The Sound in Your Mind (1976)—take 2

7/1/2010

The Sound in Your Mind (1976)—take 2

This album still makes my untenable top ten. I listened to it on day one of our 24-hour car ride to Maine. I stand by my January 8th blog about this one. This version of “That Lucky Old Sun” gets better with time. Willie envies the Sun because it isn’t bound by time. Think about it. The sun is lucky because it is time itself. It determines the time of day. It has nothing to do but “roll around heaven all day.” It has no troubles because all of our mortal troubles revolve around the fact that we revolve around the Sun and thus are victims of time’s unceasing march. The Sun at the center feels none of these limitations. Willie wants to feel like that. He wants to feel free of time like the Sun. And his music on this album has that feeling. It seems to break free of time in a lazy, “roll around heaven all day” kind of way. Willie seems to triumph over time in “If You’ve Got the Money, I’ve got the Time.” He owns time. In a “Penny for Your Thoughts” Willie sings, “Memories are haunting you, and they’re making you feel blue…are you thinking of the past and a love that didn’t last…I hope and pray that some tomorrow I can take his place.” Here Willie owns thoughts. He is buying time and mind. Willie hopes and prays about the future while comforting someone who is haunted by the past. In so many of his songs memories haunt, stalk, and generally hang around. In “The Healing Hands of Time” these memories heal as they haunt. This strikes me as a good way to describe Willie’s music: a haunted healing, or healing through haunting. “They’re working while I’m missing you…soon they’ll be dismissing you from this heart of mine…they’ll lead me safely through the night, and I’ll follow as though blind, my future tightly clutched within those healing hands of time. And they let me close my eyes just then…soon they’ll let me sleep again…and I’ll get over you by clinging to those healing hands of time” Time works hard to help Willie get over painful memories, and yet time is memory, so the disease is also the cure. Time helps Willie get through the night, and yet the night is time. Willie heads into the future blind. His future is clutched tightly to time, and yet he clings tightly to time. So he is clinging tightly to his future. “Thanks Again” has that wry quality found in “Funny How Time Slips Away.” “Thanks for what little love you gave to me.” In other words, thank you very little, or thanks for nothing, or thanks for the painful memories. And yet with Willie, his irony isn’t ironic. He really is thankful. He means what he says and the opposite of what he says. He gets to have it both ways, and thus can be ironic without being cynical. He is utterly sincere and utterly ironic at the same time. Who else can pull that off? “I’m not sorry for giving all my love to you.” Willie gets to have his regrets and not have them, too. “My reason for existing is now revealed: I’m just here to show the world how blue a man can feel.” “I’d Have to be Crazy” may be Willie’s oddest song. “I’d have to be weird to grow me a beard just to see what the rednecks would do.” An interestingly autobiographical line revealing Willie’s delight in pushing buttons and boundaries even with his own audience. “Now I don’t intend to, but should there come a day when I say that I don’t love you, you can lock me away…I’d have to be crazy to fall out of love with you.” Clearly Willie is crazy because he fell out of love with lots of people after 1976, and he was crazy to ever think he wouldn’t, crazy to promise to love anyone forever. And yet time does that to people. Time drives us crazy. It’s funny that way. Which makes the medley at the end of this album so poignant with both “Funny How Time Slips Away” and “Crazy.” Though I love the hymn “amazing Grace,” this is the least interesting track on the album. I am struck this time around by the phrase “how sweet the sound,” which comes right before the “sound in your mind.” “The sound of a love that I lost one day.” It’s a bittersweet sound. Only Willie can feel bad because he’s feeling better. “It’s a little like rain, but it’s a lot like a sunny day.” “It’s a little too late to start thinking about starting all over…I can’t take another slam in the mind…but remember my love is the sound that you hear in your mind.” Being too late is an ongoing theme in Willie’s music. He’s so late he’s on time; he sings so far behind the beat he’s in front of it. Running around like the lucky old Sun “Laughing at half of the memories…you’re not hard to remember.” This time around I have to give the nod to the 1974 live version of the Funny/Crazy/Night medley, but this one is a close second. Mickey’s harmonica performance stands out on this album.