Brilliant Songs #4: Jason Isbell’s “If We Were Vampires”

There are times when a song or a phrase, a picture or a wisp of cloud, a gnarled old tree or a glance from a stranger, hits us like a bomb, but a good kind of bomb—one that shakes us out of the stupor we too often descend into as we forsake sharing with our own lives the precious gift of our true and careful attention.

And so it was, apparently, with rootsy singer-songwriter Jason Isbell and his complete absence from my radar (Just how did that happen?) until late last night when my music aficionado friend Kevin saw fit to send me a link to an Isbell song, and the bomb exploded.

The song—“If We Were Vampires”—helped Isbell and “The 400 Unit” of musicians that serve as his backup band win a trio of awards the other night at the American Honors and Awards Show in Nashville. Best Song, Best Album (which contained the song) and Best Duo-Group of the Year.

All well and good, but in the case of a song with as much emotional wallop and elegance as this one, no award can truly reflect the songwriting genius and the urgency of heart that went into its writing.

Isbell is a few months shy of 40, once divorced, once in rehab, married now to his fiddler, harmonizer and fierce true love, Amanda Shires, to whom “If We Were Vampires” is addressed. They share a daughter, 3-year-old Mercy, whose name figures as a lovely double entendre in the song, the title of which doesn’t readily suggest what is surely one of the more tender, gut-wrenching love songs ever written, and is thereby all the more brilliant for it.

Let’s take a listen now, with Isbell’s nearly flawless diction rendered all the more clear by the lyrics scrolling helpfully below (would that other singers and You Tube creators do the same…). Then we’ll return—after you’ve dabbed at your eyes for the requisite moments—for some reiteration and pondering of what we just beheld. Full lyrics will again follow at the end of the post.

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Well.

There is a fine interview snippet on You Tube of Isbell discussing the writing of this song in particular. Let’s face it—does the world really need another love song?

Isbell approaches the question by describing how he wanted and needed to dig deeper and “deconstruct” the genre by asking himself a second question: What’s at the bottom, the bare, rooted bottom, of love? What makes it, deep in our hearts, so fierce and protective of our beloveds and, not coincidentally, of ourselves?

No, it’s not “the long flowing dress” she looks so enchanting in, nor “the light coming off (her) skin,” fetching as that can be.

Nor “her hands searching” for him in the dark, nor, so very fine as it is in this surpassingly great line: her “nails leaving love’s watermark.”

(Ooh, Baby…)

Nor is it, and here we go even deeper, with even greater songwriting acuity than is expressed about the physical pleasures alluded to above:

It’s not the way you talk me off the roof
Your questions like directions to the truth

Profound as those lines are from both an emotional and writing standpoint, it’s still not the “it,” the essence, the source of his tenderness and devotion.

What’s lurking down there, lo and behold, is a kind of fear and heartbreak at the mere thought of his beloved’s mortality and, indeed, of all that he (and we as his listeners recognizing and identifying with his song) hold most precious and dear in this life.

And worse yet: the fear that her demise will precede his own, and he will be left disconsolate, empty, bereft of purpose.

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Amanda Shires

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Of course, the flip side is that if he dies first, she will be the one disconsolate, empty, etc. That lands both of them here:

Maybe we’ll get forty years together
But one day I’ll be gone
Or one day you’ll be gone
If we were vampires and death was a joke
We’d go out on the sidewalk and smoke
And laugh at all the lovers and their plans
I wouldn’t feel the need to hold your hand

As the dumb blind luck of incarnation would have it, though, neither of them were born vampires but instead as just regular human beings, subject to expiration like all animate things. Which leads Isbell on to the full, easy-to-say/hard-to-practice understanding and expression of a universal truth that clangs as a hoary cliche in less capable hands but in his rings a fresh note befitting the poet that he is:

Maybe time running out is a gift
I’ll work hard ’til the end of my shift
And give you every second I can find
And hope it isn’t me who’s left behind

I love the interjection there of “I’ll work hard ’til the end of my shift.” It grounds the sentiment and the couple’s lives and love in a material, working person’s here-and-now, not devoid of flesh-and-blood constraints.

One can almost see Isbell working a lathe or hunched over a soldering job while glancing occasionally at the clock, slightly anxious and ready to rip off that mask and hustle home to give his beloved, knowing how precious and fleeting their time on this earth is, “every second I can find.”

In reality, though, Isbell knows how fortunate he is to be punching the peculiar clock of a working musician wholly devoted to his craft. In the same interview cited above, he describes how he knew he had something special in “If We Were Vampires,” and rather than affecting an “Aw shucks, it’s just something I threw together, wasn’t really nuthin’” false modesty, he instead, with all the truth most every creative person feels but rarely reveals, describes how beside himself he is with the prospect of sharing it.

And how promiscuous he feels, without regard for exactly who his audience needs to be:

“Even after writing songs for decades, sometimes you’re like, looking for the first person in the house: ‘You have to hear this right now. I know you’re a cat, but you HAVE to listen to this song…’”

Endearingly, he then reveals it took him “half a dozen attempts” to sing it to his wife without breaking down and crying.

So there she is, the subject, the focus, the receiver and the giver back of all his realization of what lies at the base of human life and love, desire and care: its preciousness, bounded—and indeed, created by—finitude.

Because death is, alas, “no joke,” but that doesn’t mean it gets to claim the last bitter, derisive laugh.

It remains for love, nobly and well and frequently expressed, to claim that mantle, grinning in appreciation all the way.

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IF WE WERE VAMPIRES

It’s not the long, flowing dress that you’re in
Or the light coming off of your skin
The fragile heart you protected for so long
Or the mercy in your sense of right and wrong
It’s not your hands searching slow in the dark
Or your nails leaving love’s watermark
It’s not the way you talk me off the roof
Your questions like directions to the truth
It’s knowing that this can’t go on forever
Likely one of us will have to spend some days alone
Maybe we’ll get forty years together
But one day I’ll be gone
Or one day you’ll be gone
If we were vampires and death was a joke
We’d go out on the sidewalk and smoke
And laugh at all the lovers and their plans
I wouldn’t feel the need to hold your hand
Maybe time running out is a gift
I’ll work hard ’til the end of my shift
And give you every second I can find
And hope it isn’t me who’s left behind
It’s knowing that this can’t go on forever
Likely one of us will have to spend some days alone
Maybe we’ll get forty years together
But one day I’ll be gone
Or one day you’ll be gone
It’s knowing that this can’t go on forever
Likely one of us will have to spend some days alone
Maybe we’ll get forty years together
But one day I’ll be gone
One day you’ll be gone

© Downtown Music Publishing

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And one more for the road…