MUSIC BOX NO. 7

processionals, puncture wounds, and five songs i have on tape.

ONE. BLACK CHRIST OF THE ANDES BY MARY LOU WILLIAMS.

I have this dream. It’s more of a metaphor, really, but if I find myself inside it when I sleep, it counts as a dream. In the dream there is an uncharted ocean. On the ocean is a ship, an endless ship where monsters eat you if the lights go out. Entire layers of the ship have been ceded to darkness. Inside the ship is a fairy tale— not a commercialized one for children, but one of the ones I grew up with— full of blood and hope and mistakes that kill you. Inside the fairy tale is a deadly forest. Inside the deadly forest is a labyrinth. There may or may not be a Minotaur in there, which means that there is a Minotaur in there. If there is a Minotaur, it was placed in the labyrinth for its own safety. If there isn’t a Minotaur, it’s in there because it’s guarding something, and it’s also trying to kill you. Finally, inside the labyrinth lies a wall, and within the wall is a well. There is no door to the wall, no possible entryway. If you try to climb over it, you’ll find it unclimbable; if you dig under it, you’ll find that there is no depth that it does not reach into. All of this is very unfortunate because you need the well to live. The contents may be ugly, but they are necessary, and you can’t reach it.

I want you to understand what I mean when I say that each place is “inside” the other places. I’m referring to doorways. The processional happens in a single space; it all uses the same air, the same ground, the same walls. Each layer of the processional is transparent. They are woven together into one cloth. You occupy each layer simultaneously, but you are only aware of the one you’re currently moving through. To continue forward through the layers of the processional, you must reach a certain point in the layer you’re in— this will allow you to “enter” the next one, which is less of an entry and more of a transferral of awareness— and only then can you carry on. This system of occupation works especially well in conversation. I, saying something, might be standing in the labyrinth or at the wall, and you, hearing it, might be on the ship or in the fairy tale, but if you understand me, we can occupy the same space simultaneously and you might be able to see down through the layers to wherever I’m standing. We are in the same place with different meanings.

Evidently, this is something I’ve thought through. I’ve thought about it just enough that it showed up as a dream about a week ago. I wasn’t scared because I’ve got a voice in my head, one that tells me to do everything in multiples of five whenever possible, to avoid the fickleness of electricity, to wear blue for luck; this voice knows how to navigate the processional because this voice built the processional, so I listen to it expeditiously and am rewarded for it. I keep the ship’s lanterns from going out. In the fairy tale, I help the old woman and I don’t trust the fox. I throw marked stones in the forest to know where to step and which paths to follow. I unravel yarn inside the labyrinth. Now, at the wall, I cannot go through to the well at the center. Because the well is also a layer of the processional— albeit an untouchable one— I can occasionally see a product of the well, but I am unable to reach out and go into it.

The thing about metaphors and thought exercises, as it turns out, is that they become a lot less easy to stomach when you have to live within them in some capacity. An abstract conceptualization became viscerally real within the dream. I wailed at the wall. I slammed on the brick with my fists until my hands bled. I needed the well and I could not reach it; I cannot pretend that it wasn’t a death sentence. I cried, begged, screamed. Nothing happened. The wall did not give way.

I’m not going to call it a nightmare— it was more of an uncomfortable truth than anything. But it was disturbing. So, in the middle of the night, I walked out into the steppe and prayed for rain.

St. Martin de Porres was born in December 1579 and died in November 1639— he was beatified in 1837, canonized in 1962, and musically canonized by jazz pianist Mary Lou Williams that same year. His patronage covers mixed-race people, barbers, animals, public health workers, innkeepers, and everyone seeking racial harmony. He was a levitator, a bilocator, a Peruvian; he talked to animals, he healed the sick, he sheltered and fed homeless children. There are more relevant saints for me to pray to, I’m sure, but my idea of prayer isn’t exactly traditional and I’m not exactly praying to St. Martin— I’m praying to the piece by Mary Lou Williams.

