Songs of Renown: Townes Van Zandt- high, low and in-between

 

High, low and in-between

Townes Van Zandt

 

Come from a long line
High, low and in between, same as you
Hills of golden, hails of poison
Time's thrown me through

And I believe I've come to learn
That turning 'round is to become confusion
 And the gold's no good for spending
And the poison's hungry waiting

What can you leave behind
When you're flying lightning fast and all alone?
Only a trace, my friend
Spirit of motion born and direction grown

The trace it will not fade in frozen skies
And your journey will be
And if a shadow don't seem much company
But who said it would be?

 

There is the highway
And the home-made lovin' kind, the highway's mine
And us ramblers will get the travelin' done
You fathers build with stones that stand and shine

Heaven's where you find it
And you can't take too much with you
 But daddy, don't you listen
It's just this highway talkin'

 

All things that are alive
Are brothers in the soil and in the sky
And I believe it with my blood, if not my eyes
I don't know why we can't be brothers here,
I know we should be
Answers don't seem easy
and I'm wondering if they could be

 

 

The Texan singer-songwriter Townes Van Zandt, who died in 1997 aged just 52 after a long struggle with mental illness and addiction, is considered by many  to be one of the finest contemporary Aamerican songwriters.

Townes Van Zandt is revered and admired by musicians and musical aficionados alike as one of the most evocative lyricists in contemporary music. 

Van Zandt wrote songs of immense beauty, sadness, alienation and despair and pathos, many of which draw from his conscious and unconscious experience and from historical and personal events. 

There is a timeless, poetic and deeply philosophical quality to his lyrics which stand as poetry first, then as music.  For Van Zandt it was essential that songs work as poetry first and he worked tirelessly to craft his song lyrics.

The song High, low and in-between was the final track on his early 70's album of the same name.

Song of Renown: Townes Van Zandt The Catfish Song

"I'll kindle my fires with the words I can't send you/ And the roads I can't follow and the songs I can't sing/ I'll wander alone on the sleighbells of winter/ With the stars for a diamond and the world for a ring"  

Townes Van Zandt ,The Catfish Song

The Texan singer-songwriter Townes Van Zandt, who died in 1997 aged just 52 after a long struggle with mental illness and addiction, is considered by many (me included) to be one of the finest contemporary songwriters.

Despite not being well known, Townes Van Zandt is revered and admired by musicians and musical aficionados alike as one of the most evocative lyricists in contemporary music. 

Van Zandt wrote songs of immense beauty, sadness and pathos, many of which draw from his conscious and unconscious experience and from historical and personal events. 

He wrote songs of tragedy and sadness, like Marie, perhaps the finest song ever written about homelessness and poverty, and songs of despair and sorrow in the face of the pain and struggle of daily life, such as A Song For (which mentions my home town Perth, Australia)

He also wrote songs that drew on his own struggle with mental illness and addiction, such as Sanitarium Blues, The Rake and The Hole.

 Van Zandt also wrote beautiful and life affirming songs of daily life, of love, of the cycles of nature and the landscape and environment, and of his reflections on the experiences of being human.

There is a timeless, poetic and deeply philosophical quality to his lyrics which stand as poetry first, then as music. For Van Zandt it was essential that songs work as poetry first and he worked tirelessly to craft his song lyrics.

The Catfish Song is the final track on Van Zandt's 1987 album At My Window. The album was Townes Van Zandt's first studio album in 9 years and is full of magnificent songs of love, loss, grief, the beauty of daily life and the struggles of living. This includes Songs like Snowin on Raton (which has featured on this blog before), At My Window and For the Sake of the Song.

But for me, The Catfish Song is the highlight of the album and ranks in the my top ten Van Zandt songs of all time.

Van Zandt's world weary spoken singing style is accompanied by the evocative gospel style piano of renowned jazz and country pianist Charlie Cochran. It is a magnificent piece of instrumental support; a performance of haunting intensity and profound humanity. 

