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There are times in life when everything seems to go wrong, where it's mostly your ideas and impressions working against you; but there are others, where truly everything goes in the opposite direction to how you'd like.
The hope is that for both moments, hidden somewhere, salvation, the turning point, that which in prose is known as the light at the end of the tunnel lurks. But the first is primarily a mental condition, the perception of when you feel that everything in life is proceeding “against” is nothing more than an unhealthy idea, it can certainly leave annoying residues, but most of the time you come out stronger and with an additional experience.
The second condition, however, is more painful because it overtakes real life, sweeps it away like a tsunami, and when it passes, nothing is ever the same again and it never can be, and this is real life, and it is the life described in this album.
More or less all of us have found ourselves living some days immersed in depression, in the deep reflection of mental unhappiness, and somehow, perhaps with the help of a friend, a book or a new love, we have come out of it. But it is the second case, the overwhelming one, that hurts us and many times changes us so much that it upends our life for all the days to come. Often I have found myself battling boredom and solitude, with that bit of bad luck that makes you cry, but ultimately helps you strengthen your small convictions. It's been days now that I've been living in the whys, whose answers take time to come, and in these gray days, it was chance that made me cross paths with this album, and since then it has obsessively accompanied my days, in the car, in the bookstore, at home or on the mac, wherever I am, it plays.
It was inevitable that getting so deeply under my skin would make me reflect for a long while on how often the author must have found himself living in the painful condition when everything, but absolutely everything, truly ruins you, destroying in a short time everything you have, know, and most importantly, are.
The conflicting relationship with a father who was as much a genius in physics as he was a lover of alcohol, the solitude and pain encountered in the death first of the mother from an unrelenting cancer and then of the sister who committed suicide, had already found expression in the themes of the previous “Electro-Shock Blues” (1998), but here they return with compelling evidence and with a new and surprisingly wonderful message of salvific future hope.
The greatness of this work, two CDs with 33 songs, lies in its being a comprehensive compendium of life, from the suffering of abandonment and death, to the faith in a hope of a way out of the pain, and that despite everything, tomorrow might still be worthy of being lived and perhaps even better.
“I wake up early in the morning/ no matter how disappointed I was the day before/ now it's all new”
(...) “I do some silly things/ but my heart is in the right place/ and this I know” (...) “I have a dog, I take him for a walk/ and everyone likes to say hello/ I've always been on the edge of the sidewalk/ I'm learning to say hello without too many troubles/ I'm growing just like my father/ although I swore not to/ now I can say I feel love for him” (…) “I feel like he’s with me now/ even though he's dead/ it's not all bad, nor all good!” (Things the grandchildren should know)
“I was not a son of a bitch/ dad was a drunk/ a very unpleasant person/ asleep on the floor/ right in the middle of the front door” (…) “Grandma cheated/ said the times were serene/ said I was not a son of a bitch/ kneeling on myself/ praying God please... ” (Son of a bitch)
It is thanks to the strength of phrases like these that I find the power to overcome all my petty weaknesses, when I feel that there are those in the world who still believe in life despite having had to face it so uphill.
Perhaps I should have talked about the music, the collaborations with Tom Waits and Peter Buck of REM, the rock ballads, the blues, the country or the pop, the poignant strings and the piano solos that can be heard in this album, or even its long gestation started in 1997 and only completed today; but when I grasped the depth of soul behind this work, a long conceptual suite made of love and hatred for life, all discussions on the music seemed to me of unnecessary vacuity.
Together with Elliott Smith’s “From A Basement On The Hill,” the paradigm of the artist who in one case succumbs and in the other overcomes the malaise of living.
For me a Masterpiece of art and life!
Tracklist Lyrics and Samples
04 Blinking Lights (For Me) (02:01)
Blinking lights on the airplane wings
Up above the trees
Blinking down a morse code signal
Especially for me
Ain't no rainbow in the sky
In the middle of the night
But the signal's coming through
One day i will be alright again
Blinking lights on the highway cars
Stopping one by one
Get a look at the accident
Didn't see that one coming
And the doctor in the sky
Gonna bring his chopper down
Gonna bring me out alive
And set me on the ground
Once more again
Blinking lights on the airplane wings
Up above the trees
05 Trouble With Dreams (04:33)
There's nothing that i wanna do
More than get alone and be with you
Trouble with dreams is they don't come true
And when they do they can't catch up to you
You don't need a thing from me
But i need something big from you
'cause you know i've got
An awful lot of big dreams
I'm walking down a lonely road
Clear to me now but i was never told
Trouble with dreams is you never know
When to hold on and when to let go
If you let me down it's alright
At least that leaves something for me
'cause you know i've got
An awful lot of big dreams
This is the life that i must lead now
Crossing fingers and wiping brow
Trouble with dreams is you can't pretend
Something with no beginning has an end
You don't need a thing from me
But i need something big from you
'cause you know i've got an awful lot of big dreams
08 In the Yard, Behind the Church (04:05)
In the yard, behind the church where
Butterflies and blackbirds search for
A safe place to rest the night away
We will go down to the brook and
Sit upon the overlook then
Forget about the troubles of the day
We will walk among the graves of
Men long dead with presidents' names and
Listen to the water flow softly by
I will kiss you on the lips now
And as the sky grows dark we'll strip down
And let the water wash away all lies
In the yard, behind the church where
Butterflies and blackbirds perch on
Gray stones as the garden's growing dim
We will lay down on the ground and
Put our cheeks against the dirt down
Where it no longer matters
Where you've been
12 Mother Mary (03:21)
People talking sound like dogs
Barking through the trees
Making no sense at all
Meaning nothing to me
Mother Mary
Quite contrary
I did not mean to let you go
So quick
People talking crack me up
They don't have a little clue
What it's like to be me
What it's like to lose you
Mother Mary
I grow weary
I did not mean to ler you go
So quick
People talking sound like dogs
Barking up the wrong tree
Take a good man down
And set the evil free
Mother Mary
Quite Contrary
I did not mean to let you go
So quick
14 Understanding Salesmen (02:43)
A knock on the door means
Hello jesus calls
A ring on the phone means
A trip to niagara falls
Daddy don't let me down this time
I'm all alone inside my mind
And it's no small thing
That i must prove to you
A late night card game
With the guys is alright
But i would rather take you
For a test drive
Daddy don't let me down this time
I'm all alone inside my mind
And it's no small thing
That i must prove to you
While i look out
On the passing fields
The sun through the bugs
On the windshield
Makes me feel
Like i
Don't matter
A knock on the door means
Hello jesus calls
A ring on the phone means
A trip to niagara falls
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Other reviews
By holdencaulfield
And you tell us that the Night is anything but endless, and if you just hold on, morning eventually arrives.
Your voice that scratches against the pain, until it wears it out and realizes that, beneath, happiness is hidden.
By The Punisher1
Indulging in and gathering oneself in a moment of melancholy certainly does good, but doing it for an hour and a half is half a suicide.
Many tracks could have been spared as they are completely dispensable in the economy of the work.