When she composed Black Christ of the Andes, Williams’ career had already spanned about forty years. She started playing piano publicly at age six and professionally at age ten. By the time 1962 rolled around, she was just emerging from a musical hiatus, potentially due to the death of her long-time friend and student Charlie Parker, and had converted to Catholicism about five years prior. She had been encouraged by her peers at the church to create a work of “sacred jazz” and, inspired by the recent canonization of St. Martin, she composed Black Christ. A six minute swirl of religious tension and incredible musical intellect, it combines the spiritual component of a choir with the tonal sensibilities of jazz. The specific chord combinations are not ones you frequently hear in choral music— Williams did not shy away from the potential of things sounding strange or “off”, which allowed her to create a rich emotional landscape within the piece. A tide moves back and forth from comfort to fear, then back again. It’s easy to see why Williams is hailed as one of the most influential jazz pianists of all time. My veneration goes out to the song, to the way it’s sung; my veneration goes out to jazz.

So I walked out into the steppe with no shoes and no coat, just a nightgown and the memory of a dream. I don’t know why I did it. Don’t ask me why; I don’t know why. I don’t know what I thought would happen. I walked about half a mile down a dirt road, half-blind from the darkness, to ask for a way over the wall. A ladder, a door, a different well that’s easier to reach. The rain. Heal the sick— I am sick. Raise the dead— I am dead. Spare my people.

Of course nothing happened. Of course. I turned around— still barefoot, still underdressed— made my way back home through the sagebrush and shale. My only miracle is tough feet. The sky is empty.

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TWO. BLACKMAIL BY SWANS.

That is where my body goes at night. This is where my body goes in the daytime. I don’t typically like to separate the body and the more ephemeral parts of the self— mind-body dualism is bullshit, you know— but unfortunately, my mind doesn’t spend much time inside myself, so I need to make the distinction. My body spends a lot of time face down in the sunshine. My head, on the other hand, is sometimes a bird. Other times, my head crawls inside my Walkman, which is pretty fun. I think this is also just something that tends to happen to people whose bodies hurt constantly; when there’s too much emphasis on the meat, you start looking for ways out of it as much as possible. You dream. You dissociate. You get distant. You lose presence. You do anything to leave physicality behind. Or I do, at least. I’m fine with the pain, I just don’t like being in pain. Pain used to happen to me from the outside; now I’m within pain, inside of it. I would cut it out if I could, but obviously, I can’t. I’m still here, aren’t I?

This distinction does raise some interesting questions, though. How much of a person is “body” and how much of them is “other”? What qualifies as “body”? What qualifies as “other”? Where is the overlap? If any parts are outside the overlap, solely defined as “body” or “other”, which parts are they? Can you ever secularize a part of yourself from the rest of you? How do we come to terms with the grossness of physicality? How do we come to terms with the fact that, even though it can be disgusting and awful, there will be a time where we no longer have access to a body, and that will be worse?

But I digress. This is about me, laying in the sunlight and pretending to exist less than I do. If I’m drinking, it’s because I’m bored— I don’t really like the taste and I’m too prone to black moods to enjoy alcohol, so drinking is my equivalent of a rat hitting the shock button. More importantly, this is about carrion birds. I’m not moving. I’m a chalk outline on the concrete. I am the perfect target, except for the fact that I’m alive, and therefore not something that can be scavenged. The birds, wheeling around the sun like feathered spokes, move higher and higher as they watch me. I watch them right back. They’re vultures, maybe; it’s difficult to see them when they’re silhouettes on the sky. It’s kind of nice to have something wish you dead in a way that has nothing to do with who you are. I think I probably drank too much.

Black mood one: pleasure at the thought of death— not just mine, but death in general. It feels good to think about things ending and being recycled. It feels justified. The vultures act as a memento mori of sorts; if I was a little younger and a little more in the throes of my own head, I would be calling them angels. I can’t be doing that anymore, though. I don’t think it’s good for me.

My eyes hurt from staring into the sun, so I close them and release my head. Consciousness fades back into my Walkman— the whir of the tape, the clunk, the layer of static that sits behind every song— as I try to disappear again. I recorded this particular cassette at 2 a.m. the morning before I left the city because I wanted something sensual. I’ve been feeling snakelike lately, as if I could striptease out of my own skin at any moment. I wanted sex, manipulation, a little cruelty, a little ugliness. I needed it darker.

