Tim Buckley and Leatherface Sunday, September 07, 2003

Quote of the day, from one of my favorite songwriters of the last decade, Jim White:

The burden of love is the fuel of bad grammar
You stutter and stammer
What a bitch to convey

The first line is what grabs me, but I suppose you need the rest of it for context. This from a haunting song off his most recent record, "No Such Place." Everything he's done is worth a listen; he's a singular voice in "alt-country"--so far afield, in fact, that I'm not sure he belongs in the category at all. Unlike the rest of the crowd, he doesn't sound like an urban neurotic with a dusty twang. (All these guys with stubble singing about drinkin' whiskey and moanin' cause their girls done left them--please. And all those fractured girls who sing like Lucinda...) Jim has a high, thin, haunted voice, and he uses it to tell spooky stories--like waking up in a cabin in the woods at 3 a.m. because you think you've heard something crunching through the woods. Imagine Flannery O'Connor writing lyrics for Tom Waits.

Not that he's singing the Ballad of Camp Crystal Lake every time out. But he uses the same ghostly quality in his love songs to keep them from lurching into boozy self-pity. It's something like the Devo cover of "I Can't Get No Satisfaction"; by the time they recorded it the original version sounded so self-satisfied the point of the song was lost. So they turned it into a spiky, clangy robot anthem--and found the truth of it again. (This observation stolen from liner notes someplace.) Similarly, the country lamenting song has become something of a cliche at this point. When Hank Williams sang "I'm so lonesome I could cry," that kind of frank howling loss was new to popular song. After the twenty zillionth go-round, you roll your eyes. Jim White finds a way to make loss sound fresh; he finds the spectre of love. Here's a taste:

Well, I was shacked up down in Mobile with a girl from New York City
She woke me up one night to tell me that we weren't alone
She said she saw the ghost of a woman staring at me
I told her not to worry, but in the morning when I woke up, she was gone

So I headed on to Florida where I tangled with some sailors
And as I lay bloody on the wharf, I cursed the ship they sailed on
Wouldn't you know, twenty four hours later that ship sank into the ocean...
disappearing like an unwanted memory beneath the waves

I guess it's cause, still waters run, run deep in me
'cause I got this crazy way...
crazy way I'm swimming in still waters

Lots of ghosts in church. I went to sleep feeling exhausted and unrevivable, knowing my body clock would get me up at 7 for mass and wishing I could just let it run down, just for one day. I was up at 7, as predicted, but I felt fine. Call it a clean apartment, call it grace. I didn't even mind Friar Tuck today.

Oh yeah, the ghost--an idea, probably for a quick-and-dirty short story. (i.e., fifty-five pages and six months to write.) Into the inbox it goes.

And oh yeah again--the title of this post. Before "The Order" yesterday we got about nine previews for horror movies, including a remake of one of the most uncomfortable movies ever, "Texas Chainsaw Massacre." (Based on the same real-life murderer that "Psycho" is, by the way.) The remake is supposed to take place in the same period as the original, 1973; mistake, I think. The actors look very wrong. They've got that 21st-century cyborg beauty, all the girls are too skinny and muscular, and not a bad set of bangs or frosted tips in sight. Anyhow. The trailer opens with a van driving in slow motion through dusty Texas sunlight to the tune of...This Mortal Coil's cover of Tim Buckley's "Song to the Siren." Weirder than Nick Drake in a car commercial? Maybe. It's definitely a vibe.

Enough for tonight, I think. Have a good one.

@ 7:25:00 PM,

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