MUSIC NOTES TODD KOMARNICKI
Peace in a Pod I wish I could sing you this column. To let you in behind my ribcage, to where sound and yearning and the beating of my heart all rhythm out my love for the songs below. Music is definitively personal, but when it becomes communal, the silent “ah” of a shared joy can bond people together for a lifetime.Years ago, during a live performance by Radiohead, the audience became so ecstatic at what we were experiencing together that strangers hugged after many songs. “Did you hear that!?” we said with our gaping, happy mouths, not needing any words at all. And then in our own silences, in sorrow or wonder, or sheer kitchen-dance euphoria, we will find music that becomes ours so distinctly, that we are taller and deeper and wiser just for the hearing. Music that we will spend years sharing with new and old friends, awaiting the moment when the song becomes a bridge that not even time can tear down. So it is in this spirit that I offer you my iPod and earphones, and hope that once heard, these choices will become a part of your story, too. “Chet Baker’s Unsung Swan Song” by David Wilcox (Home Again: A&M Records, 1991) is not only a haunted and riveting portrait of the artist’s lifelong battle with heroin addiction. It is also a
tremulous reminder that we are all fragile, leaning on the windowsill of life, wanting to fly with the songbirds outside on the branch, not knowing if we’ll find a safe place to land.This song has taught me compassion as if I’d witnessed a stranger save a life. It is that tender. It is that true. Another song that makes me cry, but this one just out of pure, dumb happiness, is “Killing the Blues” as performed by Allison Krause and Robert Plant on their delicious new recording of duets, Raising Sand (Rounder, 2007). The combination of Plant’s unexpected restraint and Kraus’ purity of tone allows this song about loss and new beginnings to tiptoe back and forth between those two realities. And then, as it glimmers to a finish, you
realize that the song has done for the listener exactly what the title promised. Johnny Cash spent a lifetime preparing his voice for his final recordings. In his last several CDs, all exquisitely produced by Rick Rubin, Cash’s ravaged lungs and weary soul gave a gasping beauty to his work that only survival could have inspired. On When the Man Comes Around (American Recordings, 2002), his cover of “The First Time Ever I Saw Your Face” takes all the levity out of romance and replaces it with a depth of desire for his wife that is the definition of “to cherish.” This had long been a favorite song of my father’s, as it was the song he associated with first falling in love with my mother 50 years ago. When I heard my dad’s whisper-scratch PRISM 2008
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sing-along with Johnny during a recent drive in the car, the lyrics finally made sense. Love, like great music, changes you the moment it is first encountered. The earth stops for a second—just to let you catch your breath. Six years ago, I was living in Amsterdam—far away from my life and where I’d hoped it would go. Josh Rouse’s “The Whole Night Through” (Under Cold Blue Stars: Slow River Records, 2002), with its simple lyric definition of grace—“What we need right now, is somewhere to just lay down and dream the whole night through”— was both salve and solace while I waited for the next chapter of my life to begin. Now when I listen to it, it’s not tears that arrive, but gratitude. Sometimes we need to stop and learn to dream again, before we have the strength and vision to dance into our days. Leonard Cohen talk-sings. Never quite a lamentation, never just a melody with words. He would have been the Bob Dylan of the Old Testament if he’d