The Catfish Song
Townes Van Zandt 

Down at the bottom of that dirty old river

 Down where the reeds and the catfish play 

There lies a dream as soft as the water 

There lies a bluebird that's flown a way

Well to meet is like springtime, to love's like the summer 

Her brown eyes shown for nobody but me

In autumn forever the fool come a-fallin' 

And the rain turned to freezing inside of me 

I'll kindle my fires with the words 

I can't send you 

And the roads I can't follow 

and the songs I can't sing 

I'll wander alone on the sleighbells of winter 

With the stars for a diamond and the world for a ring 

Well all you young ladies who dream of tomorrow 

While you're listening these words will I say: 

Cling to today with its joy and its sorrow 

You'll need all your memories when youth melts away

Well the angel of springtime he rides down the south wind

The angel of summer, he does just the same

The angel of autumn, she's blue and she's golden

And the angel of winter won't remember your name

Down at the bottom of that dirty old river 

Down where the reeds and the catfish play 

There lies a dream as soft as the water 

There lies a bluebird that's flown away 

Oh there lies a bluebird that's flown away

The evocative power of song and lyric: Eliza Gilkyson's "Midnight on Raton"

Its Snowin on Raton
come morning I'll be through these hills and gone...

Bid the years good-bye you cannot still them
You cannot turn the circles of the sun
You cannot count the miles till you feel them
and you cannot hold a lover that is gone

Tomorrow the mountains will be sleeping
Silently the blanket green and blue
All that I shall hear the silence they are keeping
I’ll bring all their promises to you
Townes Van Zandt
Snowin on Raton

The Raton Pass is a narrow mountain pass along the Colorado- New Mexico border in the USA. The Pass provides a way through the Sangre de Christo Mountains which form a formidable barrier between the eastern US states and Mexico, Arizona and California.

The Raton Pass plays a prominent part in US history and iconography. It was the highest point along the Santa Fe Trail  which was the path used by settlers travelling westward during the colonization of the American West in the 19th century. 

The Raton Pass was used by invading armies during the US Civil war and the various US-Mexican wars  It was also the primary route for the railways as they moved westward after the US Civil War.
 
The Raton Pass features in songs by two of my favourite singer songwriters from the southwest states of the USA- Eliza Gilkyson and Townes Van Zandt (Articles about Van Zandt appear regularly on this blog).

Both Gilkinson and Van Zandt use the Raton Pass as a metaphor and analogy for posing deeper existential questions, whilst drawing on personal touches and experiences from their own life.

Eliza Gilkyson's song Midnite on Raton features on her most recent CD Roses at the End of Time. It is a beatifully atmospheric song, written while staying overnight in a budget motel on the outskirts of Raton. Like many of her songs Midnite on Raton bridges both the personal and the political. The song echoes with fragments, observations and experiences from her daily life, while raising important socio-political issues.

Gilkinson's song is also a tribute to the memory of Texan singer songwriter Townes Van Zandt, whose own song Snowin on Raton is one of his most revered.  Van Zandt who moved between Texas and Colorado regularly travelled through the Raton Pass as it is the shortest route between Texas and Colorado.

In his biography of Townes Van Zandt Robert Earl Hardey rates Snowin on Raton as one of Van Zandt's  most moving and most haunting statements about resignation and acceptance at the end of life's journey. Hardey writes that Van Zandt's song is profoundly poetic, posing the question- when the beauty of life and love are gone, will memory sustain us? 

Here is a link to the You Tube clip of Eliza Gilkyson's performing her song live.

“Midnight on Raton”
Words and music Eliza Gilkyson
GilkySongs BMI 2010

Sitting in a motel on the outskirts of Raton
How the years have flown
Since Townes passed through these hills alone
I got someone who loves me
But it’s too late to phone
I wanna ride this road forever
And I’m dying to go home

Out there on the interstate the hurryin’ of the cars
High above room 28 the swirling of the stars
And I draw the vinyl curtains like a veil across my skin
I turn the bedside lamp down
And I let my shadows in

Cause I feel so full and so empty handed
In a world so cruel I don’t think I understand it
Are we still the fools
Who don’t know right from wrong
Here at midnight on Raton?

