astonishing. First, consider the fact that many people consider The Faces of the early '70s as the greatest live rock 'n roll band of the era, better than the oft-championed Rolling Stones. But based on the lone live album in the official catalogue -- 1974's woefully uneven and besotted Coast to Coast -- you'd never know it. Now consider the fact that this boxed set contains a dozen smoking live tracks that finally justify the claim. Add some revelatory BBC sessions, a batch of unheard new material (to me, at any rate; sorry, but I wasn't buying the singles at the time), and a few alternate but hardly inferior versions of the well-known classics, and you've got one of the few truly essential boxed sets.

Rod Stewart is only part of the show here, of course. Bassist Ronnie Lane contributes several sweet, country-tinged vocal turns, and even Ron Wood, he of the blistering slide guitar, gets in a couple yelps. But hearing Stewart unleashed, finally, in a live setting that truly shows off that remarkable voice, and backed by a balls-to-the-wall rock 'n roll band, is one of the great pleasures of my life. This stuff makes me want to riot, even at an advanced age. Keep me away from the expensive furniture.

It all makes me shake my head in disbelief at the travesty that Rod Stewart became in such a short time. At least we had five great years.

Favorite Albums of 2011

Here's my list. I'll try to add commentary in the coming days. These are the 20 albums that meant the most to me in 2011, in alphabetical order. It was a Herculean task just coming up with the list, and I'm not even going to attempt to rank them. Besides, the order would be different tomorrow if I tried to do so.

Ambrose Akinmusire – When the Heart Emerges Glistening
The Black Keys – El Camino
Richard Buckner – Our Blood
Ry Cooder – Pull Up Some Dust and Sit Down
Dropkick Murphys – Going Out in Style
Peter Gabriel – New Blood
Josh Garrels – Love and War and the Sea in Between
Joe Henry – Reverie
Van Hunt – What Were You Hoping For?
King Creosote and Jon Hopkins – Diamond Mine
Lydia Loveless – Indestructible Machine
Laura Marling – A Creature I Don’t Know
The Milk Carton Kids – Prologue
Over the Rhine – The Long Surrender
Paul Simon – So Beautiful or So What
Southeast Engine – Canary
Craig Taborn – Avenging Angel
tUnE-yArDs – Whokill
Veronica Falls - Veronica Falls
Gillian Welch – The Harrow and the Harvest

As always, there are regrets with such a list. So I offer my particular apologies to P.J. Harvey, Tom Waits, Kate Bush, Son Lux, Julianna Barwick, Josh T. Pearson, Aradhna, Sonny and the Sunsets, St. Vincent, The Cars, Real Estate, Kurt Vile, Aaron Strumpel, Blitzen Trapper, The Decemberists, Ezra Furman, Iceage, Fucked Up, Kids on a Crime Spree, The Roots, Kip Hanrahan, Megafaun, Low, Seryn, Mind Spiders, Brad Mehldau, Lanterns on the Lake, Obits, Okkervil River, and The Unthanks, all of whom made splendid records in 2011, and deserve the positive accolades and commentary that I don’t have time to give them.

Ten 2011 Albums For People Who Hate Christian Music

At Image Journal: http://imagejournal.org/page/blog/ten-2011-albums-for-christians-who-hate-christian-music

Working for The Man

Working for The Man, at Image Journal.

The Dillards

The prevailing wisdom is that country-rock (not to be confused with alt-country, Americana, y'alternative, or later labels) emerged in the late '60s, more or less simultaneously with the releases of The Byrds' Sweetheart of the Rodeo, Dylan's Nashville Skyline, The Nitty Gritty Dirt Band's Will the Circle Be Unbroken, and the brown album from The Band.

Conventional wisdom has apparently never heard The Dillards, who were mixing up banjos and backbeats in the mid-'60s. Brothers Rodney (guitar, vocals) and Doug (banjo, vocals) Dillard migrated from their Ozark Mountain home to southern California (and from there to multiple appearances on The Andy Griffith Show) in the early '60s, playing a relatively straightforward brand of bluegrass. But by 1965, at the height of Beatlemania, the brothers had discovered a potent mix of bluegrass standards, soulful, mystical originals, and Lennon/McCartney covers. By 1968 the transition was complete, and the resulting album Wheatstraw Suite is an unheralded classic -- arguably the first country-rock album, a wondrous collection of traditional bluegrass instrumentation, pedal steel, and unmistakeable backbeats courtesy of drummer Jim Gordon, shortly before he hooked up with Eric Clapton and Duane Allman in Derek and the Dominoes.

It was a direction that spooked Doug Dillard, who quit the band to join ex-Byrd Gene Clark in Dillard and Clark. Ironically, Dillard and Clark produced their own brand of country-rock shortly thereafter, penning several songs that would become classics of the genre, and that don't sound remarkably different from the contemporary work of The Dillards. Go figure.

For an excellent overview of the evolution of a great band, pick up There is a Time, a Dillards compilation that spans the years 1963 - 1970. Listen to the harmonies and hear the template that bands such as The Eagles and Poco would smooth out and take to the pop stratosphere in the following years. Rodney and Doug deserved better. To quote Lebowski, "I had a rough night, and I hate the f*&%in' Eagles, man." Me too.