Black mood two: romance. And it is a black mood. Things I don’t understand tend to irritate me, and romance is out of my reach, so I oscillate between wanting to throw myself into it to study it and wanting nothing to do with it. I understand love, I think. But romance is something else. Why is it not enough to say you’ll do anything for someone and leave it at that?

Blackmail first appeared on Swans’ 1986 EP A Screw, then on their 1987 album Children of God. On the first listen, it seems like a relatively straightforward ballad. Close your eyes, say the word I want to hear, come up behind me and hold on, say you’ll do anything for me. The impact of the song lies in three things— the nondescript lyricism, which relies on repetition more than elaborate declarations of love and keeps the song ambiguous, Jarboe’s shockingly delicate vocals, and the fact that the title of the song is “blackmail”. Within that particular context, the requests for the song’s subject to “close their eyes”, “do anything for [the singer]”, and “do what [they] don’t understand” become a lot darker, leaning more towards manipulation than love. But the song is so tonally wide-eyed that you almost believe the narrator isn’t intentionally being manipulative; that’s just what their love looks like. Who says there isn’t an overlap between manipulation and love? Take it or leave it. Do anything for them, and they’ll be your body when your body is broken. This is the leverage that you have over each other.

In a state of non-being like this, the black mood goes through me. It goes right through me like I’m not even there. I don’t get angry or sad or anything— everything just goes through me. It’s like I’m transparent. Romance doesn’t matter. Death also doesn’t matter because I’m not dead yet, despite what the carrion birds (still circling; still spinning like wheels) might think. One day, someone is going to be my body when my body is broken. Someone’s going to have leverage over me— that’ll be a new experience, because I’ve never known someone who could make me want to obey them. Someday, holding on is going to be bearable. Not today, but someday. Sometime soon. We’re almost there. Promise me we’re almost there. Tell me you mean it.

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THREE. PARADISE CIRCUS BY MASSIVE ATTACK FT. HOPE SANDOVAL.

It takes a week for me to hurt myself in a noticeable way. I don’t do it intentionally— I just walk into these little pains constantly, stubbed toes and sunburns and mystery scrapes. It runs in the family, really. You should hear the way my grandmother and my father are always falling into a new bodily harm. A few days after we arrive, I spend an hour trying and failing to dig an ingrown hair out of the seam of my thigh with a pin, and then spend the rest of the day squeezing blood and serous fluid out of it. A day after that, I scratched my calf hard enough to bleed while walking through the scrub brush. These things are normal— it’s natural wear and tear on the body, the products of not living in a bubble. I just happen to notice them more than the average person. I poke them, savor them, watch them heal; I feel all sorts of tender, soft things towards them. My little bruise babies.

With this in mind, it’s no surprise that I got a chunk of stick inside my foot. No big deal. My mother and I were at the river, quietly talking amongst ourselves so the teenage boys on the other side of the water wouldn’t catch our conversation the way we were catching theirs. When I stood up to play with the dog, I felt something enter my skin. Full penetration. I walked on it for about a minute, moving over the sand and through the water, before I checked the sole of my foot to see what happened. There are smarter things to do, surely, but sometimes things don’t have to exist until you acknowledge them— whatever was now inside me wasn’t real until I allowed it to be. And it wasn’t like it hurt. There was just the sensation of my skin widening around something in a place where it shouldn’t be widening. My miracle is still tough feet; it’s just that toughness is sometimes an emotional quality instead of a physical one.

It took about five seconds for me to pull out the little nub of wood lodged inside me, and five more to say to my mother, very calmly, look what I just pulled out of my foot. The stick had been about a centimeter and a half deep into my skin. A tiny sliver of it was still in me. When my mother asked if I was okay, I said that, well, I’m not exactly crying, am I?

No, my mother replied. But with you, there’s a long distance between pain and crying. And she’s right.

Back at the house, I spent most of the evening rinsing it and trying to dig the remaining wood out of my skin with a needle and tweezers. Of course, none of that worked. My new hole, sitting right on top of my plantar fascia, only got wider— I put a bandage over it, at my mother’s behest, and tried to walk it out of me. It was really more of a limp than a walk, in all honesty. I hobbled across the house a couple times and made promises I couldn’t keep that it’ll either be pushed out or absorbed.

