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Progress allows us to move towards the future. Tradition keeps us grounded, static. What doesn’t add up, observing the universe that man has created, is that advancement has not become synonymous with good, and tradition, in some of its many faces, has not remained synonymous and consequent of conservatism. History narrates how punk has disappeared, how 80s pop has remained confined in the showcases of nostalgics, how rock has almost entirely devolved and scattered into thousands of fetid channels of compromise and vacuity. I am increasingly convinced that what persists over the centuries is the music born from the suffering of our ancestors and the brutality of need. Simple songs, born to express ancient and eternal events, music of unity and passion, of rains, fires, devastations, loves. From the primordial Hungarian violinists to Bonnie "Prince" Billy and Townes Van Zandt, the poorly woven and moving tapestry of music unfolds, narrating the life of people through the words and notes of individuals.
Tim O'Brien continues his impassive work of disseminating old-time American tradition with "Songs from the Mountain", in the year of our Lord 2002. It could be 1850, and it could have been recorded with a wax cylinder and a banjo made from a cat’s skin (tender bluegrass anecdotes: the enormous old Doc Watson obtained his first clawhammer banjo, built by his father, by procuring the skin directly from a deceased feline. He later became famous as a guitarist and not as a banjo player, but that’s another story): the result wouldn’t be different. The instrumental tracks are uniquely vigorous; let’s leave the hordes of hipsters to dance ineptly to their four-quarter disco beats, convinced they can reach ecstasy by fictitiously penetrating the air and creatures around them; we are content to vomit in the violinistic brutality of "Stobrod’s tune" and the short and vertiginous "Lonesome John" (punks bow down and learn: here there are no chords, as there is no guitar, there is a very rough rhythm compressed in 1:53 of sweaty old-time fury: more than "God Save The Queen". And at least a century in advance.)
Tim O'Brien moves from the boisterous drunkenness of "The drunkard's hiccups (Jack of diamonds)" to the elegance of "The Blackest Crow". A magic, a painful wind like a mystery, a soft caress. One of the most beautiful love poems grafted onto the shadowed tree of a minor melody. It prompts one to imagine the solitary creator, older than man and already struck by the desperation of love, dead and lived in the shadow of immense and terrible mountains, green and gray like grappa and wrapped in the same oblivion.
The eternity of music is hidden in the eternity of these songs. Pain and passion, hunger and thirst, drunkenness and lust, tenderness and solitude, love and fierce hatred live side by side, like crippled brothers needing to be uplifted or destroyed like demons from a fragile vase often broken: ourselves, Man.
Brechtian parenthesis, or Praise of the Invisible: together with Tim O'Brien (vocals, guitar, mandolin, fiddle) played Andrea Zonn, Pete Wernick, Mollie O’Brien (vocals); John Herrmann (banjo, mandolin, vocals); Dirk Powell (banjo, fiddle, piano).
"I am a poor wayfaring stranger
While traveling through this world below
There's no sickness toil or danger
In the fair land to which I go"
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