I find a crumpled napkin and I fumble for a pen
Chase a fleeting moment like it was my long lost friend
And I curl up ‘neath the blankets and dream until the dawn
But come morning I’ll be through these hills and gone
Come morning I’ll be through these hills and gone

 

Love songs by the late and great Townes Van Zandt:

Lovers Lullaby
by Townes Van Zandt

Dreams that have flown down the hall
tears that were sown on despair
summer's turned fall
it don't matter at all
when I wake and find you lying there
Sweet silence and soft auburn hair

Blues gonna dance through the sky
time's gonna roll soft as rain
sigh after sigh is gonna pass by and by
ah love's gonna fly on the wind
when I gaze into your brown eyes again

All the things I've seen
and the places that I've been
don't mean a thing since I found you
all that matters now
since I've won your love somehow
are these plans I keep makin'
not to lose you

So sleep till the moon slips away
I'm hopin' all you're dreamin' comes true
when you rise with the day
I might not have too much to say
but you know that doesn't mean
that I don't love you
ah you know that doesn't mean
that I don't love you

All the things I've seen
and the places that I've been
don't mean a thing since I found you
all that matters now
since I've won your love somehow
are these plans I keep makin'
not to lose you

Dreams that have flown down the hall
tears that were sown on despair
summer's turned fall
it don't matter at all
when I wake and find you lying there
Sweet silence and soft auburn hair
Sweet silence and soft auburn hair

Songs that work as poetry: the genius of Townes Van Zandt

The music of Townes Van Zandt has featured on this blog before (here and here). For me Townes Van Zandt is along with Bob Dylan the finest American male singer songwriters of the last 4 decades.

But this piece from the music blog Just a Song is one of the best pieces I have read about Van Zandt's musical gift. It focuses on just one song, Rake from his 1971 album Delta Momma's Blues.

The following extract is from the piece on Just a Song:

"The song's almost an Old Testament parable. A powerful and timeless tale. A story that's impacted down the ages and that shall eternally impact. There will always be wantonness and there will always always be a Prodigal Son!

The lyrics are spiked throughout with Townes' trademark melancholia. A melancholia that emanated from Van Zandt's pained troubled soul. An essential and undeniable part of his essence, of his songwriting. Never maudlin though. Never false. On the contrary, immensely powerful, impactful, unforgettable.

A melancholia of the type described by John Donne that "leaves behind a kind of sorrowing to the mind." A type that's tortured many other great musical artists in recent times, such as Nick Drake, Kurt Cobain and Elliot Smith - all who inevitably sadly succumbed to it's incomprehensible force. A type we still see in the work of artists such as Shane Mac Gowan, Leonard Cohen, and Tom Waits.

All songwriters compelled to express their inner pain through art, perhaps in order to thereby attain some modicum of relief. All songwriters whose work is laden with what Federico García Lorca called Duende.

What Lorca meant by that was true soul, a raw inherent sadness, a heightened awareness of death. An inherent quality of art, most usually musical art, that is most clearly found in, for example, the old traditional music of Portugal and in ancient Irish traditional music - particularly in the "Sean Nos" keening songs.

Federico García Lorca in his essay "Play and Theory of the Duende" wrote; "Duende, then, is a power, not a work. It is a struggle, not a thought. I have heard an old maestro of the guitar say, 'The duende is not in the throat; the duende climbs up inside you, from the soles of the feet.' Meaning this: it is not a question of ability, but of true, living style, of blood, of the most ancient culture, of spontaneous creation."

Lorca also wrote "This ‘mysterious power which everyone senses and no philosopher explains' is, in sum, the spirit of the earth, the same duende that scorched the heart of Nietzsche, who searched in vain for its external forms on the Rialto Bridge and in the music of Bizet, without knowing that the duende he was pursuing had leaped straight from the Greek mysteries to the dancers of Cadiz or the beheaded, Dionysian scream of Silverio's siguiriya ..... Duende brings to old planes unknown feelings of freshness, with the quality of something newly created, like a miracle, and it produces an almost religious enthusiasm."

