john prine, robbie robertson and u2 walk into a bar...

Two vastly different songs are swirling around my soul these days: "Summer's End" by John Prine and "Take Your Partner by the Hand" by Robbie Robertson. The first hails from Prine's 2018 masterpiece, The Tree of Forgiveness.  The second closes Robertson's sound montage of 1998; a First Nation's trip hop compilation called, Contact from the Underworld of Red Boy. Aesthetically they are as different as night is from day. Intuitively, however, they are kindred spirits evoking a longing to belong that echoes throughout our alienated and lonely culture.

In his first collection of original tunes in over a decade, Prine has created a song cycle every bit as rich and and discerning at Leonard Cohen's closing album: You Want It Darker. Cohen's 2016 finale prophetically announced what many of us have experienced during the current regime: a grim sense of reality infused with passion and despair that still honors a numinous spirituality that shines a ray of hope into our suffering. "Steer your way through the ruins of the Altar and the Mall," he chanted just 19 days before his death. Rolling Stone noted that Darker is: "a realistically grim, spiritually radiant and deeply poetic world view, generally spiked with a romantic thrum and an existential wink" (https://www. rollingstone.com/ music/music-album-reviews/review-leonard-cohens-you-want-it-darker-possibly-his-darkest-lp-yet-110031/) It is Cohen's celebration of the clash between our wounds and our deepest quest for love.

John Prine is every bit as honest, humble and humorous as Cohen but he mixes it all up with what Rolling Stone calls his history of being a smart ass. This dude loves to laugh as well as cry, savor the sweetness of love even while lamenting its passing. He robustly pokes fun at his own morality - and ours, too - but does it with such tenderness that you can't help but sing along. I've been loving his songs like "Angel from Montgomery" and "Sam Stone" since the early 70s. In a sweaty college gymnasium in rural North Carolina, my brother and sister joined me for a Kris Kristofferson concert. During the magic of that night he introduced us all "to the hole in daddy's arm where all the money goes, Jesus died for nothing I suppose." Brilliant in every way possible - and Prine continues to deliver in spades again for the sheer joy of making sweet soul music. Here he sings "of his hopes about reuniting with his departed loved ones, kissing a pretty girl on the Tilt-a-Whirl, and opening up a nightclub in heaven called the Tree of Forgiveness, which I’d imagine as a place not unlike Levon Helm's barn. I hope Prine does. And I hope I get there eventually, so I can take him up on the... the promised pint of Smithwick’s" when our life has run its course. (https://www. rollingstone.com/music/music-album-reviews/review-john-prine-keeps-finding-fresh-revelations-on-tree-of-forgiveness-628390/)

As I listened to "Summer's End" I heard a lot of truth rolled into 3:42: there's a gentle lament about missing the mark, the passing of time and disappointing those we love; as well as a prayerful, melodic invitation to a grace and renewal that makes all things new. Prine never ignores our pain, but he knows that there is a love greater than death, too. "Now we see as through a glass darkly, later we shall see face to face" wrote St. Paul. "Three things remain: faith, hope and love - and the greatest is love." Just try not to sing along with the chorus: "Come on home, come on home, you don't have to be alone, just come on home." This is the best of American roots song writing. It moves the heart. It is easy to sing. And it strengthens our best hopes and dreams. I love it - and I bet you will, too.

Now jump back in time 20 years for "Take Your Partner By the Hand" my favorite tune on an exquisite album inspired by Canadian Aboriginal music. 


There is nothing "popular" or "commercial" about "Partner" nor is the album immediately accessible to those yearning for the days of "Cripple Creek" or "The Weight." In The Band, Robertson rarely sang. Why would he with the likes of Levon Helm, Rick Danko and Richard Manuel as mates? And while the debate continues re: did Robertson rip off Levon - probably yes - this song cycle is truly unique. It mixes British techno grooves with Canadian First Nations chants. It links contemporary Native American vocalists like Rita Coolidge and Joanne Shenandoah with trip hop rhythms and percussion. And through it all, the piercing guitar of Robertson is mixed into his other worldly vocal incantations to evoke a reality that never separates heaven from earth or faith from suffering. As one critic put it, this is music that expresses what it feels like to "straddle two cultures: the underworld of redboy and the overworld of white dominance." It is about assimilation and longing, resentment and resistance, anger and love.

That is perhaps why the closing track, "Take Your Partner by the Hand" grabbed my attention.  A woman enters a club to dance and perhaps hook-up. She doesn't speak. The weird and wild ones come before her only to be dismissed silently. 

At the club they circle around some sex goddess like vultures
Flashbulbs popping
Like bees around their queen
She is completely indifferent to all the commotion
And orders some mango tango ice cream by sign language
She's approached by some wild-eyed poet drunk with love
I like her easy refusal, the way she shakes her head
She lives these days in the attic of an old dance hall
That's been shut down for years
And swears there's times when she can hear feet shuffling below
And can see the shadows swaying, moving to the music

All around her, on an elevator to nowhere, she aches for meaning. For a connection. For love in a world that feels like she's "stuck in traffic, crosstown, the stress of not moving. She described it as like being locked in a car with a madman behind the wheel and the radio tuned to static." But inside her being she longs "to take a partner by the hand... what's so hard to understand?" I hear this song as part one of "Summer's End." This is what it feels and sounds like to be assaulted by alienation. It hurts. It aches. And below everything is a yearning "to come on home" in one way or another.

I've been where Robertson is in this song. I am saying I know the fractured reality of a First Nations person in this crazy racist world. And I have no interest in cultural appropriation. But remember how Eddie Rabbit once put it? "Looking for love in ALL the wrong places?" Coming of age in the 60s and 70s when the promise of fulfillment and satisfaction became obsessed with sex - and then cocaine and later cash - I've chased that empty dream. But below it all, beyond the shame and failure and wounds,the quest is still about love, right? "Partner" is a haunting and sad song but it suggests a universal longing in much the way U2 did on "Dirty Day."
 "

Everywhere I look these days I see God calling out to us to pay attention to real love. The connections are vivid for those with eyes to see...