The song’s opening line “cold was the night, hard was the ground” is an echo of Blind Willie Johnson’s haunting 1927 recording “Dark Was the Night, Cold Was the Ground, When They Laid My Savior Down,” a song of lament for the crucifixion and death of Jesus.

I find the layers of contrast and tension created by Wait’s word choice here captivating and at the same time unsettling.  Waits begins a song about the apparent inattentiveness of God to the death of a runaway by referencing a song about the death of God Himself in Christ; a song that, in turn, is written and performed by a man who, like Georgia, was poor, black and largely unnoticed until after his death.*  All of this in one line. Genius.

So, in a nod to Waits’ choice to nod lyrically to Blind Willie Johnson, my recording of the song begins with an audio-nod to Pedro the Lion’s “The Longer I Lay Here.”  Listeners will hear 6 beats of click-track to begin the song.  The click is normally hidden but, like Bazan who produced “It’s Hard To Find A Friend,” we left the click exposed.  Bazan chose to let the click track remain throughout the entire song.

The parallel here is a reflection of the way I receive Georgia Lee as a listener, which is much of why I covered it for the album.  Listeners like myself are drawn to songs of like Georgia Lee and the larger bodies of work by David Bazan/Pedro the Lion because these songs provide words and shape to a very real experience of God that has little media attention paid to it: His absence.

The suffering of children at the hands of foul men or corruption of any kind often leads us along a line of questioning which comes to a tumbling, awkward end in an eerily empty space… eery because it is the space we thought we would find God, smiling knowingly, with a cup of hot chocolate and all the answers our shaken hearts desire about suffering, death and the like.. but many do not.   Though this doesn’t at all represent a loss of faith, it is nonetheless a place of desperate, soul-wrenching tension… a place in which one must choose against ones “better judgement” when responding to the question “Why wasn’t God there?”

(At another point, I’d like to take a more philosophical look at the experience of God’s absence or disappointment with God in the context of faith.  For now, I’m going to stick with the song’s place on the album in the light of that same tension.)

Waits’ song doesn’t answer it’s own question.  Nor should it be required to.  It is enough for the song and artist to ask it; to create space  for the tension between assurance and doubt.  In fact, the temptation to answer such questions prematurely is partly what makes some contemporary christian art seem so disconnected or shallow.  It communicates a disregard for what I have come to know as an authentic and vital aspect of faith: doubt.

The empty spaces we sometimes find ourselves in are part of a mature emotional and spiritual landscape.  It is about these spaces that works like “The Dark Night of the Soul” or “The Cloud of Unknowing” have been written, assuring those on a journey of faith that there is nothing broken; that this is part of what the map looks like.  In “Caring For Words In a Culture of Lies” Marilyn McEntyre notes that it is in the silence after a sentence or the space left at the end of a line where a reader actually has the ‘space’ to engage, to receive and to process… to more fully know what was just written (or spoken, or sung).  She calls this “the hospitality of our own silences.”

Wait’s “Georgia Lee,” and the space that follows it, has been a hospitable silence for me.

You can purchase the song or the album here
You can also find it at iTunes

My first knowledge of Tom Waits actually came by way of Primus; a band I listened to incessantly as a teenager.  Wait’s appears on Primus’ dark and quirky 1991 release “Sailing The Seas of Cheese.” He is featured on a track entitled “Tommy The Cat” as the voice of Tommy, who is, of course, a cat.  Interesting bit of trivia: Primus backs Waits on the opening track to “Mule Variations,” the same album from which we get the song “Georgia Lee.”

Waits wrote Georgia Lee with his wife, Kathleen after the body of 12-year old Georgia Lee Moses was found off Highway 101 in Petaluma, CA, just north of San Francisco.  Discovered on Aug 23, 1997, Georgia had run away and was missing for over two weeks before her absence was noticed; a more common occurrence in low-income or impoverished areas.  In fact, just four years earlier, the absence of Polly Klaas, a 12-year old girl from an upper middle class neighborhood in the same county as Georgia Moses, had stirred outrage and action nationwide.  Major celebrities and news outlets committed hours of time to finding her.  Polly’s kidnapper and eventual murderer was arrested and is now on death row.  The man who killed Georgia was never found.

“Not to make it a racial matter,” Waits said “but it was one of those things where, you know, she’s a black kid, and when it comes to missing children and unsolved crimes, a lot of it has to do with timing, or publicity . . . and there was this whole Polly Klaas Foundation up here, while Georgia Lee did not get any real attention.  And I wanted to write a song about it.”

