When I was 5 or 6 years old, I believed that musicals
were real. When the time was right, the people around me would burst into
song, and we could finally stop worrying about what to say next because
we’d all be in thrall to the music, borne aloft by an invisible
orchestra. Our everyday blah-blah-blah, the ugly cadences of unscripted
speech, would dissolve in a cataract of couplets. If we could just get to
the right part of the story, we could belt out our beautiful secret
thoughts in unison. Like Tevye and Golde, Curley and Laurey, Tony and
Maria, we all had songs inside us, I thought. We just had to believe in
them, and eventually they’d break free. “A song is like a dream, and you try to make it
come true,” Bob Dylan writes in his memoir, Chronicles. “They’re
like strange countries that you have to enter.” There’s a case
to be made for craftsmanship, the journeyman’s disciplined drudgery,
but who wants to hear it? The best art seems artless, as natural as
birdsong. God only knows how much work went into it, how many halting
imitations and mortifying failures preceded it; what matters is that it
comes out reckless and inevitable. Jolie Holland doesn’t sound much
like Dylan, but she reminds me of him more than any of his obvious acolytes do. It’s not because her voice slides and bends all over the place,
stretching out syllables and swooping through scales as it follows the
errant dictates of what fans will call style and detractors will call
affectation. Nor is it because they’re both antiquarians, wanderers,
and magpies. It’s because while they’re singing, they seem to
be living inside their dreams, sleepwalking into strange countries —
or, as Holland puts it, “There’s a mockingbird behind my
house/Who is a magician of the highest degree/And I swear I heard him rip
the world apart/And sew it back again with his fiery melody,
melody.”
The song from which those lines are taken,
“Mexican Blue,” is the final and finest track on Springtime Can Kill You, Holland’s third album and her best one yet. The other 11 songs are
admirable in various ways, lovely hybrids that range from avant-Dixieland
to frowsy country-blues to narcotic folk-rock. It’s tempting to
praise all of them, to describe how the pump organs, pianos, glockenspiels,
tubas, and box fiddles collude with her pulled-taffy drawl to trick you
into believing that you’re coming unstuck in time, hurtling from an
1820s parlor to a 1920s flophouse to a sunny city bus in the early 21st
century. You could write a rather impressive term paper on her recurrent
imagery, those alleys and flowers and mockingbirds and moons that cycle
through in seemingly endless combinations. But it’s that last song,
six minutes and 28 seconds of slow, shuddering, circular beauty, that gets
me. I played it 10 times in a row one night, I’ve played it countless
times since, and every time I listen to it is like the first time, so I
have to play it again. “You’re like a saint’s song to
me,” she sings in the first and last verses. “I’ll try to
sing it pure and easily.” The song is a dream, and she makes it come
true. Even though I’m old enough to know better, I have to believe
she’s making it up as she goes along, breaking into this radiant
cornpone aria because she can’t help it, it’s just coming out
of her, the way I thought it happened in musicals.
This article appears in May 11-17, 2006.