For All the Saints

For All the Saints, at Image Journal.

A Bluegrass Wake

A Bluegrass Wake, at Image Journal.

Joe Henry - Reverie

Joe Henry has a new album called Reverie. It's the best album I've heard this year. This is the way it often works for me, it seems. Joe Henry releases an album. It's the best album I hear that year.

I once read a review that claimed that Henry's music is an acquired taste. And it is. He himself would admit that he isn't much of a singer, and the off-kilter, woozy amalgam of Depression-era jazz, blues, and folk that accompanies his words can sound dense and foreign to modern ears attuned to accentuated dance beats or power chords. It comes across the speakers or the earbuds the way a not-quite-tuned-in radio station comes in; readily discernible, but fuzzy. That impression is only accentuated with Reverie, which leaves the windows of the recording studio wide open to pick up the sounds of passing traffic, barking dogs, and visiting mailmen. Personally, I love the sounds. But I love Depression-era jazz, blues, and folk, too. I'm weird.

If you don't particularly care for the sounds, and if you're willing to hang in there and give it a go anyway, I can't help but think you'll be amply rewarded if you pay attention to the lyrics. Songwriters are frequently called poets, but really most of them are hacks who have figured out how to rhyme. Joe Henry is a poet. By that I mean his lyrics can stand alone as legitimately layered, nuanced poetry. Dylan has done this at times, and perhaps Paul Simon, Tom Waits, Joni Mitchell, and Leonard Cohen in good years, but Henry has made a 20+ year career out of this, and he keeps getting better. From a songwriting standpoint, I'd stack the albums Joe Henry has made in the past ten years -- Scar, Tiny Voices, Civilians, Blood From Stars, and Reverie -- against any ten-year-run by any songwriter anywhere, anytime. Look at what he does for Richard Pryor, perfectly encapsulating a deeply conflicted life, and doing it within the context of a 12-bar blues:

Sometimes I think I’ve almost fooled myself
Sometimes I think I’ve almost fooled myself--
Spreading out my wings
Above us like a tree,
Laughing now, out loud
Almost like I was free

I look at you as the thing I wanted most
You look at me and it’s like you’ve seen a ghost;
I wear the face
Of all this has cost:
Everything you tried to keep away from me,
Everything I took from you and lost

Lights shine above me, they’re like your eyes above the street
Lights shine below me, they’re like stars beneath my feet;
I stood on your shoulders
And I walked on my hands,
You watched me while I tried to fall
You can’t bear to watch me land

Take me away, carry me like a dove
Take me away, carry me like a dove;
Love me like you’re lying
Let me feel you near,
Remember me for trying
And excuse me while I disappear

He captures those fumbling, inarticulate moments when we know that something is stirring within but we can't name it, can't pin it down, but we know that we are fully alive, in touch with the person we are and the person we can become. He does it on Reverie with songs like "Heaven's Escape" and "Grand Street." A kid lies on top of a car hood, watching a Henry Fonda movie projected against the side of a bank. A kid -- the same kid? -- encounters a seedy hotel cook holding a door open to the back of the hotel. What happens in those two scenarios is blurry, indistinct, never explained. But these are the moments on which life hinges. Get off the car hood, or walk in the hotel door, and life proceeds one way. Stay on the car hood, walk past the hotel cook, and life proceeds another. Flannery O'Connor presents these tiny, telling moments again and again in her short stories. Sherwood Anderson does it in a marvelous short story called "Sophistication." It's the same moment Bruce Springsteen describes in "Thunder Road." Mary either gets in the car and heads off down the highway or she doesn't. And everything depends on the choice.

That's what Joe Henry does, again and again. He illuminates the ineffable. He probes the inarticulate, murky world where the light occasionally shines. He's a great songwriter.

Dwight Twilley

The saga of Dwight Twilley is the classic story of the right guy in the wrong place at the wrong time. It would have never been easy for a man from Tulsa, Oklahoma to bust into the rock 'n roll mainstream, but Twilley also happened to arrive on the scene in the mid-'70s, a time when Anglophile power pop was in disfavor. Just ask Alex Chilton and Big Star. Twilley and songwriting partner Phil Seymour delivered two superb albums -- 1976's Sincerely and 1977's Twilley Don't Mind -- experienced barely a ripple of critical acclaim, and disappeared from view.

He's resurfaced with new solo albums periodically, and the past five years or so have seen a resurgence of interest in his music. Nada Surf covered Twilley's "You Were So Warm" (from Sincerely) on last year's very fine If I Had a Hi-Fi (a case of the criminally unappreciated covering the criminally unappreciated?), and he's now the subject of a rock 'n roll documentary. The resulting soundtrack for the film (called, appropriately enough, Soundtrack) has just been released, and it's a wonderful reminder of all that is special about his music. The songs, all written and performed by Twilley, are rueful, funny, and deeply personal, and if his voice is a little weathered and frayed around the edges, he's lost nothing in the way of memorable pop hooks. Take a listen, explore the back catalog, and revel in the wonders of one who slipped under the radar.