Spirit (1996)

Another stripped down album from the late ‘90s. Must be Willie’s flamenco phase. Sounds similar to Teatro in many ways, which was recorded in an old Mexican movie theater. This one is recorded at Pedernales, Willie’s own studio on his golf course in Austin, Texas. I was re-reading the lyrics to the songs on Teatro and noticed that they are even darker than I first thought. “I Just Can’t Let You Say Goodbye” is about a guy strangling his woman so she can’t ever say goodbye:

The flesh around your throat is pale
Indented by my fingernails
Please don’t scream, please don’t cry
I just can’t let you say good-bye

Cha-cha-cha. Yikes. I also discovered that “Somebody Pick Up My Pieces” was written in 1998, which shows two things: one, that Willie could still flat-out write songs in the late ‘90s; and two, that the placement of this new song directly after “I’ve Just Destroyed the World” is even more poignant as it telescopes thirty-six years of heartbreak from 1962 to 1998. Willie’s always circling back, discursive, spiraling around and around the same old themes, staying old and new at the same time. So many of his albums recycle old material and yet blend it with the new. Grafting new songs like apple tree branches onto solid stock. It’s Proust again, battling time. Or is it Buddha? A Buddhist Proust?

I’ll start ranking songs and versions of songs at some point, but I know that “Too Sick to Pray” will be in my top ten list of songs. Spirit, not surprisingly, is Willie’s most spiritual album, even more spiritual, I think, than his gospel albums. With Willie’s Hindu/Buddhist reincarnation mentality, it is often hard to take his gospel songs seriously because you don’t hear a lot of repentance or redemption. You hear it on this album, though. It wasn’t too long after the IRS fiasco and him losing everything, so this album may reflect more honest soul-searching than the take-it-in-stride feel many of his songs and albums have. The sound is very polished, and yet there are only four musicians: Willie on lead guitar and vocals, Bobbie on piano, Johnny Gimble on fiddle, and Jody Payne on rhythm guitar and harmony vocals. It isn’t raw and unpolished the way Storytellers and the IRS Tapes are, but it has a clean and polished sparseness, if that’s possible. And yet not sterile. Somehow it is still gritty and real. Maybe it’s the vulnerability of the lyrics or the wrinkles, the creases, the lines in Willie’s face and hands on the black and white photos on the album cover that brings this out. The guitar picking stands out as it does on Storytellers. “I Thought About You Lord” may make my top ten, too. Willie thinking about life ending and love unending. About his music and time. Looking back, looking forward. Looking for meaning. Questioning. What’s striking about this song is what it doesn’t say. He says what he’s thinking about but he doesn’t say what he thinks about what he’s thinking about. Where does he stand? He doesn’t offer any answers. It’s a song about just thinking about things that can have no answers. Fittingly, it opens and closes with the plaintive instrumental “Matador.” We begin and end wordlessly. As if to say, What can you say? In the face of loss, love, time, death, What can you say? The five minute “Spirit of E9” expands and extends the wordless exploration till he comes full circle, like Joyce in Ulysses—yes, yes, yes—with the 18 second reprise of “Matador.” He waves the cape, though not a red one, and we listeners, like bulls, miss glancingly with our ears. What is the audio equivalent of peripheral vision? Can we hear out of the side of our ears? Our ears are already on the side, so maybe we have to be able to hear out of the front of them. If we normally hear peripherally, maybe we need to learn to hear centrally. To hear with our eyes? Or with our eyes closed? This album makes you want to close your eyes, in a good way, and pray.

So I’m 42 songs and 2.3 hours in to my year-long adventure. I’m going to move one album per day over to my new 8 gig IPOD so the only music on my IPOD will be WN albums I have already written about thus far this year. It will help me keep track of where I am, and I can circle back and re-listen for things I may have missed on the first go. I listened to Teatro and Storytellers three times each, which seems like a good number. It may be hard when I am not on vacation, but I’m on listen #2 of Spirit, though I have played it more than almost any other WN album over the years, so it is comfortable to my ears like worn slippers or jeans. And I probably sing “Too Sick to Pray” to myself more often than any other WN song. Both because it is easy to sing and because it is so often true for me. Not that I am physically sick very often, but that I feel as pathetic (or apathetic, which is worse?) spiritually as he sounds and looks on this album. “Your Memory Won’t Die in My Grave” has a hopeful, triumphant vibe. Not the dancing flamenco cha-cha of Teatro, but an upbeat downer song. Again, an oxymoron, I know, but that’s what it is. The joy C.S. Lewis writes about. A pain, but a pain we miss when it’s gone. A pain we want to feel again. And it isn’t masochistic or self-flagellating. It’s just that we feel more alive when we are hurting, we are more attentive, more fully awake. Tim O’Brian writes about this in The Things They Carried. How he felt more alive during battle. How he appreciated nature and being alive more intensely after a near-fatal skirmish. Second time through I notice that another instrumental song, “Mariachi,” is placed in the dead center of the album at track #6. Wordlessness within words. And maybe that’s the way to sum up this album. It feels like a silent film with words. It seems to speak and remain silent at the same time. It is an album about how words get in the way, or how words fail, or how we don’t know what to say, or how we are too tired or sick to say them. And it says this with words and without them. In short, the album is halting and tentative and vulnerable like prayer, yet hopeful and triumphant like prayer, too. It runs the emotional gamut of prayer. Amen.