A Week With Bonnie Prince Billy's "Lie Down In The Light": Day 2
30 September 2008
tell your friends...
Words by Joel Minor // Illustration by Sonia Kreitzer
Starting a family and keeping it together can be tricky, requiring definite selfishness and selflessness, both of which must be properly placed, to maintain domestic balance. But over all, for good or ill, families function best by members who act selfishly outside their unit, and selflessly inside of it. As so the species survives.
Then, of course, there is the family one is given and the family one creates. We can’t help whose arms we’re born into, and neither can parents help who enters their arms, but only through exerted example can shape us at all by the time we leave them. We grope for assistance, then grope for independence, contrariness, sizing and sized up by the lot from which we came, whether we like it or not.
When we are between families—having left home and before creating our own—we may want to shed the mentality of finite responsibilities, higher salaries and safe, stable residencies, to pursue more altruistic or stoic aims that individuality allows. Few of us can successfully stay upon that path for long, especially if we were lucky enough to have been taught, growing up, that one (family) does not have to live in opposition to the other (compassion). Sometimes, most times, the best way we can help humanity is to create a microcosm of it with the macrocosm in mind. The scope of our concern need not be limited to or compromised by the daily chores of protecting those dearest to us.
The eye in “(Keep Eye On) Other’s Gain” is not a covetous one, not a competitive or greedy one, although it is rightfully suspicious. Most of all, it is perceptive, staying aware that some don’t have the simplest necessities, while others can go through life unfeeling of what should hurt them. The thing to keep in mind while keeping track of the progress of others, is, “there’s only so much here upon the earth to go around.” This simple line transcends the selfishness of exerting strength and staying ahead, and presumably, applies to the person being advised too: watch the voracious ones, so you don’t be like them.
One of an artist’s unwitting duties—what makes him or her an important artist—is to speak to us individually about collectivity. We recognize the drive, the experience, the emotion, in our own way, almost never the same way as the artist’s or another observer’s, but we are connected by the expression. Artists, writers, musicians notoriously make poor family heads, pursuing more worldly home lives and less staid lifestyles. For the rest of us, whose circumstances have not afforded such hardships and graces, the artist serves as the complimentary counterpoint, the innocent escape from the mundane.
I first heard Bonny Billy twelve years ago, when I was between families given and chosen, and he instantly and consistently compelled me to correspond, to explore the concept of ethereal allies, to fasten myself to space and solitude. Eventually, the inherency for loved ones near prevailed, but the music never left me as a spiritual guide. “Other’s Gain” speaks humbly to this duality in me the listener, husband and father, who needs the singer ever-present, as a blessing, even as it presents the similar duality in the singer himself, recognizing the value of his upbringing in staving off the harmful blows in a nomadic adulthood.
I see only one choice to mix with this message, with the effervescent falsetto, the bird-chirping recorder, the sing-along harmonized chorus. Gain and due are the ingredients. Give it some “Antagonism,” a song so steady in narrative and philosophy, even mentioning what mother taught too, though rebuking it in the face of, assistance of, an unexpected encounter with a brother, of the broader and yet more intimate kind. The pulls between focused and aimless, hardened and still soft, rock and water, meting out and accepting cruelty—breaks for the stripped, vulnerable, airy, who-is-speaking-to-whom dialog that soothingly electrifies the nerves and fences the body from harm, just for a moment.
Strong and important as family and rational living may be, non-being promises a certain immortality. It draws us into meditation, drugs, exercise and other highs, usually relegated to temporary escapes, unless addiction or egoism gets the best of our desire for little deaths and rebirths, letting them take over our lives. Would that all of us could pause to recognize, appreciate and express the many times we die and find ourselves like babies again, wholly intent on exploring and learning.
The desire to join together or even create an archetypal understanding of existence requires flight from earthly gains and dues. The more pieces that are joined, the more identity breaks apart. I think Bonny Billy understands this—I’ve always thought he has, but Lie Down in the Light thoroughly reminds me of that conviction. “Where is the Puzzle” is straight in purpose but ambiguous in meaning, which pretty much describes most of his catalog, but puzzlers like “Meaulnes,” “More Brother Rides,” “Arise, Therefore,” “New Gypsy” and “Goat and Ram” roll off the top of my head—a head not bothered by riding the ambiguities for years and years, because a piece occasionally fits in, unexpectedly, and I can lose myself a little more, blessedly. Renewal reigns.
Everything again, bliss with end, singing dawn, troubled song—these are the corner pieces in “Puzzle,” creating contradictions in commitment to conclusion or continuance, but making clear, he’s found the puzzle again, and he’s most happy again, most home again, trying to solve it. A livening, soothing duel between electric guitar in the right channel and steel guitar in the left, accentuates the argument, while Bonny sings his heart out in the middle, on everything, bliss, dawn and song, going on.
That abstract “you” has returned full-bore on Lie Down in the Light, another of its appealing aspects, not relying solely on the sexual-other “you” for completion and revelation. Appealing because it keeps me puzzled. Take “Kid of Harith”—because that’s what I’m fusing with “Puzzle”—and tell me who the “you” is who has found him but whom wonders if he will remain faithful to. This song is a conundrum too, a search the narrator knows not whether best performed together or on his own, whether his companion will even notice his disappearances, his infidelities, for the real road in front of his spirit.
I think the “you” of “Puzzle” is indeed his spirit, but also his music, perhaps interchangeable, but as he proclaims at the end, the only one he wants or trusts, whose life continues on after he is gone. It’s the tug-of-war at the heart of Lie Down, between muse and relation, but that they have equal strength allows him to be faithful to both, even as he is continually leaving one for the other.
commenting closed for this article
Recent Progressive Reviews
all content © 2006-2008, daytrotter®, all rights reserved. | Free MP3s for your iPod. | Contact Us | p3p privacy policy | For information about Advertising, send a message to: advertising@daytrotter.com
All songs posted at Daytrotter.com are the exclusive property of the respective recording artists and Daytrotter. Please do not post these songs on other websites/weblogs, etc. We encourage you to link directly to our songs page or the specific free songs page for a particular band/artist.
Daytrotter is a registered trademark of Daytrotter Media, LLC.