My little puncture wound. My hole baby. I nurse it at night. I coddle it. In the morning, I wash it out very gently, which does effectively nothing. It still doesn’t hurt. It aches, maybe, but it doesn’t hurt.

Paradise Circus is the first single off of Massive Attack’s 2010 album Heligoland, and the only song on the album to feature vocals from Mazzy Star’s Hope Sandoval. Despite it being a relatively calm song, there’s a layer of energy beneath it, pulled taut like a bow. I imagine that it would be the perfect song for the trailer of a horror movie about a haunted house— unnatural stillness, long shots of flashlights slowly panning over dusty shelves, things moving just out of frame. It sounds almost conspiratorial, too. Sandoval delivers the lyrics with the perfect amount of casual slyness, bordering on noncommittal, as she reverse-psychologizes you into falling into a destructive sort of love. Love is like a sin. It will swallow you whole. Blame it on the devil, but you know you like it. You know you want it. And I do.

The remaining sliver of wood politely removes itself from my foot by the next evening. I don’t know where it went; maybe it was washed down the shower drain, or maybe it was the dark spot on one of the bandages I peeled off. The ache remains. It’s not as intense as it was— funny how such a tiny scrap of material can cause so much sensation— but it’s still there, twinging every time I put pressure down on the wrong side of my foot. The limp recedes to an awkward shuffle. The shuffle recedes to stillness. I’m looking at the sky. Is it really empty?

There’s a thoroughly documented connection between love, pain, and God. It’s been the subject of various mystics for thousands of years; it appears in the places where you least expect it. I mean, with the amount of Christ imagery getting pumped out by the imperial core, it’s pretty much impossible to avoid. See him masticated on the cross. See him bleed. See his wounds and his suffering and his death, all at the hand of his beloved Father, who art in Heaven. In The Plague by Albert Camus, a preacher spends an entire sermon telling the town that they have to love God because of the plague, not in spite of it— the message was lost (though respected) by most of the other characters, but I appreciated it. I think the more succinct way of putting it is a quote from Ted Chiang’s Hell Is the Absence of God¹: “everything in life is love, even pain, especially pain… God is not just, God is not kind, God is not merciful, and understanding that is essential to true devotion.”

I’ve resolved not to roll over in the face of a storm. There’s one coming now, you know. It’s something in the stillness. The sky is swelling pregnant. I nurse my little ache— I move closer to the ache, I go inside of the ache, I sit in the eye of the ache— and wait for it to hit. No misapprehensions. No conditionality. Around we go, spinning in his grin. And that’s how I like it.

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FOUR. FUZZY BY GRANT LEE BUFFALO.

The day ends like a leaky faucet— first the sun itself disappears into a cluster of the surrounding hills, then the clouds flare pink and go silent, then the light finally fades. I like the way the light moves here. The house I’m staying in is at the top of its own sugar lump hill, giving a perfect view into the town below; as the sun shifts, blue-dark contorts itself through the juniper and sweetgrass, pooling at the bottom of the valley. You can watch the shadows of the clouds traverse the range. Sometimes there are distant cows grazing in the little patches of wetlands scattered across the area. Most of the time, though, there’s nothing except plants, ultrafine dust, and wildlife. Suits me just fine. I’m good at the lonesome this type of landscape brings down on you.

Late at night, if I have nothing better to do, I go sit on the porch and watch the blackness stay still. It feels somewhere between a tangible manifestation of solitude and an old friend. All my best moments happened in near-total darkness; most of them had something to do with the fact that I was perfectly alone and nobody could see me. I like to hide. I like to be invisible. I’ve known that since I was a kid— playing hide and seek with me was a nightmare, because I could twist myself into an impossible shape and stay like that for hours on end. No one could ever find me. I don’t think they have, yet.

