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I am a registered Democrat, consider myself "progressive," and I'm a divinity school graduate who in 1991 marched in a Washington, D.C., anti-war rally, my "No Blood for Oil" T-shirt gleaming white and brand new on my back. I am also the wife of an Army captain who returned last spring from 13 months in the Middle East as part of Operation Iraqi Freedom. I threw away that T-shirt a few years ago, and when my husband Rob was sent to Iraq, I discovered phrases like "the military wives' group" creeping into my conversations. I couldn't shake the feeling that places I used to consider "home"like liberal politicswere no longer, while the new places that had been forced into my lifelike the Armyweren't a good fit for me either. I felt ideologically homeless. What a mess.
Vuelta by Richard Shindell Koch Records, 2004 $17.98 |
The artist who reached me the most during that dark period was Richard Shindell, whose latest album, Vuelta, was released in August. Shindell is ok with the mess. He is a storyteller and an observer. A one-time seminarian, he doesn't write about religion or politics per se, but he acutely communicates through his songs an awareness of forces in the universe greater than himself or any of his characters. He is a writer as I wish I could be, striking precisely at the emotional heart of a person's individual story and giving voice to ambiguity, confusion, and strugglewhich felt last year like the watchwords of my faith.
Shindell's eye for both human frailty and strength is sharp in this new album, his fifth studio recording. Set down in his adopted home of Buenos Aires, Argentina (he was born and raised in New Jersey), the album has Latin musical flares and even a song in Spanish, a self-deprecating love song about an English speaker's struggle with a foreign language. The narrative arc of the album, which begins with a song about a woman whose husband is leaving at dawn for war and ends with a father's lullaby to a newborn child, speaks to the experience of being carried along life's current.
One of the triumphs of the record is the very first song, "Fenario." I couldn't listen to the track right away; it hit a little too close to home. As Shindell has done so well on previous albums, he manages here to get inside a woman's life for the five-minute span of the song.
"The Bonnie Lass of Fenario" is an old Scottish folk song, which both Joan Baez and Judy Collins recorded to some acclaim. The last verse of Shindell's version, which alludes to the same mythical battle, is a quote from "Break of Day" by the metaphysical poet John Donne. Such rich texturing is typical of Shindell's songs, yet they rarely lose their emotional immediacy. Rob left at 5 A.M. on Valentine's Day for a war that we wereand aredeeply confused about. (The third verse in particular seems to brush up against the current crisis. "Brave my love, but false the king / False his wars, and false his dawn / Damn the gray that gains the sky / And damn the sun, the king's cold eye.") The song captures such a familiar feelingthe hope that the dawn won't come, that he'll be all right, that the time will pass quickly. The military spouse has to acknowledge that war, like so much else, is beyond our control.
I gravitated next toward "Waist Deep in the Big Muddy," Shindell's version of the Pete Seeger classic. While Seeger's version has always struck me as lyrically rich but musically simple, Shindell homes in on the anger in the song, the way a soldier feels when he's made to follow a "damn fool" who's leading him to certain doom. The brilliance of the song is in its narrator's helplessness as he records the dialogue between the misguided captain and the assertive sergeant, leaving the rank-and-file out of the conversation altogether as they observe the struggle for leadership and its grim results.
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