Rake
By Townes Van Zandt

I used to wake and run with the moon
I lived like a rake and a young man
I covered my lovers with flowers and wounds
my laughter the devil would frighten
The sun would come up and beat me back down
but every cruel day had its nightfall
I'd welcome the stars with wine and guitars
full of fire and forgetful

My body was sharp, the dark air clean
and outrage my joyful companion
whisperin' women how sweet they did seem
kneelin' for me to command them
And time was like water, but I was the sea
And I'd never noticed it passin'
except for the turnin' of night into day
and the turnin' of day into cursin'

You look at me now, and don't think I don't know
what all of your eyes are a sayin'
Does he want us to believe these ravings and lies
they're just tricks that his brains been a playin'?
A lover of women he can't hardly stand,
he trembles, he's bent and he's broken
I've fallen, it's true, but I say unto you
hold your tongues until after I've spoken

I was takin' my pride in the pleasures I'd known
I laughed and thought I'd be forgiven
but my laughter turned 'round, eyes blazing and
said "my friend, we're holdin' a wedding"
I buried my face but it spoke once again
It's the night to the day that we're a bindin'
and now the dark air is like fire on my skin
and even the moonlight is blinding

Popular posts from 2010: Townes Van Zandt

During 2011 I plan to republish some of the more popular and/or topical pieces previously published on the blog. The blog piece below on the legendary Texan singer songwriter Townes Van Zandt appeared in July 2010 and was one of the most viewed pieces in 2010. Van Zandt is not well known as a musician, but for many musical aficionados he is considered among the finest singer songwriters in the American musical tradition.

Here is a link to another piece on Townes Van Zandt which appeared on the blog but was viewed far less frequently than the one reprinted below. In that piece I cite an article which drew on the concept of Duende, coined by the Spanish poet Federico Garcia Lorca to explain the power of Van Zandt's songs. In Lorca's terms duende refers to a raw inherent sadness and a heightened awareness of death, that is the defining quality of great musical art.

image and lyrics courtesy of www.townesvanzandt.com

"Days full of rain
Sky coming down again
I get so tired of these same old blues
Same old song
Babe it won't be long
till I'll be tieing on my flyin' shoes"

The Texan singer-songwriter Townes Van Zandt, who died in 1997 aged just 52 after a long struggle with mental illness and addiction, is considered by many (me included) to be one of the finest contemporary songwriters.

Despite not being well known, Townes Van Zandt is revered and admired by musicians and musical aficionados alike.

He wrote songs of such immense beauty, sadness and pathos and his songs draw from both conscious and unconscious experience and from historical and personal events. He could write songs of tragedy and sadness, like Marie, perhaps the finest song ever written about homelessness and poverty, and songs of despair and sorrow in the face of the pain and struggle of daily life, such as A Song For (which mentions my home town Perth, Australia)

He also wrote many songs that drew on his own struggle with mental illness and addiction, such as Sanitarium Blues, The Rake and The Hole.

But Townes Van Zandt also write beautiful and life affirming songs of daily life, of love, of the cycles of nature and the landscape and environment, and of his reflections on the experiences of being human.

Townes Van Zandt was one of the most evocative lyricists in contemporary music. His skill as a lyricist is rivaled only by Bob Dylan. There is a timeless poetic and deeply philosophical quality to his lyrics. His lyrics stand as poetry first, then as music. For Townes Van Zandt it was essential that songs worked as poetry first and he worked tirelessly to craft his song lyrics.

Van Zandt wrote so many fine songs. Other than Bob Dylan I know no other contemporary singer songwriter who composed so many magnificent and profound songs.

I think his finest song and one of the great songs of all time is his song Flyin Shoes. Van Zandt wrote the song about a Confederate soldier dying on the battlefield during the US Civil War Battle of Franklin. At the time he wrote the song, Van Zandt was living on a farm outside Nashville where the Battle of Franklin had been fought and he claimed that there were still signs of the battle on the farm. The song reflects his ruminations about the landscape, the battle and a dying soldier.

Lyle Lovett regularly covers the song and you can hear his live version and recorded version.

For those interested in knowing more about Townes Van Zandt there is an outstanding documentary Be Here to Love Me and a number of books, including A Deeper Blue: The Life and Music of Townes Van Zandt, as well as various websites.