I wish you could hear the way the crickets howl at night and feel the way the wind blows, though. In the afternoons and evenings, it can get up to about 20 miles per hour, as if it’s trying to rip the hair off your head. You should also see the look of the moon when it starts to rise. Everything in this house is wood and taxidermy and long-useless antiques— razors, guns, snowshoes, a broken typewriter. Every chair creaks. Every surface has antlers. Combined with the landscape, there’s no escaping it. Face it, honey. You’re lonesome. And I wish you could feel this kind of lonesome, too, just so I could be sure that you know what I’m talking about.

What do I say about Fuzzy? I’ve been trying to write something about this song for the better part of a year, now, but the time never seemed right. The moments happening in my life, the walks through the city and the endless hours in my bedroom, were inadequate when it came to describing the song. It felt sacrilegious to try and force the smallness of my life on Fuzzy. Fuzzy is too big for that, you know? There’s space in it, the same way there’s space out here— a sort of hollowness, an awareness of the boundaries. It’s hard to describe. The feeling is, frankly, a little fuzzy around the edges, hard to grasp.

The first Grant Lee Buffalo song I ever heard was also on a cassette tape, funnily enough— Mockingbirds was on a mix my father made back in the 1990s, titled “The Essentials”², and it absolutely was essential. I can’t begin to describe how many times I listened to that tape in my early teens. Even now, I have the tracklist memorized. Mockingbirds was one of my favorite songs on Side A, along with Haven’t We Lost Enough? by Crosby, Stills & Nash, the Smashing Pumpkins’ cover of Landslide, and Tangerine by Led Zeppelin. Side B opened on Supersonic by Oasis, which was hard to beat, but I loved Mockingbirds. It was one of my first introductions to music that was sad without feeling saccharine or overdone. There was a quietness to it that resonated with me. I’ve never felt loud; it only made sense that my sadness shouldn’t be loud, either. It cohered in a way things rarely do.

In my mind, Fuzzy exists as an inverse of Fast Car by Tracy Chapman, for lack of a better description. Fast Car feels like very briefly getting out of your hometown, highway wind in your hair as you drive fast at night— on the opposite end of the spectrum, Fuzzy feels like driving back into your hometown, full of memories and familiar faces and your childhood home, and knowing that you’ll just be leaving again soon. Your world shrinks, despite the interstate and the trains and the cars that make it bigger. You need something to place your faith in, something to replace the fear. You sink back into the comfort of a familiar hurt because there isn’t anything else to do. You’ve been lied to. You’ve lied, too. Everything has a backdrop of ambiguity; nothing is clear cut. It’s all fuzzy.

I’m in the wind, now. I’m in the cricket howl. My mother sometimes brings me along for nighttime drives— we go down the back roads alongside the river, windows down, heading nowhere in particular. She says she’s trying to adjust me to the pain. I don’t mind. It’s a familiar hurt. Besides, you know I’m good with pain. The headlights roam over the sage, looking for something out of reach. Back on the porch— alone on the porch, except for the moon— I get lonesome again. I’m always a bit lonesome, but now I’m rolling in it. The black night reaches for me. It’s all fuzzy again. I’m fuzzy.

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FIVE. RAZOR LOVE BY NEIL YOUNG.

I don’t believe in cinematicality. Haven’t since I was a kid. I had a nightmare about getting my face ripped off when I was six or seven years old, and after suddenly gaining control of my dream and making it end in a much less gory way, I got out of bed almost a dozen times saying, “now that was what I call a dream!” over and over because I saw it in a movie and no, the first eleven times I did it weren’t good enough. They weren’t movie quality. The twelfth time wasn’t good enough, either, but I had given up by that point. And of course there are ecstatic moments of symmetry where everything feels perfect and beautiful. Of course there are. I just don’t think it’s worth trying to imagine they’re being filmed, because what makes those moments so good is that they’re happening inside me.

You point a camera at the world and the entire world goes flat— it’s not the camera’s fault, that’s just what the world looks like. The richness of color and the softness and the brutal slaps of emotion that are connected to it come from inside. If you somehow translated all of that into a different medium, if you let other people into your eyes, they still wouldn’t see what you’re seeing because now their eyes are in the way. But let me try anyway.

