Tag Archives: Gordon Lightfoot

Postcard 2 e1623335161759

Musicians Can Be Like Family

We are the music makers,

And we are the dreamers of dreams. . .

                                                   -Arthur O’Shaughnessy

B flat major

As a person accumulates time on this planet, and if they are among the “sound- centrics”* who crave music in their lives, they are likely to experience a unique kind of mourning when a favorite musician dies. The feeling mimics the kind of response we might expect with the passing of a family member.  To be sure, the act of grieving for a performer is likely to be more parasocial than communal. But it replicates the same sense of loss we experience with someone we know.  Because a person’s music can have such a hold on their identity, and because their music obviously remains alive on recordings, their passing can be an unwelcome disruption of a ‘relationship’ we cherished. The residuals of feeling easily expand to include musicians with whom we shared an expressive history.  As it often works out, the sense of loss we may be ours alone within our immediate circle.

Time travel with a musician is unique to the phenomenology of the self.

There are reasons for this effect. Musicians have a privileged relationship with members of their audiences.  The curve of success for influential musicians often parallels our own intense musical awakenings in youth: a pattern that means that performers and their admirers may be traveling the same timeline of the life-cycle. Even in this one-way relationship musicians can become familiar media “friends,” even more so because our key life experiences are accompanied by soundtracks that they have created. It should hardly be a surprise when their deaths cut deeper than we might have expected.

B flat majorEvery music lover would have their own list of singers, songwriters and players who have been granted a kind of permanent immortality. When they are suddenly gone, we notice and care. At least that is how it felt to me on learning recently of the deaths of singer Tony Bennett and Canadian musicians Gordon Lightfoot, Ian Tyson, and The Band’s Robbie Robertson (below).** The music world lost all of them recently.  An extended period for this novel kind of mourning tends to lengthen as we reclaim their presence through videos and recordings.

Like mine, any person’s list of recent losses will be personal and idiosyncratic, and as expandable as an old accordion. It speaks to our individuality that no two individuals would likely claim the same musical placeholders that we keep for our inner selves. Time travel with a musician and their work is unique to the phenomenology of the self.

It was not always so. Victorians especially struggled to comprehend what it meant to be listening to a recording of a deceased singer. A ghost from the past, many thought. Some were unsettled by the act of bringing the very breath of a singer back to life. Did this violate the natural order of things? Or had we finally tapped a way to hear the angels? After all, before recording, sound was the most precious of phenomena: at once transient, but extremely effecting.

The power of recorded sound to defeat aging and death makes it a kind of time machine of the psyche: a portal to a past we recognize and often want to relive. Songs of the deceased offer the chance to reinterrogate the identities we once owned, envied, and perhaps abandoned. All of this evocative power makes it easy to understand why the lives of musicians are among the most enduring social markers.

______________________

*As noted in The Sonic Imperative (2021), this inexact but useful characterization is meant to identify the millions of individuals among us who are consistently constantly seek fulfillment in the creation or consumption of auditory media: mostly music, but not exclusively so.

**Robbie Robertson leading off his song, The Weight, with a world of musicians contributing.

black bar

cropped Revised square logo

flag ukraine

Through a Vale of Tears: The Story-Song

Joni Mitchell in 1974 Wikipedia.org
Joni Mitchell in 1974  
               Wikipedia.org

To sing is to have the self confidence to make oneself more accessible to others. Perhaps this is what Augustine meant when he said that “the person who sings prays twice.”

Are there spheres of communication that have a perfect form?  Are there ways to express the nearly inexpressible? These are grand but interesting questions with at least a partial answer. One plausible way to adding meaning to a message is to carry its burdens in two dimensions: for example, in words and images, or in words and music.  Sometimes it seems like the world increasingly prefers the first option.  We have seemingly insatiable appetites for even bad video and film, with even worse sound.  But I keep coming back to the revelatory power of the other pairing centered on the aural: words and music. The combination can suddenly make apparent what cannot be made visible or represented in language alone.

