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1:05pm September 14, 2014

Mining For Coal Strikes Gold

popoffmusic:



Every so often I listen to music that reminds me of its power to connect people of very dissimilar backgrounds. And when I am reminded of that power my body swells and sometimes I dance in a fury, sometimes I smile wide, and sometimes my heart aches and I cry. And my experience with Kathy Mattea’s ‘Coal’ and ‘Calling Me Home’ had a few moments where my eyes could not control themselves.

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These are my two favorite albums of hers as well.  "Calling Me Home" may be my favorite album, of anyone’s, ever.  Everything about it feels deeply familiar to me.  Everything about it sounds right.  Every song on the album deals with loss or grief in some way, and right now that’s comforting in an odd way.  She can take terrible things and make beauty out of them, and make you see the beauty that shines through everything even in the darkest of times.

My favorite songs from Calling Me Home:

  • Gone, Gonna Rise Again
  • The Wood Thrush’s Song
  • West Virginia Mine Disaster
  • Black Waters
  • West Virginia, My Home
  • The Maple’s Lament

But really, there are no bad songs on the album.  Every single one of them is amazing.  There is no weak point.  There are no songs I skip over.  I think “Gone, Gonna Rise Again” is going to be one of my all-time favorite songs forever, though.  It places death within the cycle of life and shows beauty in a situation where many people would only see suffering.

These apple trees on the mountainside
(Gone, gonna rise again)
He planted the seeds just before he died
(Gone, gonna rise again)
I guess he knew that he’d never see
Red fruit hangin’ from the tree
But he planted the seeds for his children and me
Gone, gonna rise again

It’s high on the ridge above the farm
(Gone, gonna rise again)
I think of my people who have gone on
(Gone, gonna rise again)
Like a tree that grows in the mountain ground
Storms of life have cut ‘em down
But the new wood springs from the roots in the ground
Gone, gonna rise again
Gone, gonna rise again
Gone, gonna rise again

Seriously… that song gives me more comfort over my father’s death than anything else ever could.  It doesn’t offer platitudes, but it puts death firmly in the cycle of life, in a way that shows a very stark beauty.  The light that death always brings with it, if you have the eyes to see it.  And I always see that light when I see death, but I rarely see it put into a song.

Anyway, I love when I discover that my favorite country artists from the eighties are not only still making music, but have matured into something utterly amazing compared to their already-amazing music from when I was growing up.  Kathy Mattea and Lacy J. Dalton have both done this incredibly well.  They’ve both deepened with age, and you can hear it in their music.  It’s also amazing that their voices are not only still there, but improved – most singers start losing vocal abilities in their forties, but these two, their voices have only gotten better.  They’ve got very different strengths, but I love both of them.

I usually put both Calling Me Home and Coal together on a single playlist and put it on shuffle, and that’s how I listen to Kathy Mattea’s latest albums.  I love them both, but Calling Me Home is definitely my favorite.  And like the name Calling Me Home, there’s something about it that calls me back to my roots, even though my roots are in a very different part of the country than hers.

Lacy J., by the way, lived in the redwoods as well, for awhile.  I think she’s lived in a lot of places.  But I think she lived in the redwoods while we lived in the redwoods, just a completely different part of the redwoods.  And her albums from that time period make me feel like I’m curled up under the earth in the redwood forest.  They make me able to feel my whole body, they completely envelop me.