Discography - Week 44

And we've reached Week 44 of our year-long Discography music discussion.  I'm not saying that we're still pissed off about Trump and that we're still depressed, but we are starting off with a World War I poem . . .

In honor of the esteemed Dave Kelley, but more generally as an homage to life, death and memory:

"Dulce Et Decorum Est"
Wilfred Owen

Bent double, like old beggars under sacks,
Knock-kneed, coughing like hags, we cursed through the sludge,
Till on the haunting flares we turned our backs
And towards our distant rest began to trudge.
Men marched asleep.  Many had lost their boots
But limped on, blood-shod.  All went lame; all blind;
Drunk with fatigue; deaf even to the hoots
Of tired, outstripped Five-Nines that dropped behind.
Gas! Gas! Quick, boys! - An ecstasy of fumbling.
Fitting the clumsy helmets just in time;
But someone still was yelling out and stumbling,
And flound'ring like a man in fire or lime.

Dim, through the misty panes and thick green light,
As under a green sea, I saw him drowning.
In all my dreams, before my helpless sight,
He plungers at me, guttering, choking, drowning.
If in some smothering dreams you too could pace
Behind the wagon that we flung him in,
And watch the white eyes writhing in his face,
His hanging face, like a devil's sick of sin;
If you could hear, at every jolt, the blood
Come gurgling from the froth-corrupted lungs,
Obscene as cancer, bitter as the cud
Of vile, incurable sores on innocent tongues,
My friend, you would not tell with such high zest
To children ardent from some desperate glory,
The old Lie; Dulce et Decorum est
Pro patria mori.

Gary Beatrice

My Morning Jacket, Evil Urges

"It ain't evil if it don't hurt anybody."

Is Jim James a hippy or a libertarian?

I don't know and I don't care, at least 2/3 of the way through when James' falsetto gives way to the fantastic instrumental break / speed up. To me MMJ is all about the sound. And "Evil Urges", with its funk/ soft rock / disco/ rock 'n roll mash up, delivers.

Dave Wallace

Bruce Springsteen - The Ghost of Tom Joad

Originally the title track of a largely acoustic album, Springsteen revived The Ghost of Tom Joad with an incendiary live version featuring Tom Morello on guitar and guest vocals.  They then recorded a studio version for the High Hopes album.  Their version only amped up the the original's anger and rage at our country's amnesia of the neglected and abused.  And, of course, quoting Tom Joad's famous speech is guaranteed to warm the cockles of the heart of anyone who loves Grapes of Wrath.

Kathy Seiler

Nikka Costa - So Have I For You 

My newer playlists are getting a little stagnant so I've gone back to some albums I haven't listened to in a while. Nikka Costa isn't terribly well known as a singer but she's got a funk/soul/blues vibe and some great lyrics to her songs. This week's selection is from her "Everybody Got Their Something" album from 2001. She hasn't seemed to do much musically in the last several years.

This song expresses how the current state of affairs of our country makes me feel, which is pissed off and subjected to the dominating views of a bunch of idiotic middle-aged white men (no offense to the readers intended, I'm not generalizing to anything other than the GOP). It seems there is backward movement on every front right now; immigration, environmental issues, vaccination attitudes, women's reproductive rights (I am NOT a "host", Oklahoma)... shall I go on?  The song expresses the feelings of constantly being subjected to someone else's rules and has some lovely analogies in it, including my favorite: 

"Just like sea has spent eternity at the mercy of the moon, so have I for you"  

To its credit, the song has a message of rising above the subjugation and choosing to be positive, both in lyrics and musically at one point, where it starts to remind me of songs from the 60's. I haven't managed to channel that positivity yet, but maybe if I put the song on replay I'll manage it.

Mike Kelly

Gravity's Gone -- Drive by Truckers 

Earlier in the week, Scudder reported that some members of this community think Mike Cooley is only the third-best songwriter in Drive By Truckers. This is patently false.  This bad hombre can turn a phrase and is probably the only person profiled on this discography that has coined a phrase in Urban Dictionary. Here- look.

Even though this should be enough to settle this nonsense, let's take a look at a classic Mike Cooley verse from this song:  

"Those little demons ain't the reasons for the bruises on your soul you've been neglecting
You'll never lose you're mind as long as you're heart always reminds you where you left it
And don't ever let them make you feel like saying what you want is unbecoming
If you were supposed to watch you're mouth all the time I doubt you're eyes would be above it"

So there's a lot here. One of the things about the Ever South is that rarely do people come right out and say what they mean and so when it happens, it's refreshing and surprising and mostly leads to good things.  MC knows this and wrote a whole verse about it in this song of excellence.  It speaks to how he's the whole region's wise big brother whose advice you don't necessarily always want, but always need.  From songs like Surrender Under Protest which tells hard truths about the confederate flag to songs like Ghost to Most which reminds people to be conscious of the fact we all have our own shit to attend to, Mike Cooley sees it the way it ought to be seen.  

