Signposts Along the Road

(With thanks to All Music Guide’s Thom Jurek, who knows a good prayer when he hears one. He’s heard two in the past couple months.)

Here is a not-so-secret secret. I am a Christian, and I despise Contemporary Christian Music. Riddled with cliches, prone to drab loss/cross and grace/face rhymes, and safe as milk, these slick, soulless Infomercials for Christ are usually the last place I look for spiritual value.

But I do look. And I do listen. And sometimes I find the ineffable and the transcendent in the strangest places: Van Morrison breaking free of language altogether and soaring off into one of his otherworldly scats, Miles Davis playing a muted trumpet, Bob Dylan (yes, Bob Dylan) singing any of the raw, open wounds disguised as songs on Blood on the Tracks, summoning up new vistas of loss and regret and longing, Sufjan Stevens quietly mourning the death of a friend to bone cancer. These are all spiritual signposts for me. They crack my heart open, and they point the way home.

The Christ Tree by The Trees Community is one of those signposts, but for more than thirty years it’s been a signpost that’s been buried and forgotten. The album, originally released in 1975, reportedly sold fewer than 500 copies on its original release, and quickly went out of print. Now resurrected and reissued as part of a 4-CD box set, and the recipient of universally glowing reviews, the album may finally win the surviving members of the community the respect and acclaim they so richly deserve.

The story of The Trees Community is part and parcel of the Woodstock era, even if the music is not. It goes like this: a bunch of hippie Christians get kicked out of their Manhattan apartment building/commune, buy a bus, and set off in 1971 to tour the country, explore different modes of Christian spirituality, and make music together. It ends up as a seven-year road trip, with stops along the way at Trappist, Benedictine, Franciscan and Paulist monastic communities, evangelical and social outreach groups of every denomination, and a Hutterite farming collective. An extended stay at Thomas Merton’s Gethsemane monastery results in the two live concerts released as part of the box set. An abortive, early studio album called A Portrait of Christ in Music is never released at all (but is included in the box set). And, finally, in 1975, The Christ Tree arrives as the community’s first and last official album.

Altogether it’s a miraculous thing, as unearthly as any music ever recorded, and as eerily lovely as the post-modern classical music of Henryk Gorecki or Arvo Part; four hours of utterly uncategorizable transcendent beauty. The short summary is that fourteen people play more than eighty instruments and sing. The even shorter summary is that you’ve never heard anything like this in your life.

The 12-minute “Psalm 42,” which opens this collection, sets the tone. It incorporates elements of Balinese chant, American folk song, Indian raga, African polyrhythms, Scottish bagpipes, Tibetan gongs, and something called Mexican bell wheel Sanctus. The voices weave in and out in contrapuntal harmonies, rise to glorious crescendos, recede to whispered pleas, as the words of the ancient psalm reverberate through the recording studio, bounce off the walls, and ascend to heaven. This isn’t world music; it’s universal music: “As the deer pants for streams of water, so my soul pants for you, O God.”

And it’s utterly outside of time. Everything about this music ought to be trippy and dated. It is not. Cut off from commercial trends, wandering the country without access to a radio, totally bereft of a cultural (or countercultural) context in which to place themselves, The Trees Community simply created music without precedent. Nobody told the nomadic hippies that they couldn’t mix contrapuntal vocal techniques with eastern instrumentation, so they did. And the end result is something brave and lovely and utterly strange: worship music that sounds like it comes from anywhere but planet Earth.

That’s not to say that listeners won’t find plenty to latch on to in the earthly realm. “In a little while you will see me no more, and then after a little while you will see me,” Jesus tells his disciples in the Gospel of John. In the impossibly moving “How Long is a Little While?” The Trees Community gives voice to the cry of countless grieving sufferers throughout the world. How long? How much can we bear? This is a spiritual blues that bears, yes, some connection to Mississippi Delta blues. And Tibet.

Like I said, there’s nothing like it in recorded music. Do yourself a great favor and pick up a copy.

Rickie Lee Jones’ new album Sermon on Exposition Boulevard is another of those signposts. Jones has had a long and illustrious career as an unregenerated boho, the female yin to Tom Waits’ Hollywood gutter poet yang. Here she offers a mostly extemporaneous take on the Gospels, inspired by spiritual philosopher Lee Cantelon and his book The Words, a latter-day spin on Jesus’ teachings presented in the language of the hipsters and the down-and-out.

Backed by junkyard percussion, plucked ouds, and distorted electric guitars, Rickie Lee encounters the Jesus of the gospels, stripped of 2,000 years of musty tradition and ceremony, and improvises on a lyric that is the antithesis of all that is safe and antiseptic. Scatting and soaring like Van, repeating her lyrics like rosary beads, she moves into dangerous territory indeed:

I wanted to pray
I wanted to let you go on your way
I wanted to know why they laid there
Dying in the streets next to the restaurant
Where people were eating and yes
I wanted to pray

How do you pray in a world like this
You know, I see the people on TV
And they close their eyes
and they bow their heads
And they say "Let us pray"
And it feels so cold and meaningless
And I wanted to pray
And I said
Tell me father
Tell me mother
Heavenly mother
And they said

When you pray
Pray alone by yourself
In the secret room of your heart
Don't go out into the church filled with people and pray
God hears every secret that you say
See all those people praying on TV and the churches
They like to make a big parade out of what they're doing
They think God hears them louder if they say it
Over and over and over and over and over again

But I say, God, but I say this
You are the prayer
Your eyes are the prayer
Your hand on your cheek
You are the prayer
Those words you want to speak
They are the prayer
That dance you make
When you're by yourself
Just before your mother calls you on the phone
You are the prayer
I tell you what
You gotta take it back from them
Because the prayers belong to you
All you gotta do is say hey hey
I'm down here too, I'm down here too
I'm down here too
And I hear you in the trees
And I hear you
And I'm near you
I wonder why there's so much suffering

I want to say thank you, thank you
Thank you, thank you, thank you, thank you
I wanted to say thank you, thank you
I wanted to say
I wanted to say
You are where I like it best
You are where I like it best
You are where I like it best

That's the Lords' prayer
"You are where I want to be"
So, amen, just amen
Amen, all by myself, amen, amen
I'm so lonely, just amen
And I'm rising, rising, just amen
You can look through my eyes
Hear through my ears
Look through my eyes

It is, as Madonna says, like a prayer. It’s unorthodox, in both the musical and theological senses, and I wouldn’t advise using it to construct any creedal statements. What it is is a cry from the heart, and it will crack yours wide open if you let it. It’s raw and unfiltered. It’s disturbing. It’s beautiful. And it will let you hear an old, familiar story in a new way.

They are two remarkable albums, two new signposts for me. The reason I listen to music is to encounter moments like these. I’m thankful to still find markers along the roadside.