NATHAN BELL
''BLACK CROW BLUE''
JANUARY 1 2011
54:19
1. American Crow/3:49
2. Me and Larry/3:52
3. Stone's Throw/4:39
4. Gypsies/3:15
5. Red and White/4:42
6. Crow in Oklahoma/3:01
7. Rust/4:44
8. Pittsburgh/3:04
9. Black Crow Blue/4:00
10. The Striker/2:43
11. My Favorite Year/4:29
12. She Only Loves Blue/4:06
13. Wherein Crow/4:22
14. We All Get Gone/3:33
REVIEW
by Glen Hirshberg
Claremont, California
January 2010
“We become the tales we tell,” Nathan Bell sings on “Me and Larry Brown,” a gorgeous early track on Black Crow Blue, which collects tracks from Bell’s absurdly ambitious Meacham Project. I’ve staked my life on that being true. Here’s a tale I’ve been telling lately:
More than twenty years ago—I don’t remember how or where—I stumbled across a couple of beautifully etched, hard-edged, luminous records by an Iowa duo called Bell and Shore. The songs on those records have become part of the permanent soundtrack to my life. “Pretty Plains Girl” was the first and sweetest ghost story I sang to my son (“young boy, young boy, you’ll soon be mourned/if you chase that girl through the I-wa corn…”). I can barely remember a single scene from all those deadly serious, well-intentioned post-Vietnam movies of the late ‘70s and early ‘80s, but I am still haunted by the bemused, resilient DJ/veteran on “Radio V-i-e-t-n-a-m.” I’ve never stayed at the “El Ranko Motel.” But I know who has.
Last year, stuck yet again in the middle of a novel about the Federal Writers’ Project called The Book of Bunk I was increasingly sure I would never finish, I gave up on the scene I was failing to compose and started Googling. I’d hunted for news of Nathan Bell many times before. But he seemed to have vanished.
Suddenly, that day, there he was. And—after fifteen years of inactivity, or at least public inactivity--he was writing up a storm. He had a website, even, and a fan group: the Cult of 8. I wrote and told him to make it 9. A month or so later, he wrote back and asked if I was the Glen Hirshberg who wrote The Snowman’s Children. Not long after that, he sent me a song.
My art has given me many gifts: a lifetime of stories; a series of impossible dreams; the peace that comes with knowing you have to find peace yourself; the knowledge that every now and then, through circumstances that probably have only a bit to do with what I’ve written, my work has moved somebody, made someone’s days better. I’m not sure any of the above means as much to me as Nathan Bell’s song, “The Snowman.” It was the first instance I know of when my work apparently helped trigger a truly magnificent piece of art from someone else.
Nathan Bell has always been a passionate, fiery, smart, funny, tuneful, devastating song and lyric writer. But the Meacham project, which he announced to the Cult of 8 a while back, struck me as about as sane an undertaking as my unfinished, hopeless novel. There’s been lots of writing about music. There’s lots of music about writing. There’ve been plenty of songs about or inspired by books. But lyrics are different than poetry or prose—not better, not worse, just an entirely different art—and songs about writing have to dance through all sorts of traps; the too-many-words trap; the fawning fan letter; the potted plot summary; the my-whiskey-with-Gatsby.
But as a songwriter…well, Nathan Bell can dance. These tracks aren’t summaries of poems and stories and novels. Sometimes, I suspect, they contain only the faintest glimmers of the art that inspired them. The Larry Brown in “Me and Larry” is a deftly cross-hatched sketch of a man a songwriter knew, who happened to write Larry Brown’s stories. The dark traveler working his way through the eerie, sly “The Striker,” inspired by Marvin (father of Nathan) Bell’s “Dead Man Poems,” is a wicked and very contemporary variation on an American trickster archetype as old or older than the country itself. The American Crow in “American Crow” and “Crow in Oklahoma”—restless, unpredictable, self-destructive, tough, proud, mythic, staring at a world where there’s “nowhere left for the light to go”—certainly sounds deeply rooted in Sebastian Mathews’ literary creation. But he also sounds like a Nathan Bell character, fresh from a pitstop at the El Ranko on his way to vanishing into the I-wa corn. I’m glad to have met him. And I can’t wait to seek out Mathews’ original.
There’s a song inspired by my new book, too. The one I was sure I’d never finish, and finished a few months ago, after 13 grueling years. I’m not sure I even recognize any element of my novel in “Black Crow Blue.” Except maybe an openness to experience, a ghostly trace of youthful optimism grown old but never tired, at least not yet (“Have you ever seen a sky so wide/You can fit the whole world inside/I have”), a sense of fatalism tempered by the determination to go not just on but through, a willingness to love (“Have you ever been afraid to touch/”Someone that you loved too much/I have”).
Best and most important of all, these are songs. The lines quoted above seem memorable to me, but they stick out not because (or not only because) they’re artful lines but because they’re pegged to bits of rhythm or brambled twists of melody that pull off that most elusive of songwriter’s tricks: they sound familiar, even ancient, and also brand new. The sense of loss in “Me and Larry Brown” comes wafting out of that gentle, insistent guitar before Nathan Bell even opens his mouth. “The Striker” could be a Woody Guthrie talking blues, but the accent falls more heavily on the blues, the quiet but relentless chigger of the rhythm, the exhausted murmur of the vocal. You’ll appreciate the words. But you’ll remember the music.