The song–from folk to opera–is potentially expression times three: words laid within the “hooks” of melodies, modulated in attention-getting  triads within major or minor keys, and sometimes set literally to the rhythm of the heart. The effect is both poetic and disclosive, nudging the voice into a registers that seem to make the soul more transparent. To sing is to have the self confidence to make oneself  more accessible emotionally. I’d like to think this is what Augustine meant when he said that “the person who sings prays twice.”

Story-songs are a special case. Lately they’ve been celebrated in feature films such as the Coen brothers’ Inside Llewyn Davis (2013), as well as popular documentaries such as Laura Archibald’s Greenwich Village: Music that Defined a Generation (2013).  And while it’s hard to avoid being hopelessly reductive when discussing music, it’s relentless pull on our attention  still manages to bait us into the effort. Bears have honey.  We have music.

Narrative ideas are sometimes worked out in so-called “concept albums.” Cabaret singer Nancy Lamott’s My Foolish Heart (1993) has a string of pieces that start with a couple’s first infatuation (The Best is Yet to Come) and ends 10 songs later in a relationship that is spent, the broken couple dividing up their books as they prepare to move on (Where do you Start?).  

The story-song goes even further to construct its own three act play, often in very personal terms.  And if there’s not always a full third act, there is at least the expressive power bound in a sequence of events cast in the prose of personal biography. Few working in this more intimate  style settle for the kinds of statements of sheer romantic bliss that iconic writers of the Great American Songbook took as their norm. Instead, the best are individualized narratives that still manage to tap feelings we already know. The story-song offers a para-history:  partly someone else’s biography and–because of the empathy  a fragment of sentiment evokes–partly ours as well. The effect can be transformative. The mingling of words and music in three or four chords can be more precious to its listeners than multi-million dollar films that often squander their mandates to tell a compelling story.

Identifying classics of this form will always be an idiosyncratic exercise. Story songs have obviously sprung from everywhere, including Southern Appalachia (Iris DeMent’s Our Town), the folk revivals of the 1960s and 70s (Bob Dylan’s Ballad in Plain D), Nashville (Taylor Swift’s Love Story), and even suburbia (Richard Shindell’s Hazel’s House).

There are so many songs that could be called iconic.  Everybody’s playlist is different and not to be dismissed. Consider a small sample:

For a full three-act narrative there’s Marty Robbins’ 1959 ballad, El Paso. To say that it got its share of airplay in its time is an understatement.  Robbins wrote it for his Gunfighter Ballads, album, doing in four minutes what the popular horse operas of the day spread over 90.  It retains the same masculine form emphasizing action over feelings as Gordon Lightfoot’s Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald (1976). Lightfoot put to music the widely known drama of a Great Lakes freighter lost in a fierce Lake Superior storm.

Sometimes story-songs seem take us very close to a writer’s past, such as Dar Williams After all (2000), It recounts a family in disarray, and her subsequent bouts of depression as a younger woman.  Some of the same kind of despair exists in The Pogues’ Fairytale of New York (1987), where the alcohol-induced meltdown of the Irish group seems to be happening during the recording.

Kris Kristofferson once said to Joni Mitchell that she was maybe too biographical in her music: “Oh Joni – save something of yourself,” he cautioned after hearing one of her sets decades ago.  Her Night Ride Home (1991) avoids the darker cast of so much of her output. It it she simply celebrates the freedom of heading out with her friends in the band after a successful performance.  No cares or phones.

Two story-songs deserve special mention for the sheer beauty of their visions. One is Shindell’s, Wisteria.  If ever a song catches an adult’s wistful sense of a place he once knew, this might be it.  And there is also Michael Peter Smith’s The Dutchman (1968), an earnest folk song in the tradition of its era, and a surprisingly touching story of an aging couple trying to hold on. Woods Tea Company found the perfect venue to record it, using the kind of coffee house intimacy the ballad demands.

Story-songs usually have a melancholy cast. Ironically, they give pleasure by taking us through endless cycles of suffering and release.  In our world they are perhaps the closest counterpart to “the vale of tears” a Christian is said to pass through on the path to a better life.

___________

Thanks to my daughter, Hilary Woodward, for introducing some of these songs to me.

Comments: woodward@tcnj.edu