Van Zandt was a compelling and charismatic, but erratic live performer, but when "on song" he could deliver performances of immense power. Here is a link to a live performance recorded 2 years before he died. Powerful stuff. Around 43 minutes into the You Tube concert clip he explains how the song Flyin' Shoes came about and then delivers a powerful live performance.

"Duende" and the music of Townes Van Zandt

Since writing the previous blog piece on the music of Townes Van Zandt a couple of additional things have turned up.

I came across this piece on Townes Van Zandt on the excellent Just a Song blog site. Writing about Townes's song The Rake the author writes this:

"The lyrics are spiked throughout with Townes' trademark melancholia. A melancholia that emanated from Van Zandt's pained troubled soul. An essential and undeniable part of his essence, of his songwriting. Never maudlin though. Never false. On the contrary, immensely powerful, impactful, unforgettable."

Very well put. The writer goes on to use the concept of "Duende", coined by the Spanish poet Federico Garcia Lorca, to understand Townes's work. As defined by Lorca "Duende" refers to a raw inherent sadness and a heightened awareness of death, that is the defining quality of great musical art.

As the blog writer points out:

"The music of Townes has duende in spades. It climbs up from deep inside him, from the soles of his feet to the tip of his skull."

This week ABC Radio National's Daily Planet program features a new album of Townes Van Zandt songs recorded by unknown artists titled Introducing Townes Van Zandt via the Great Unknown. Here is a link to the Project and the CD. The Daily Planet also features songs from Steve Earle's latest CD Townes, in which he interprets some of his favourite Townes Van Zandt songs.

Currently listening to: Townes Van Zandt

image courtesy of www.townesvanzandt.com

"Days full of rain
Sky coming down again
I get so tired of these same old blues
Same old song
Babe it won't be long
till I'll be tieing on my flyin' shoes"

The Texan singer-songwriter Townes Van Zandt, who died in 1997 aged just 52 after a long struggle with mental illness and addiction, is considered by many (me included) to be one of the finest contemporary songwriters.

Despite not being well known, Townes Van Zandt is revered and admired by musicians and musical aficionados alike.

He wrote songs of such immense beauty, sadness and pathos and his songs draw from both conscious and unconscious experience and from historical and personal events. He could write songs of tragedy and sadness, like Marie, perhaps the finest song ever written about homelessness and poverty, and songs of despair and sorrow in the face of the pain and struggle of daily life, such as A Song For (which mentions my home town Perth, Australia)

He also wrote many songs that drew on his own struggle with mental illness and addiction, such as Sanitarium Blues, The Rake and The Hole.

But Townes Van Zandt also write beautiful and life affirming songs of daily life, of love, of the cycles of nature and the landscape and environment, and of his reflections on the experiences of being human.

Townes Van Zandt was one of the most evocative lyricists in contemporary music. His skill as a lyricist is rivaled only by Bob Dylan. There is a timeless poetic and deeply philosophical quality to his lyrics. His lyrics stand as poetry first, then as music. For Townes Van Zandt it was essential that songs worked as poetry first and he worked tirelessly to craft his song lyrics.

Van Zandt wrote so many fine songs. Other than Bob Dylan I know no other contemporary singer songwriter who composed so many magnificent and profound songs.

I think his finest song and one of the great songs of all time is his song Flyin Shoes. Van Zandt wrote the song about a Confederate soldier dying on the battlefield during the US Civil War Battle of Franklin. At the time he wrote the song, Van Zandt was living on a farm outside Nashville where the Battle of Franklin had been fought and he claimed that there were still signs of the battle on the farm. The song reflects his ruminations about the landscape, the battle and a dying soldier.

Lyle Lovett regularly covers the song and you can hear his live version and recorded version.

For those interested in knowing more about Townes Van Zandt there is an outstanding documentary Be Here to Love Me and a number of books, including A Deeper Blue: The Life and Music of Townes Van Zandt, as well as various websites.

Van Zandt was a compelling and charismatic, but erratic live performer, but when "on song" he could deliver performances of immense power. Here is a link to a live performance recorded 2 years before he died. Powerful stuff. Around 43 minutes into the You Tube concert clip he explains how the song Flyin' Shoes came about and then delivers a powerful live performance.