Category Music

Tommy Prine is sad about something. But it’s not an indulgent, wallowing, “poor me” kind of sadness. What saddens him is just a fact of life, and he knows it has to be that way. He can’t change it, so all he can do is acknowledge it, live with it, accept it for what it is.

Oh, and one more thing: He can write a song.

The tune is “Ships in the Harbor,” and it became the 26-year-old Prine’s debut single when it was released in September, prelude to an album set for release early in the new year.

Part of the song’s brilliance is its simple, sorrowful take on the basic human experience of departure.

Prine distills the sweet sorrow inherent in every departure  with a winsome tone in his voice and guitar, totally devoid of artifice.

All our lives, we wash in and out of others’ lives like the tide, sometimes in with them for just minutes or hours before washing back out to sea for days, months, years, maybe fore...

You’re arguably the greatest musical force in history, and something inside you knows this, feels the weight and the call of it. You seem to have been born hearing the music of the spheres, with the strong determination to transcribe and share it with your fellow humans.

Like most all artists, you suffer various torments related to the struggle of creating something from nothing, to become as a god in wrestling ultimate beauty, harmony, wisdom from the unformed dust of creation.

This noble purpose clashes with the all-too-human vagaries of your personality, some endowed at birth, others formed by a miserable childhood under a highly abusive alcoholic father. He as much as beats music into you, but rather than recoil, you forge music into your own answer, a kind of transcendent revenge in which you explore and expand upon the very depths of disconsolation and tragedy, beauty and triumph.

Widely acclaimed bu...

If you’re the least bit inclined toward metaphor, you know that a reference to pulling weeds in a song or poem is never just about pulling weeds—no matter the triumph you deservedly feel anytime you fill your bucket with them through a long morning stooped over a flowerbed. (In my case, it’s more often a gravel driveway I try to keep from becoming a long rectangular succulent patch, but I know my flowerbed crabgrass, too…)

Weeds being a longstanding interest of mine, both metaphorically and down-there-in-the-dirt (see here), I stumbled accidentally upon Josh Morningstar’s “Pullin’ Weeds” last week with great interest.

About one line into my listen, I knew I’d hit a little jackpot of a song.

A few more lines in, I knew I’d want more of this singer-songwriter who deserves a bigger following than the all-too-common fierce-but-small one he has earned over his still brief career...

I thought about appending the song discussed here as the musical selection to last week’s post on C.S. Lewis’s “Learning in War-Time” sermon, but I was so struck with the lyrics of “May I Suggest” that I found myself wanting to take the deeper dive that is the purpose of this “Brilliant Songs” series. So here we go…

In its lyrics, “May I Suggest” can be seen as a kind of companion to “Learning in War-Time.” It goes Lewis’s case—for the value of intellectual inquiry, art and beauty no matter what the world situation is—one better by making an overt, poetic appeal to the transcendent dimension that life so often beckons us to consider when we step back just a smidge from the daily grind.

Too many scenes and dreams to count or remember, but their sum total can make all the difference in lives lived with good fortune and the good grace to appreciate it.

Werner uses the arts of writing and singing a beautif...

Sometimes it happens this way: You’re 9 years old in the fourth grade and your stern-but-fair teacher Miss Ruth Ferris has had the remains of an old paddle steamboat hauled onto your school grounds a little ways off the Mississippi River in St. Louis. She does so partly for fun, and partly for the sake of instruction and storytelling on the ways and boats and people of the river, which she reveres.

You stare at the boat in awe, climb up into its pilot house, run your fingers over its paddlewheels—and you feel something taking root in you. You don’t know it yet, but you will never forget these moments.

Then, barely a teen, your jaw drops the first time you hear Earl Scruggs play the banjo, so now music joins the river in a grand and passionate fusion...