DoWnLoAd
''BLACK CROW BLUE''
JANUARY 1 2011
54:19
1. American Crow/3:49
2. Me and Larry/3:52
3. Stone's Throw/4:39
4. Gypsies/3:15
5. Red and White/4:42
6. Crow in Oklahoma/3:01
7. Rust/4:44
8. Pittsburgh/3:04
9. Black Crow Blue/4:00
10. The Striker/2:43
11. My Favorite Year/4:29
12. She Only Loves Blue/4:06
13. Wherein Crow/4:22
14. We All Get Gone/3:33
REVIEW
by Glen Hirshberg
Claremont, California
January 2010
“We become the tales we tell,” Nathan Bell sings on “Me and Larry Brown,” a gorgeous early track on Black Crow Blue, which collects tracks from Bell’s absurdly ambitious Meacham Project. I’ve staked my life on that being true. Here’s a tale I’ve been telling lately:
More than twenty years ago—I don’t remember how or where—I stumbled across a couple of beautifully etched, hard-edged, luminous records by an Iowa duo called Bell and Shore. The songs on those records have become part of the permanent soundtrack to my life. “Pretty Plains Girl” was the first and sweetest ghost story I sang to my son (“young boy, young boy, you’ll soon be mourned/if you chase that girl through the I-wa corn…”). I can barely remember a single scene from all those deadly serious, well-intentioned post-Vietnam movies of the late ‘70s and early ‘80s, but I am still haunted by the bemused, resilient DJ/veteran on “Radio V-i-e-t-n-a-m.” I’ve never stayed at the “El Ranko Motel.” But I know who has.
Last year, stuck yet again in the middle of a novel about the Federal Writers’ Project called The Book of Bunk I was increasingly sure I would never finish, I gave up on the scene I was failing to compose and started Googling. I’d hunted for news of Nathan Bell many times before. But he seemed to have vanished.
Suddenly, that day, there he was. And—after fifteen years of inactivity, or at least public inactivity--he was writing up a storm. He had a website, even, and a fan group: the Cult of 8. I wrote and told him to make it 9. A month or so later, he wrote back and asked if I was the Glen Hirshberg who wrote The Snowman’s Children. Not long after that, he sent me a song.
My art has given me many gifts: a lifetime of stories; a series of impossible dreams; the peace that comes with knowing you have to find peace yourself; the knowledge that every now and then, through circumstances that probably have only a bit to do with what I’ve written, my work has moved somebody, made someone’s days better. I’m not sure any of the above means as much to me as Nathan Bell’s song, “The Snowman.” It was the first instance I know of when my work apparently helped trigger a truly magnificent piece of art from someone else.
Nathan Bell has always been a passionate, fiery, smart, funny, tuneful, devastating song and lyric writer. But the Meacham project, which he announced to the Cult of 8 a while back, struck me as about as sane an undertaking as my unfinished, hopeless novel. There’s been lots of writing about music. There’s lots of music about writing. There’ve been plenty of songs about or inspired by books. But lyrics are different than poetry or prose—not better, not worse, just an entirely different art—and songs about writing have to dance through all sorts of traps; the too-many-words trap; the fawning fan letter; the potted plot summary; the my-whiskey-with-Gatsby.
But as a songwriter…well, Nathan Bell can dance. These tracks aren’t summaries of poems and stories and novels. Sometimes, I suspect, they contain only the faintest glimmers of the art that inspired them. The Larry Brown in “Me and Larry” is a deftly cross-hatched sketch of a man a songwriter knew, who happened to write Larry Brown’s stories. The dark traveler working his way through the eerie, sly “The Striker,” inspired by Marvin (father of Nathan) Bell’s “Dead Man Poems,” is a wicked and very contemporary variation on an American trickster archetype as old or older than the country itself. The American Crow in “American Crow” and “Crow in Oklahoma”—restless, unpredictable, self-destructive, tough, proud, mythic, staring at a world where there’s “nowhere left for the light to go”—certainly sounds deeply rooted in Sebastian Mathews’ literary creation. But he also sounds like a Nathan Bell character, fresh from a pitstop at the El Ranko on his way to vanishing into the I-wa corn. I’m glad to have met him. And I can’t wait to seek out Mathews’ original.
There’s a song inspired by my new book, too. The one I was sure I’d never finish, and finished a few months ago, after 13 grueling years. I’m not sure I even recognize any element of my novel in “Black Crow Blue.” Except maybe an openness to experience, a ghostly trace of youthful optimism grown old but never tired, at least not yet (“Have you ever seen a sky so wide/You can fit the whole world inside/I have”), a sense of fatalism tempered by the determination to go not just on but through, a willingness to love (“Have you ever been afraid to touch/”Someone that you loved too much/I have”).
Best and most important of all, these are songs. The lines quoted above seem memorable to me, but they stick out not because (or not only because) they’re artful lines but because they’re pegged to bits of rhythm or brambled twists of melody that pull off that most elusive of songwriter’s tricks: they sound familiar, even ancient, and also brand new. The sense of loss in “Me and Larry Brown” comes wafting out of that gentle, insistent guitar before Nathan Bell even opens his mouth. “The Striker” could be a Woody Guthrie talking blues, but the accent falls more heavily on the blues, the quiet but relentless chigger of the rhythm, the exhausted murmur of the vocal. You’ll appreciate the words. But you’ll remember the music.
DoWnLoAd