I’ve been sitting on the patio for hours, now. I don’t know what time it is. The potbelly of the sun makes me think it’s afternoon. The wind, as always, is blowing like it’s trying to knock me over— miles of hot force, hitting my face and pulling my hair and vying for my headphones. Sagebrush, distant pines, pale dust, juniper, sweetgrass. I’m looking at the ground. I’m counting to forty with my finger on the rewind button. It is a hideously perfect feeling. I can’t decide if this is the beginning or the end of the movie.

Razor Love is the second-to-last track on Neil Young’s album Silver & Gold (2000), but I know it as the final track on side A of a mixtape I made the morning before leaving town. It takes almost exactly forty seconds to rewind through the entirety of Razor Love on my Walkman, give or take a few seconds for human error. I know how long it takes to get back to the beginning of the song because that’s all I’ve been doing. Song ends. Hit the rewind button. Wait forty seconds. Hit play. Most of the time, I get the last few strains of the Leonard Cohen song before it, but soon enough— I got to bet that your old man became fascinated with his own plan, Neil says, and I believe him. That’s important, you know. You have to believe the singer or it’s just not a good song. And belief has nothing to do with truth, because only one of those things is necessary.

So I’m on the patio in the wild wind and the sun, head down, jean shorts on, headphones in, hands pressed over my ears so I can hear the music without so much interference from the air. I’ve been using bandanas as shirts lately— it’s interesting to have so much flesh exposed without being in a bikini top. The dog is lying in my shadow, using me as a shelter from the wind. If I look up, the little valley below me is practically glowing. It’s hard not to believe that the sun works differently out here; you can get to thinking that the light ignores physics, that it pools and drags itself around the hills like fabric. It’s the blue-dark I mentioned earlier. It’s the congregation. Forty seconds on rewind. I got to bet that your old man…

I guess it’s about fear. My dislike of cinematic moments, mainly, but also the song. The thing about a perfect moment is that it will inevitably end, and then things will go back to being much less satisfactory. The thing about love is that sometimes, it’s got a sharp edge to it. Same thing with faith. Despite this, perfect moments will happen, love is inevitable, and faith is unavoidable. These things come without you asking. They’ll roll you over, if you let them. I feel rolled over. I feel rolled over because I really like it out here— the smell of the air, the heat, the solitude— and every time I think about that, I remember that I’ll be leaving here eventually. All things change; all life is transient. You never step in the same river twice. It’s a terrible thing for someone who likes to return to places. Forty seconds. Guitar, piano, shaker, drums, harmonica. I got to bet that your old man…

There’s a simple solution to all of this, obviously, which is to stop anticipating pain. That would also solve the crux of the issue in Razor Love— even though the narrator deeply loves this person and enjoys their company, they keep looking for imaginary evils within the relationship. It’s the razor, you know? Despite the faith, despite how the subject of the song continuously makes the narrator’s day, the narrator keeps dragging them down with things they can’t help but see. If it’s happened before, what’s stopping it from happening again? Can I stop it from happening if I see it coming? Will it save me this time?

I don’t fucking know. It’s sunny outside. I’m getting manhandled by the wind. I let my mind go back into my Walkman, back to Neil Young. I can anticipate pain later. For now, I’ve resolved to just enjoy it. The sky is so open that it looks like a lid. Barrenness is a cultural concept; there are millions and millions of things in the nothing out there, a dozen microcosms of vibrancy. Two swallows chase each other past my head. Crickets— massive ones, so big you think they’re a lizard or something at first glance— skate by. I’ll need to make dinner soon, but again, that’s something for later. I’ll indulge in a little cinema. Forty seconds. Cue the music. I got to bet that your old man…

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BONUS TRACK. RETURN OF THE GRIEVOUS ANGEL BY LUCINDA WILLIAMS AND DAVID CROSBY.

I can’t make claims for California. When I say I grew up in the west, California is included in that, but it’s not mine. Sometimes you can be somewhere without it actually being yours, you know? I have little heart-spots like that all over the place. But California was never mine— California, for me, was less of a place to live and more of a place to stay. Vacations, highways, swimming pools were scattered like marbles across it. Everyone I knew who was either from California or lived in California always seemed to be going somewhere else. And there’s a lot of places in California that I love dearly, but I just didn’t have enough staying power to feel like part of it could ever be mine. The history of California was so massive, so overpowering, that it almost tipped over into being ahistorical; everything was inconsequential compared to the millions of years that came before. The ponderosa pines and the desert ate up whatever presence I left behind me. It swallowed us all.