He's that friend who you take to breakfast the day after a night's worth of bad choices and helps you maintain perspective. He's that rock star I could teach in Rhetoric I about concisely saying original things and he's easily the best songwriter in the DBT.  

Dave Kelley

Let me begin with two warnings.  This is very stream of consciousness and contains not one, not two, but three songs.

My late father saw combat action in Europe in the Second World War.  One of my most prized possessions is a bunch of letters he wrote home to his parents while overseas.  Recently I spent an evening in my recliner with several pours of bourbon reading a number of the letters.  It is odd in a good way to read such letters written by your father more than fifteen years before you were born.  I recognize aspects of the man I knew growing up, but other parts of his writing are from a version of the man that was but a shadow by the time that I came into being.  That propelled me to ruminate about who we are.  Our twenty year old self, our forty year old self, our fifty four year old self.......?  Or are we an amalgam of all of our selves.  Methinks that is a subject better left to a Scudder class exercise than my superficial ass.  

The lunatic currently occupying the Oval Office certainly has the ability to drag our nation into at least one foreign war.  He and some of his team share the same vision of the world as a dark, dangerous, and evil place that jihadists have.  Last weekend I pulled into the grocery store parking lot and saw a woman who appeared to be in her fifties emerging from her car.  On her car was a bumper sticker that listed he name of a male, the fact that he was a Marine, and writing indicated that he had been "deployed to heaven" several years ago.  I can only guess that it was his Mom.  She also appeared very sad.  Now maybe she was sad because she had a headache, recently been laid off, or had had an argument with her husband a few hours before.  I of course leapt to the assumption that she was sad because her boy had been killed overseas.  I instantly got choked up and needed a minute to compose myself before getting out of my car.   

All of the above led to my selections this week.

"Momma Bake aPie."    Written by Tom T. Hall.  Recording by Drive By Truckers".

Tom T. Hall is a criminally underrated songwriter IMHO.  He wrote this song during the Vietnam War about a young man who has lost his legs in combat flying home to reunite with his family.  The fact the he attempts humor and tries to be nonchalant only makes it more powerful to me.

"Momma bake a pie

Daddy kill a chicken

Your son is coming home

11:35 Wednesday Night."

"Momma will be crying and Daddy's gonna say

Son, did they treat you good?

My uncle will be drunk and he'll say

Boy they're doing some real great things with wood."

"The War"  Lucero

Parts of this song remind me of things my Dad told me about the war.  Other parts are the point of view of a man very different than my dad.  This is an autobiographical song about the writer's grandfather.

"Three times I made sergeant

I'm not that kind of man

And pretty much as quick as I could

I'd get busted back to private again

Cause taking orders never suited me

Giving them out was much worse

I could not stand to get my friend killed

so I took care of myself first"

I'd be no guest at the table of the Lord

His food was not to be mine

Cause I cursed his name every chance that I could

And I reckon that's why I'm still alive."

"With a Memory Like Mine"  Darrell Scott. 

Told not from the point of view of a soldier but instead of a father waiting for a train to return the body of his son killed at war.

"In a little country graveyard

on a dark and dreary day

They laid a flag upon the casket

and the casket in the grave

I couldn't stand it any longer

And I knew not how to pray

I cried Oh Lord I hate to leave him

All alone beneath that clay

I can see him as a baby

I can hear him call my name

I can feel him under fire

And I see him rising from the flames"

I am not a parent, but this song reduces me to a puddle of goo whenever I hear it.

To end, I would highly recommend reading "Dulce Et Decorum Est".  It is a great poem written by Wilfred Owen who served in WWI.  The fact that he was killed in action before the war ended only adds to its power.

Gary Scudder

This post was inspired by the esteemed Gary Beatrice, who has forgotten more about music than I will ever know.  He pointed out a few weeks ago how Mike Cooley has grown as a singer/songwriter for the Drive-By Truckers, especially after Jason Isbell left the band.  I think he's always been a really good songwriter and I think he's becoming a great songwriter.  Mike Kelly and I had one of the great "Dude!"/bromance/hug-it-out moments at the Drive-By Truckers concert when they played Marry Me, one of my favorite songs and I one I promoted months ago.  So, with this in mind, I'd like to talk about two Cooley songs:

