Across the Borderline (1993)—take 2

7/8/2010

In January I predicted this album would grow on me. I haven’t revisited it since, so we’ll see if it has. The first thing I notice is how long these songs are. Many are in the 4-6 minute range, which suggests that Willie is pushing, stretching, expanding the traditional country format. The line that strikes me this time from Paul Simon’s “American Tune” is “So far away from home.” Willie is always on the road, always “so far away from home,” and yet the road is his home. He is both far away and near at the same time. Later he sings, “I don’t have a friend who feels at ease.” This is the Augustinian dilemma that we are restless till we find rest in thee. Willie sings, “I can’t help but I wonder what’s gone wrong.” And then, “That’s all I’m tryin’ to get some rest.” The quest for rest. Is that the ironic holy grail of Willie’s wanderlust? We constantly must leave and hit the road so that we can find true rest and peace at the last? Wouldn’t a better way to find this be to stay put, to stay home? The RadioLab episode about pop music has an interview with Aaron Fox, a musicologist who has written a book called Real Country Music. He claims that country music originated with Jimmie Rodgers’ 1927 hit “little old log cabin.” He claims that it was only at this time, when most Americans no longer lived in the country, that living in the country became a nostalgic idea, and thus a new genre of music. If this is true, then Willie, who was born in 1933, was basically born at the birth of country music. He was born into this nostalgia. Raised on the remembrance of things past. Much like Proust in findesiecle France. Fox describes the essence of country music as a longing for the past, a desire for things to be the way they once were. Simpler, purer. He says that Dolly Parton is wildly popular in Africa, as is Don Williams. You can sell out 40k-seat stadiums with a Don Williams concert, and the Africans know all the songs. Robert Krolwhich calls it migration music. Fox says it is the 100-200 year move from rural peasant life to modern urban life. It is a universal longing, and the music speaks cross-culturally because the instruments themselves seem to be crying, and the cry-breaks, the grammar of the vocalizations, reflect that longing, that loss. Bonnie Raitt has a heartbreaking catch in her voice in “Getting Over You.” This T.S. Bruton song is about breaking up, the pieces falling apart. So maybe all the “she’s gone” songs are also symbolic of the land being gone, the rural country. She being the farm, a rural way of life. Willie sings, “There’s a vantage point, and it takes some time to find where you can see how all the pieces fit as you watch ‘em fall apart.” So he’s seeking a perspective that transcends time, that situates this loss within a larger context. The pieces in the puzzle still fall apart, but at least he can see how they once fit together, and that is comforting. “Other people say stop living in the past, but when there’s nothing left, it’s your memory that lasts.” So memory can overcome this loss, can defeat time. Memory and art, which is memory made manifest in paint, sound, or stone. So art helps us get over lost lovers and lost ways of life and the loss of life itself. It helps us face our own mortality, our own finiteness. Not sure what John Hiatt’s “Most Unoriginal Sin” means, but I like it. “This love is a ghost,” elusive, fleeting, unattainable. This song seems to be a testament to the utter Proustian, Augustinian, Gatsbyian restlessness of the human heart. Always longing for greener pastures in the past or the future. This album was produced in 1993, the year I got married. No info in the liner notes about musicians. “Most Unoriginal Sin” seems to suggest that we should throw in the towel and resign ourselves to our human fallibility. But Willie then follows it with Peter Gabriel’s “Don’t Give Up,” ever vacillating between hope and hopelessness. “In this proud land…a man whose dreams have all deserted.” Another song about loss. The loss of dreams, the loss of land, the loss of the “place I was born on the lakeside.” This song clocks in at 6:59. Some trippy, Miles Davis-like muted trumpet at the end. Dylan’s “Heartland” is overtly about the loss of the country. Land literally being lost to the banks. “a big gaping hole in my chest where my heart was”; “My American dream fell apart at the seams.” People waking up with land and “a loan that [they] can’t pay.” “Heartland” is fitting. Country music is about broken hearts in the heartland. Loss of love and loss of land. Maybe they are the same thing. John Hiatt’s “Across the Borderline” describes a place “just across the borderline,” a Valhalla, Daisy’s green light, where all your dreams might come true in the future. But “you could lose more than you’ll ever find.” “When you reach the broken promise land, when every dream slips through your hand.” Country music is about a “broken promise land,” about broken dreams. Yet rivers feature prominently in many of these songs. Rivers transcend time and land. They keep flowing when land changes hands. No one owns or can own the rivers because they keep changing. And “hope remains when pride is gone, and it keeps you moving on, calling you across the borderline.” And Willie deftly transitions into a Paul Simon song about the Mississippi delta, a river song, a hopeful song, “Graceland.” “She comes back to tell me she is gone.” Another “she’s gone” song about the loss of love and the loss of land. “Losing love is like a window in your heart. Everybody sees you’re blown apart. Everybody feels the wind blow.” Then Lyle Lovett’s more cynical “Farther Down the Line” wishes a cowboy better luck next time. “The classic contradiction, the unavoidable affliction”: “one day she’ll say she loves you, and the next she’ll be tired of you. And push will always come to shove you on that midnight rodeo.” Proust could have titled his six-volume work “Midnight Rodeo.” You can try to ride the rodeo bull of love, but you will always get thrown in the fickle ring of the human heart. True to form Willie switches back to optimism with his own “Valentine.” Must be Mark O’Connor on fiddle. “You’re the sweetest of all sweethearts.” Willie is Candide. He remains ever hopeful, ever optimistic about love, about his latest Cunnegonde with the “candy heart.” Dylan’s dark “What was it You Wanted” shows what happens when Willie’s sweet valentine turns bitter. The puzzles, the questions, the complexity of love rears its ugly head. “Whatever you wanted slipped out of my mind,” so you weren’t always on my mind. “Are you the same person who was here before?” How can you love people who change, who won’t stand still? “Still is still moving to me,” and I want people to stay the same so I can keep loving them, but I want to keep moving and changing. “Is the scenery changing?” Country music is about our relationship to change. How we want it and don’t want it at the same time. We are caught in the cruel crossfire of wanting and not wanting change. Willie goes positive again with Willie Dixon’s “I Love the Life I Live.” His perfect alternation between positive and negative songs on this album depicts the eternal push and pull of love. Lyle Lovett’s “If I Were the Man You Wanted” build son this idea that it is hard to love people who change. The old saw that women hope men will change and men hope women won’t and both are always wrong but we keep falling for each other anyway. “If the cards could all be laid on the table, then love could be more than a game.” But of course they can’t, and lies and deception lie at the heart of hearts. Daisy can’t be the woman Gatsby wants, and Albertine can’t be the one Proust wants. I see now how the dark “She’s Not for You” fits into the black and white alternating nature of this album. “Sometimes she lies” and sometimes we all lie in love. We have to. Willie ends with the rousing, screw-it-all (literally and figuratively) “Still is Still Moving to Me.” “If that’s what it takes to be free,” Willie will do it. He can be moving or still. Either way he’s moving. Still is still moving means that stillness keeps moving, stillness continues to move. And this album keeps moving with each listen. It moves into my untenable top ten. It rewards repeated listening. I can sense depth and richness that will be revealed in future listens. I can’t hear that richness yet, but I hear the potential richness, the latent richness. Not sure how that’s possible. It’s like hearing into the future. On a related note, Proust writes about places (Paris and Venice), and about the longing for places past and future. He desries place the way place is desired in country music. And he writes about trains and planes, the traveling between times and places. The longing of travel and speed and motion. Proust, who stayed in bed and never moved, was still moving in his mind, ranging widely.