Road-Side Monument for Georgia Lee in Petaluma, CA

I don’t at all mean to belittle the time and energy spent searching for, mourning and remembering Polly Klaas.  Nor do I believe Waits intended to do so.  Quite the opposite in fact; that a child goes missing from their home or neighborhood should be cause for all regularly-scheduled programming to pause.. any child…

And perhaps it was simply “to do with timing” that there was so much attention paid to the finding of one child, while another child’s absence and death can be simply read as the lay of the land. I’m not suggesting that media attention is the most accurate measure of our concern for life but the nightly news is at least some reflection of collective consciousness; some reflection of what things are of value to us;  what things we are watching, listening to and present to.

A year after services were held, Waits is quoted as saying about the service “I guess everybody was wondering, where were the police, where was the deacon, where were the social workers, and where was I and where were you.”

So while it might not be CNN or FOX or even the local paper, it has to be someone, doesn’t it? Isn’t that what our hearts demand?.. that someone is watching, someone is listening, someone is there for the other child? for every child?

“Where were her parents?  What kind of parent allows their child to run away and doesn’t call the police?” we ask.  All the while knowing that parents are not always good parents; sometimes parents are only children themselves, as Wait’s writes:  “A lot of kids are raising their parents.”

“So, If not her parents,” we concede “then what about her neighbors?  What kind of neighborhood lets one of it’s little ones simply disappear?”  At which my own heart sinks because I do not know the names of children who live only a few units away from me.

What kind of world is it, then, in which the in the foundational institutions set in place to facilitate the development of young life so consistently fail?

This progression of questions about the broken nature of things leads us to the One whose world it is… or at least to the places we expect to find Him.  The SF Chronicle reported that Waits attended Georgia Moses’ memorial service, “sitting quietly at the back of the crowded church.”

Why wasn’t God watching?
Why wasn’t God listening?
Why wasn’t God there?

If not the news networks, the families or the neighbors.. If not the world He made, then must not God Himself protect the most vulnerable among us?

Part 2 coming shortly…

You can purchase the song or the album here
You can also find it at iTunes

In the opening pages of Wendell Berry’s Jayber Crow is a notice reading:

Persons attempting to find a “text” in this book will be prosecuted; persons attempting to find a “subtext” will be banished; persons attempting to explain, interpret, explicate, analyze, deconstruct or otherwise “understand” it will be exiled to a desert island in the company of only other explainers.

Yes.
Sir.
Got it.

By no means do I intend to dismantle Trent Reznor’s psyche or read some kind of tacky, machine-molded, pastel and porcelain symbology into George Michael.  I sincerely respect and understand Berry’s warning about our (read: my) propensity to kill something beautiful by cutting it in pieces “figuring it out.”  However, I also heed the wise words of Marilyn Chandler McEntyre, who, in “Caring for Words in a Culture of Lies” writes:

Analysis is an act of love. Reading slowly, carefully, looking for pattern considering word choice, the logic of line breaks, figures of speech, pondering the fitness of images– these require a quality of attention that is comparable to the kind of attending a lover pays to the beloved.

It is in this spirit that, tomorrow, I will begin to take a loving look at the songs I’ve chosen for Through Songs I Was First Undone. To write, lovingly, about what is knowable regarding each song and the ways each has ‘undone’ me.  In certain cases, I’ll also be sharing about studio process and some intentional decisions made while recording in order to draw something out of these very alive and still speaking works.

I’ll begin with Georgia Lee.

Phillip was headed south. He wasn’t given a destination.  Or at least if there was a destination, we’re not told what it was.  All we know from what is written is that he was to go south and that the road he was to travel was a “wilderness road.”  Most of us don’t travel on “wilderness roads,” so for the sake of cohesive imagery, let’s picture driving on any of the major interstates in PA.

On the way South, along this wilderness road, Phillip came across a eunuch from Ethiopia…

…you know,.. like you do.

Now, if you’re like me and you come across an Ethiopian eunuch in a chariot, you don’t think too much of it.  But in this case, something strange was afoot at the Ethiopian eunuch’s chariot. The Spirit of the LORD said to Phillip, “Go to that chariot and stay near it.”

“…go to the chariot… stay near it…”

Not “go and plant a seed” or “go and deliver the message but don’t get involved.”

“Go and stay.”

This is not the language of agenda or strategy. This is the language of proximity; the language of incarnation.

Phillip ran to the chariot and upon reaching it, heard the man in it reading the words of sacred Scripture;  words of the prophet Isaiah; words Philip was familiar with which foreshadowed the life and death of the One Phillip had come to know as the resurrected Jesus.

What a strange twist to the story: Phillip did not bring the Word of God to the chariot; It was there when he arrived. In an setting Phillip was unfamiliar with.

