Richard Buckner
The Hill

Wearing a mask can be a way of undressing. Speaking others' words can be the path that leads to discovering one's most authentic voice.

In setting the free, almost prosaic verse of the Spoon River Anthology to music, Richard Buckner must abandon the well-trodden paths of singer-songwriter music and folk rock, along with the tight confines of their metrics. He must don new clothes and explain his voice. Make it a flexible and agile brush to portray a young woman’s bitter soliloquy taken prematurely from life, or the anguished memory of a man's last moments, murdered by his wife's young lover. Or again, the trembling voice of someone who regrets every action in their life.

The breaths are not those measured by the ballad; they follow the moods, the tirades, the sudden reconsiderations of these dead as they pen their personal epitaph.

Buckner's voice gains in depth and fragility each time, in nuances, where previously only the somewhat monotonous beauty of a soul perfectly adhering to the words it sang, which it had written itself, was known. A beauty so coherent that it instilled fear rather than love.

Compare, for example, the breath, the nervous veins of Buckner's voice in the a cappella section dedicated to Ollie McGee, with the other a cappella track featured in the previous "Devotion and Doubt," with its stentorian and somewhat flat singing. Or the dramaturgical resonance that gives the fragment the sudden caesura that in the instrumental void is constituted by a strum on the acoustic strings. Ollie McGee has just finished recounting her tormented existence, tortured by her husband. The sound of the acoustic turns the page and she can sing through Buckner's voice, replacing the hitherto plaintive tone with a powerful and fierce counterpoint, of how her husband's grief following her death avenged her.

But the masterpiece of this skillful musical exegesis is precisely in the sequencing of the tracks and the instrumental arrangement. The album presents itself as a single continuous track. Yet this continuity is the result of an editing that does not hide itself, does not fade the joins with crossfades. It cuts the sound fabric as a sickle cuts the grain, as death interrupts a life. The single track levels the individual stories, seals their shared fate as dormants on Spoon River’s hill. Instead, the displayed fragmentariness of the track emphasizes the uniqueness of each human journey.

If we then carefully examine the album cover and scroll through the list of names of the characters whose epitaphs have been translated into music by Richard Buckner, we discover that alongside the sung tracks that faithfully respect the poems of Edgar Lee Masters, even the instrumental interludes are exclusively musical translations of the anthology's poems. Sonic impressions, almost a modest retreat of the interpreter's voice in the face of the irremediable suffering described by the poetic words.

Chasing the free meter and the emotional surges of Buckner’s singing, Calexico's Joey Burns and John Convertino resort to a palette of dark and sober, yet nervous and iridescent colors. Where pick and brushes skirt shadows and abysses with languorous delicacy, the bow on the acoustic bass broods over the past, the denied hopes while organ and accordion sacredly sanctify with an almost Pasolinian oxymoron these so profane deaths. The last semblance of infernal indignation flares instead in the sudden bursts of electric guitar.

Compared to the desert painted in the albums of Giant Sand or early Calexico, the cemetery limbo of Spoon River turns out to be a lush landscape of sounds.

And indeed the last track, in which this heartfelt and resonant sound poem flows like a long and winding river, is a luminous sea, a vital death like a passionate love. Buckner sings, William and Emily sing, like two modern-day Paolo and Francesca suddenly at peace:

there is something about death/like love itself!