Darrell Scott
The Invisible Man

Some trails starting from the valley near where I dwell are covered in the filth of killer goats. A demonic goat, bearded, black as the shadow of a boot at night in a black and white photo, had been disturbed by our sudden and, to him, ill-timed arrival. As it fled over the gray rocks, I was followed by a smile. The end of a love, the inhuman screams of the wicked city, the horrors of loss, illness, and the forces spent trying to regain health and a less unstable balance: all vanished in front of a wild goat fleeing into the woods and the sun.

We proceeded over the short via ferrata. The path rose again. A shout from C. A shout from the mountain side, a cry of stone and death. The damn emissary of the devil had climbed, had moved the remains of a landslide, and had risked murder. A stone as big as two heads and a multitude of smaller stones grazed us, like death.

Not like death, but like a gentle wind, "The Invisible Man" by Darrell Scott touched me. The goatish singer-songwriter from London, Kentucky, I am certain, would have sung of the same events if he had lived near our unknown villages. Take "The Dreamer." Accompanied by a simple but crystalline F-style mandolin and sparse percussive strikes akin to discreet snakes, Darrell sings the tale (autobiographical?) of a young shepherd who leaves the flocks and native Tennessee, seeking gold to the north and promising a glorious return to his beloved. She, unsatisfied with scorning the trust of the gold and love seeker, abandons him for a much wealthier doctor, pushing the young man toward suicide. From death by his own hand, he is spared by his golden, purest quality, of being a dreamer. In the small Venetian valleys marked by fine wrinkles and drawn by streams hidden under the dreary cloak of grassy stones, there were strains of men who dreamed of the wealth of smuggled tobacco as an escape from a world of steep terraces, shadow, and death. The events of simple men have always been connected and are linked everywhere by the tight weave of dreams and needs: twice dreams, a terrible condition because it requires the strength to tear a veil, physical and spiritual, which not all human energies can sustain.

I have always listened to the fifth track, "The Invisible Man," with an ideal middle finger raised against the grotesque abominations of the era we are given to live in, which later translates into an insult to the creator deity of this unfortunate world and finally into the denial of it. A continuous merry-go-round of death and tedium envelops us. We can meditate or drink to exhaustion, go to whores or cry over a pure lost love, but any event does not change the perhaps insuperable invisibility established between us. We can reach the ecstasy of the embrace and see sunlit stretches, smoke a cigar in silence, or wander through a hostile city. Invisible men we are and remain. I deny god even for this. I would invite the omnipotent being to see what desperate being he managed to create. Weeping and gnashing of teeth are here among us, and we are immersed in them. At different levels, we are forced to suffer for a crust of dry bread, for a fraction of love, of attention, of tenderness. From the bowels of an now inhuman land, we must extract nourishment, from the bowels of our souls we must squeeze that will sufficient to perform meaningless tasks, only to end up in the land.

If there are moments of respite from despair, they hide in the valleys, in the meadows, remain surrounded by the rivers and fires we light at night. In overcoming our absurd invisibility, in the painful search for true love, and in the joyful search for our neighbor.

Thus unfolds "The Invisible Man," in a sonic fresco of folk (Hank Williams' Ghost), Waitsian singer-songwriter (the sound of the piano in "Looking Glass" seems to come directly from "Closing Time"), powerful desert rock (Do it or Die Trying) and reggae-bluegrass experiments (Goodle, USA).

And, to not make the mistake against which Brecht warns us, this is a Darrell Scott album that would have been unrealizable without the brilliant troop of accompanying artisans: Danny Thompson, bassist for Richard Thompson and Rod Stewart, Kenny Malone, drummer for JJ Cale and Johnny Cash, Richard Bennett, guitarist for Emmylou Harris and Mark Knopfler, the sacred monster Sam Bush, mandolinist and fiddler, Gabe Dixon, keyboardist for Paul McCartney. All chiseled by Gary Paczosa, who gifts the work with surprising acoustic definition and a rare attention to detail in an album with a substantial folk base.

Honesty, suffering, and redemption.