Drive-By Truckers, Surrender Under Protest and Primer Coat

I'd argue that, as much as I love Patterson Hood, it's actually Cooley who has written the best songs on the last two albums.  A lot has been said about Surrender Under Protest, and rightfully so, and it was my pre-concert pick to start the DBT set (my son correctly picked Ramon Casiano, in itself another great Cooley song).  It takes a talented (and ballsy) songwriter to take a line like "compelled but not defeated" from the Southern Lost Cause mythology, and turn it upside down and make it an anthem for the Black Lives Matter movement - and then Cooley takes a step back and reflects how we sadly insist on always being the "other's other."  English Oceans, their previous album, is an oddly overlooked DBT album, and Cooley's Primer Coat has quickly become one of my favorite songs.  It deals with another Lost Cause: life.  Now, understand that I'm not waving a white flag, and my friends will tell you that I kick back as hard as anyone.  Instead, I guess my point is that like the original Lost Cause, life is shaped as much by the mythology of a stolen victory, in this case it's a man whose youth and vitality and relevance are stolen by the passing of time, emphasized by a wedding (as it often is).  In this case we're really talking about two weddings, that of his daughter coming up and the memory of his own.  His wife, probably because women are more in tune with the constant flow of life and death, takes it much better. "It comes to women and they survive but when the same comes to men/ Someone comes for their babies, something dies there and then."

I love the description of the girl in the parking lot, and it's classic Cooley:

"Slinging gravel in the parking lots and looking tough on the hood
A girl as plain as primer coat leaves nothing misunderstood
Her mother and I through trembling lips, a steady hand on his own
The future of every rebel cause, when all the fighting is gone."

It's only after a few listenings that you realize that there are generations crossing in this song, and that the "girl as plain as primer coat" could either be the man's wife or his own daughter. And here's the thing, primer coat may be plain, but without it the paint job doesn't last as long.  So the song is really told from several perspectives, and it reflects on an upcoming wedding but also on the passing of time.

"My sister's marrying in the spring and everything will be fine
Mama's planning the wedding, Daddy's planning on crying
She's slipping out of her apron strings, you'd best leave him be
He's staring through his own taillights and gathering speed."

As I stumble, "Bent double, like old beggars under sacks, Knock-kneed," towards my 60s, I appreciate the line, "He's staring through his own taillights and gathering speed."

Yes, the "future of every rebel cause, when all the fighting is gone."

Cyndi Brandenburg

Here is one more....it is not about DBT in general or Mike Cooley in particular, even though I'm a fan despite that unfortunate phrase he coined (and I witnessed that "dude!"/bromance/hug-it-out moment, which was truly a beautiful thing to behold--talk about scattered moments of joy).  

When in doubt, Wilco always works.

Wilco, How to FightLoneliness 

Sometimes, adulthood feels dreary even when life is arguably pretty great and contains moments of joy scattered all over the place.   The reality that this is what we get, that what appears so under control is actually a ruse for how much is out of our control, can be downright depressing.  Plus, Donald Trump sure isn't helping matters.  He actually takes that sense of things being out of control from the self-indulgent to the "holy shit this world's truly going to bloody hell" level.  But driving home from work yesterday, I noticed that the feeling that set in wasn't about any of that.  It was actually simpler, predicated on something more basic. It was loneliness, which is weird, given the crowd of smiling faces and the room full of love I had literally just left behind.

The constructs of contemporary American adult life naturally lead this way, I suppose.  And with maturity and responsibility, we smile, and join in, and keep at it, because running recklessly away or driving off into the distance doesn't work.  What was once overt teen angst morphs into something subtler and deeper--a loneliness that we can try to fight, but that in the end, we just have to learn to live with.

Phillip Seiler

Everything But the Girl “Missing”

I think you would be hard pressed to write a more brilliant lyric than “And I miss you/ like the deserts miss the rain”. At first, it seems so obvious and simplistic (junior high poetry!) Of course the deserts miss the rain. The absence of rain is what makes a desert a desert! But then, you start to see the brilliance of this little phrase. How do deserts miss rain? Do they long for that which never comes? Is it momentary joy in between long droughts of longing? Do the deserts resent the rain for staying away? Is it all just echoes and faint memories of what was?

And then to have it sung by the incomparable Tracey Thorn. Oh there is a voice full of crystal clear longing or despair or mystery or all of these. And just when you can’t imagine Ben Watt’s accompaniment getting much better at capturing the yearning and the loss? Moment 2:24, the music begins to fall away. First the guitar, bass and drums, then the strings (except for a beautiful, diminishing echo of what was last played), until it is just Thorn and the synth. Will the song fade away, fall apart, turn to dust? No. Everything returns and life crashes back in. Or maybe the pain returns or the longing fails to subside into acceptance.

You, dear listener get to decide. It’s a Rorschach blot in musical form.  

(If you have never heard their cover of Only Living Boy In New York, you can fix that here.