It was already there.
Pregnant with life.
Waiting.

Phillip asked the Ethiopian: “Do you understand what you are reading?”  To which the man replied: “How can I, unless someone explains it to me.”  And then the Ethiopian invited Phillip into his chariot.

Go. Stay. Get in.

To be in the chariot is to for Phillip to no longer have control.  His feet off the ground, his “destination” was now wherever this man was heading; Phillip’s journey was now linked with the journey of this stranger; his story now intercepted and invaded by this stranger’s story.

And it is in that setting, unfamiliar and uncontrolled, that the conversation turned to the Story that is both their stories; the Story that is our story as well.  A story so deeply ingrained in this world and in our hearts that every story ends up being some shade of it, leaving us only with the option, the adventure, the joy and responsibility of discovering it… where it already is.

What I am doing, in part, with this new project is asking my christian brothers and sisters to approach chariots they might be unfamiliar with; even perhaps suspicious or afraid of… and stay.

… to make a discipline of engaging, listening and seeing… much as we have made a discipline of dividing, discerning and judging.

…to be actively present instead of eager to leave…

…and in that discipline of being actively present, to recognize the story and song of the Divine where it already is rather than believe it only ends up where we take it…

…to know well enough the texts our neighbors are reading that we could ask, knowingly “Do you understand what you are reading?”…

…to get in and see the story from the seat our neighbors are sitting in and “explain” as best we can, as best we know, as thoroughly as possible.. Life. Death. Resurrection. Covenant. Kingdom. Glory. Hope. Loss. Victory… Trusting not to our wisdom or education but to the pervasiveness of the Story Itself and to the Sovereignty of the One whose Story it ultimately is.

You can purchase the album at my web store now.
You can also find it at iTunes.

During my first post about the new album, I mentioned my early work as an artist in a neighborhood KISS cover band.  I wanted to leave no doubt whatsoever regarding my history with rock music and the shaping that genre has done in me.

That’s me on the right.

It was 1979. I was 5.

I was barely in kindergarten…

… but I was in the KISS Army.

Last month, I did a short interview with Soul-Audio about the new album.  Here is an excerpt from my conversation with content editor Andrew Greenhalgh:

“Soul-Audio: Earlier, in reference to Waits’ “Georgia Lee,”  you talked about the subject matter of openly and honestly questioning God, i.e, “Why wasn’t God watching, listening, whatever.”  And said that, “I live there a lot of the time. I have a suspicion that many of us do.” Now, I totally concur with that. We do live in that state of questioning, even though we don’t always own up to it. And truthfully, a lot of Christian music doesn’t openly address these questions; rather, they seem to offer up simple platitudes as opposed to tackling the issues head on. Is it important for you to address these kind of questions? And why do you feel as though the industry, the CCM one, anyway, is more reluctant to do so?

Justin: I find a great sense of normality in songs like Georgia Lee; songs that reflect a disconnect between man and God. My experience of faith has been that it is a difficult road to travel on and ‘choosing to believe’ at times is a sacrifice of pride and intellect that I am unwilling to make. To trust God in the face of deep tragedy is most often not as simple or easy as waiting for the tension of minor chords to resolve into major chords which reinforce the soaring, full-throated declaration that “I will praise You in this storm.” While I think that declaration is beautiful and necessary in its place, so is the song that says “My boat sank and I lost everything I cared about.. where the hell were you?”

I would further add that there is something at least equally redemptive in giving legitimacy to these expressions of frustration and doubt. After all, before Job said to God “Surely I spoke of things I did not understand” he.. well… spoke of things he did not understand. It is BECAUSE of his courage to confront God on what he saw as unjust action that he came to really KNOW what he had previously taken for granted.

It’s important for me to voice these things on a few levels. For myself to make my own soul known to me; art serves this purpose in my life.. I am able to read myself more clearly in the things I write, especially as time passes after a recording. I also believe it’s important to create space for the many of us who live here to have a sense of normalcy in our doubts.

As you mention, there is plenty of space provided for those more ‘certain’ about their faith; I am hoping to provide some room for the rest of us.

As regards the reluctance of the CCM to do or not do anything in particular, I can only guess; not knowing very many people working in its ranks anymore. I know that it is that it’s much harder to sell a story that makes people uncomfortable; a complicated or unresolved story. The CCM industry is just that: an industry. It’s not a church and we often expect of them the same principles we do of our local congregation. The job of an industry is to sell things. A Christian industry sells Christianity. A Christianity shrouded in mystery is a hard sell. Certainty? Well, that we can do.”

Read the whole interview here