Summers spent on the coast occasionally gravitated inwards, away from the sea— into Palm Springs, into the Mojave Desert— and, naturally, we found ourselves at Joshua Tree over and over again. It really is beautiful out there. I used to spend hours as a kid scrambling up rock formations, trying to get as close to the sky as possible.

The short of it is that my family almost stayed at the Joshua Tree Inn. We had been on the road for a while. My parents wanted showers and a real bed, and my sibling and I certainly weren’t going to complain. For obvious reasons, the prices were exorbitantly high— people are willing to pay a lot to stay at the motel where Gram Parsons died— so we decided against it and camped instead. But we were so close to it. We stood outside the room where he overdosed; we were mere feet away from the place he took his last breath. I didn’t know who Gram Parsons was back then and I didn’t get why there was a room named after him. Neither of my parents gave a shit, so they never told me. I don’t even know if they know that Gram Parsons exists. We very briefly crossed paths with the ghost of his life and then we left, and that was the end of the story. I do remember how wide the sky was that night, though. Now, looking back, it seems indicative of something. Like a divine sign.

But the original Gram Parsons version of Return of the Grievous Angel is not the version I have on tape. Before I found a cable that could connect my phone or computer to my stereo, which has the tape recording function, I could only rip music from the CDs I had in my room. One of these CDs was Return of the Grievous Angel: A Tribute to Gram Parsons³, a 1999 tribute album compiled by Emmylou Harris and featuring some of the most prominent rock and country acts of the decade, including, of course, Lucinda Williams and David Crosby.

The Williams/Crosby version of Grievous Angel is definitely on the list of covers that I like more than the originals. And don’t get me wrong, I love the original, but the Williams/Crosby version plays with phrasing and composition in a very beautiful way. It’s a lot more acoustic than the original, leaning more into alternative rock than country— there’s still plenty of lap steel guitar and country-typical rhythms, but the production is a lot more sparse, allowing some space to come between the vocals and the instruments.

Despite describing a semi-observational pilgrimage across the United States, Grievous Angel is, at its core, a love song. The narrator went down 20,000 roads and all of them led them back home to their lover. When we add the rawness and power of Williams’ voice into the mix, especially spotlighted the way it is, it gives the song a gravitas it didn’t previously have. Belief is everything, and if you hear Lucinda Williams say that she saw her devil and her deep blue sea, you fucking believe her. Crosby plays more of a supporting role vocally, but it works well. He knows when to pull back and when to push forward. Their modernization of a classic is an incredible homage without being repetitive; this is important, because there’s no point to covering a song if you’re just duplicating the original. And the Williams/Crosby version of Grievous Angel is anything but repetitive.

I’m not in California right now, but the area reminds me of the Inland Empire— the rolling hills, the scrub brush, the dryness. There’s some major differences, obviously, but you can see tumbleweeds rolling across train tracks in both places. You can see the boot print of the West across the neck of everything.

There is no love lost between me and this country. Ever since I had the mental capacity to be politically aware, my opinion of the USA has slipped from negative-neutral to the fervent wish that this horrific system collapses as soon as possible. I hate it. I hate it and I’m never going to leave, because I can’t. My family has been on this land for a long, long time. There is nowhere else for me to go. There is no place for me outside of this one. The mountains and the oceans and the endless waves of grain are what I was raised in, and I’ll probably die in them, too— not necessarily in a motel outside Joshua Tree National Park, like Gram Parsons, but somewhere I can see a sky I recognize. But that’s inconsequential, for now. I’m not planning on dying anytime soon. All I know is that every time I leave, every road I take brings me right back here.

Damn my devil. Damn my deep blue sea. I come home every single time.

1. Which you can listen to in its entirety here.

2. Highly recommend it— free PDF here.

3. I can’t find a playlist of the songs, but here’s the tracklist.