What Are You Listening To?

I heard enough of the white man's blues

I've sang enough about myself

So if you're looking for some bad news

You can find it somewhere else

Last year was a son of a bitch

For nearly everyone we know

But I ain't fighting with you down in a ditch

I'll meet you up here on the road

I know you're tired

And you ain't sleeping well

Uninspired

And likely mad as hell

But wherever you are

I hope the high road leads you home again

To a world you want to live in

-Jason Isbell

No post yesterday because we woke up in Williamsport after heading the hour down the valley to a Todd Rundgren concert there. It's a pretty enough town, once the "Lumber Capital of the World", with a leafy old downtown business district and a Millionaire's Row of fine old Victorian homes. But the money's gone now, been gone for a while, and there's a lack of vitality to the place that's palpable. Plus, my growing Pennsylvania prejudice keeps seeping out, and it just seemed like most of the people we encountered around town had been pithed. The poor young woman taking our coffee order yesterday morning had to have every detail repeated back to her, twice, and she still got it wrong.

This has been the year of the record player for us--we now have one in Corning and another up at the lake, with full throated Marshall bluetooth speakers connected to each. It's a different experience to dwell with an artist across forty-five minutes of music, instead of pulling up a playlist on Spotify. And the sound is so much richer. I'd forgotten the pleasures found in all that.

We also became reacquainted with old friends. James Taylor and Judy Collins are back from our childhood, Jackson Browne's first album crackles through this space.

And rising from the grave come Frank Sinatra, Andre Previn, Sarah Vaughn, Chet Baker, and Nancy Wilson. The sort of music you should be wearing a collared shirt and leather shoes to encounter. It led to a conversation in the enormous bathtub last night, listening to the inimitable album featuring the combined talents of Nancy Wilson and Cannonball Adderley, regarding the notion that our society would be so much better if this were the soundtrack, if the sidewalks of Manhattan were crowded with men in suits and fedoras and women in heels and pearls. Instead the world seems to be run by louts in yoga pants.

I digress.

Meanwhile in Bay County, I read this morning of the prevailing musical preoccupation there, Gulf Coast Jam. It's become so remarkably expensive to wallow in that lowbrow sweat-fest that they're offering a payment plan for tickets next year. And they're featuring Jason Aldean, a truly execreble human whose entre to this gathering of rubes lies in his unflagging support for the Cheeto Messiah.

This year we've spent a lot of time listening to another Jason, Jason Isbell and the 400 Unit. Both are Southerners, roughly the same age, but that's where the similarity stops. Isbell is a poet, a guy with John Prine's insight into human life combined with an angry, disappointed edge as he writes and sings about life at the bottom, and death, and what we told ourselves we were as a country.

The album that hits these themes in our home is Nashville Sound, their Grammy award winning compilation from 2017.

I could cut-and-paste every lyric, but I won't do that here.

He sings about the anomie of being a rural Southerner in NYC:

I couldn't be happy in the city at night

You can't see the stars for the neon light

Sidewalk's dirty and the river's worse

The underground trains all run in reverse

Nobody here can dance like me

Everybody's clapping on the one and the three

Am I the last of my kind?

Am I the last of my kind?

So many people with so much to do

The winter's so cold my hands turn blue

Old men sleeping on the filthy ground

They spend their whole day just walking around

Nobody else here seems to care

They walk right past them like they ain't even there

Am I the last of my kind?

Am I the last of my kind?

He ruminates on the country his little daughter will inherit with all the awful misogyny that's now been memorialized as official policy.

I'm a white man living in a white man's world

Under our roof is a baby girl

I thought this world could be her's one day

But her momma knew better

But the one that called me up short, the song that made me burst out sobbing the first time I heard it on the highway just outside of Harrisburg last year, looking over at P in the passenger seat and pondering just how fleeting all this must be, was If We Were Vampires. Funny-sounding title, which I reckon is why I wasn't ready for what I was feeling as I listened. And so poignant now with Amanda Shires singing backup. His wife then, but not any longer.

I'll end this post with a link to the audio, and a cut-and-paste of the lyrics.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fyiEJaf-IzE

It's not the long flowing dress that you're in

Or the light coming off of your skin

The fragile heart you protected for so long

Or the mercy in your sense of right and wrong

It's not your hands, searching slow in the dark

Or your nails leaving love's watermark

It's not the way you talk me off the roof

Your questions like directions to the truth

It's knowing that this can't go on forever

Likely one of us will have to spend some days alone

Maybe we'll get forty years together

But one day I'll be gone or one day you'll be gone

If we were vampires and death was a joke

We'd go out on the sidewalk and smoke

And laugh at all the lovers and their plans

I wouldn't feel the need to hold your hand

Maybe time running out is a gift

I'll work hard 'til the end of my shift

And give you every second I can find

And hope it isn't me who's left behind

It's knowing that this can't go on forever

Likely one of us will have to spend some days alone

Maybe we'll get forty years together

But one day I'll be gone or one day you'll be gone

It's knowing that this can't go on forever

Likely one of us will have to spend some days alone

Maybe we'll get forty years together

But one day I'll be gone or one day you'll be gone