BERTHA and beyond

Greetings from a hotel room Nashville, TN. It’s hot and humid here—unlike the mountains of Colorado, which I somehow was mere days ago—but my mind is already living in autumn, my favorite season, the place where most of my songs come from. Recently, I got to thinking about a poem—a fall poem?—that I started writing a while ago. I had to poke around to find it. Was it written longhand? Was it somewhere on my computer? I couldn’t remember. But this morning, bleary-eyed over coffee here in East Nashville, I found it, and here I deliver it to you. It’s a little long, but that’s what you’re here for, right?

QUINAPOXET

The pack of dogs tumble through the gate

emergent, at the order of the State.

Synapses burnt,

I go to the desert,

that mute country.

Strung along the highway so long

my thumb broke.

They say I

need a miracle.

Past the orchards

in the burred blue dust.

Shake down the lemons,

the peaches,

the pears,

and leave your sign,

if you must.

This may be your New Jerusalem,

each personal to each

and within reach.

I was taught that voices are

prescribed in a beautiful logic,

like wedding bells or high math,

the kind of which I do not possess.

I carry my voice raggy like smoke and decaying flowers

and ancient honey.

And with this voice,

the only one I have,

I go walking and singing.

It took so long to know the song was good

simply because it was mine alone.

No more.

You are a woman who passes

like a leaf

leaving an autumn fire in the trees.

Beautiful prey, willowing,

with a nightvoice

that beats like a pulse beneath a cuff.

You, the green leaf from the heart

of the rock.

You, the snake of September

all summer sleeping in the blackberry bramble.

Orpheus sang for the country gods:

A boy, a doctor, terrible spirit

with music to make stones dance.

If there is a Lord I find you

in all things great and small.

The pricking pinhole

The dizzy waters encircling

the grievous globe.

Prophets have a way of dying by violence

and in these scuffling times

we dance from one heartbreak to the next.

We live in the dance.

Spin from one world to the next.

Learn about the rapture and the dread.

There are lights of a town on the fingernail horizon.

Go towards them.

My apologies for the spacing above, I’m still wrapping my head around how things get formatted here.

(Me and Jimmie Dale Gilmore behind The Ryman in Nashville. He had no idea who I was.)

Hiss is wrapping up a few more shows as a band over the next few days—one in Kentucky, one in West Virginia—before I go home and catch my breath and prepare to go play Bad Debt for a month all over the country. It’s a tour that I’m excited about. I continue to feel very connected to the songs on Bad Debt, and I look forward to having them flow through me nightly. But I’d be lying if I said that I knew them all pat, so I’ve been spending some free moments checking in with those songs again. I sat this morning with one of the deep cuts on the record, a song called “Far Bright Star.” It’s a simple song, a far as chords go, and it’s relatively easy to play if you put the capo on the sixth fret. It’s in standard tuning. I can say with some certainty that I was reading a lot of Basho and Issa and Buson, three classic Japanese haiku poets, when I wrote “Far Bright Star.” That opening line—Oh silver moon, I heard you crying/the archer shot you down among the melon vines—feels like it comes straight from one of them. Maybe someone out there can find which it is. I suspect it may be Issa.

This song feels tender. When I hear it, I feel tender. “Sometimes I stand alone and I don’t know why. You know I love you babe, now don’t you?” Fuck, man, that comes directly out of what I was experiencing as a new father with a new consciousness. I had no idea what the world had in store for me. If you know anything about Bad Debt, you know that it was recorded at a cabin where I lived in Pittsboro, NC onto a classroom tape recorder with a built-in condenser mic. However, “Far Bright Star” was recorded in a dingy room at the Burgaw Motel, about 15 miles from the North Carolina coast, and as such is the outlier on the record. I’m not even sure that motel is there anymore. I was out there doing some fieldwork, and distinctly remember bringing the tape recorder into the room and sitting it on the bed to finish and record “Far Bright Star” there. God, it seems like so long ago. The only person I’ve ever met from Burgaw is Audley Freed, the legendary guitarist from North Carolina that has played with The Black Crowes and Sheryl Crow and many others. I’m a big fan of his playing and he likes Hiss too and when I told him that I recorded part of Bad Debt at the Burgaw Motel, I don’t think he believed me. Later, he turned me on to Bobby Bland’s record Dreamer, which is one of my absolute faves.

I will say that if you’re a paid subscriber to this page, there is one of my favorite live Hiss recordings below the paywall, a cover of the Grateful Dead’s “Bertha” featuring Aoife O’Donovan and Isa Burke. But you’ll have to go down there to read more about it.