Imaginary Gardens (with Real Toads)

”Fisher King” by Carrie Newcomer, on “The Gathering Of Spirits.”

[Embedded mp3 above. If it’s not showing up on your feed/reader, go to the original post.]

I have a general appreciation for songs that build on mythology, incorporating archetypal characters in way that is relevant and personal. Some add a new perspective to ancient tales by contemporarizing them, while others conversely use the archetype to provide another way of thinking about a personal or contemporary emotion or situation, making it seem more universal. While many contemporary singer-songwriters look to the Greeks for their mythology (Devon Sproule’s “Tristan and Isolde,” Danny Schmidt’s “Tales of Sweet Odysseus,” Anaïs Mitchell’s “Hades & Persephone,” Jennie Avila’s “Persephone,” The Kennedys’ “Feather in the Flame,” the list goes on), and even those who draw on the Arthurian legends usually dwell on more central characters (notably Dave Carter’s “Lancelot” and “Merlin’s Lament”), Carrie Newcomer’s “Fisher King” focuses on a fairly minor Arthurian character, the Fisher King. (Carrie Newcomer and T.S. Eliot, right?)

First, a bit of artistic appreciation. The melody is gorgeous, and CN’s voice is expressive and rich. The music is intimately woven with the subject matter, from the meditative finger-picking to the subtle shifts: the dynamic rises and falls, the melodically simpler rippling bridge followed bt a split second of silence before plunging into the next verse. Exquisite.

There is just enough in the song to ground it in the Arthurian legend. The grail appears in the chorus, and the first verse is solidly Arthurian, presumably speaking to Percival: “Are you the one that’s common born, are you a fool in many ways / Have you searched half of your life, looking for some Holy Grail? / Did you see it in a dream, a vision once when you were young? / Does the circle lead you back, to the place where you begun.” But note the modifer “some,” not “the.” And that last line sounds more Sufi than Christian (though someone with more knowledge about the Arthurian legend, or Christian mysticism in general, can feel free to dispute me on that).

Unsurprisingly, then, after the first verse, the song blossoms into the more spiritually universal. Here is the third verse:

Are you the pilgrim on the road, are you the hermit in the wood
Have you followed what you know, what you want, or what you should
Have you learned a thing or two, have you wondered at the time?
In the dark night of the soul, am I the one you thought you’d find?

Without using any specific references, Newcomer firmly roots this verse in semi-universal imagery of spiritual paths. The choice of the definite article in the first two lines (“the pilgrim,” “the hermit”) underline this: she’s not asking if you are a pilgrim or if you are a hermit; she’s asking “which archetype are you?” Aren’t two of the most commom spiritual figures, from Christianity to Buddhism, the one traveling to a sacred space and the one residing alone in a sacred space (especially in nature), and more broadly, aren’t movement and statis the two basic options? Similarly, in a single line (“Have you followed…”), she gracefully divides our fundamental motivations into three basic possiblities. She does use one specific reference, though, which is also worth mentioning: she incorporates Saint John of the Cross’s phrase “the dark night of the soul.” Her use of these words taps a ready-made metaphor, expands it, and also adds another strain of medieval Catholic mysticism, which is appropriate enough. (She’s especially good at weaving in those hard-hitting mystic lines; another song on the same album borrows from Rumi, reminding us that “The wisest say there’s a thousand ways to kneel and kiss the ground.”)

This is getting long, but I wanted to say just a bit about the bridge and last verse:

Grace and laughter, ever after
Sorrow folds her hands together
Was it all and did you mean it
In the dark you’ve always seen a
Bright and shining true idea

I am the wound that will not heal, I am the song you cannot sing
I am an endless restless ache, I am I am the Fisher King
And all that I can ask of you is do what small good that you can
Speak the words I long to hear, and meet me where I am

The bridge is especially lovely in its traditional poetic features, despite its lack of end rhymes. It is very clean metrically: each line has eight syllables divided into four Trochees (i.e., four sets of a strong beat followed by a weak beat). There’s personification (“Sorrow folds her hands together”). There is internal rhyme (laughter/after, mean/seen) and assonance (bright/shining/idea, which anticipates all of the “I”s in the next two lines).

These verses return us back to imagery of the Fisher King specifically: by name, by reference to his “wound that will not heal” (his distinguishing feature), and “speak the words I long to hear” (which works more broadly but presumably refers to the King’s inability to be healed until the Grail seeker asks what ails him). Yet it remains metaphorical until the last phrase: “I am I am the Fisher King.” These metaphors, all getting at the same idea, make that last phrase all the more powerful. The repetition of “I am” is both rhythmically necessary and adds the idea that the speaker has run out of metaphors, leaving no other way left to describe himself but the simple declaration, which – paradoxically – potentially adds more shades of meaning than the metaphors, at least to the listener who is familiar with the myth.

“Away from the Lights” by Annie Gallup, from “Half of My Crime”

“Away from the Lights” is a prime example of a poem for which the words on the page do not begin to capture its flavor. It’s all about Annie Gallup’s delivery: her pacing, her intimate and seductive tone. Before hearing this song, I had no idea what a stunning word “participatory” was, especially when whispered.

Given that, I’ll just say a few words about the lyrics. It begins: “Maybe you were riding through small towns in the backroads of East Texas under a full moon in a derelict Cutlass Supreme.” In just one line, four prepositional phrases, she has nailed the setting, even specifying the illumination. The choice of the second person perspective is an uncommon one, especially coupled with “maybe.” The result is that the song starts in a sort of second-person ambivalent imperfect, which sets the song’s tone.

As you listen, here are some of my favorite lines:
“and the woman behind the wheel was not a mysterious woman, but she had a mystery about her that meant something to you on a cellular level, in a participatory way.” “but the moment already has a momentum of its own that you don’t understand, so instead you just watch her driving, cotton dress pale in the x-ray dashboard light.” “over and over until it becomes an idiomatic phrase in an archaic language without context or meaning, so somehow comforting like a refrain.”