Saints: Joan of Arc

Leonard Cohen: Joan of Arc

[purchase]

Joan of Arc may be the most famous of the martyr saints, so I need not tell her story in detail. Leonard Cohen shows himself to be a gifted story teller here. He reimagines her martyrdom as a wedding between Joan of Arc and the flames that would consume her. Cohen has Joan at the last tired of war, and maybe seeking release. The song dates from 1970, so it may reflect Cohen’s feelings about the Vietnam War in this way.

The funny thing is, I don’t really like the music of Leonard Cohen that much. His devotees are passionate about him, and will probably resent my saying so, but I find that a little of his voice goes a long way. In fact, I never would have known about this song at all, were it not for an amazing cover by Darrell Scott. There is an informal rule here at Star Maker that we should not post anything released after 2000. We’ve bent that rule a number of times, but Scott’s Joan of Arc is from 2008, so that’s pushing it. That said, if one of my fellow Star Makers should happen to post Scott’s version in the comments, I won’t tell. I really like Cohen’s original as well, now that I’ve found it, but I just don’t know if I would want to listen to the entire album it came from in one sitting.

Saints: Saint Genevieve

Alison Brown: Saint Genevieve

[purchase]

Like most of her solo work, this piece is an instrumental, so it's hard to say explicitly what commentary, if any, Compass Records founder and banjo-playing bandleader Alison Brown has to offer about the patron saint of Paris, France.

But music has mood, and this slow, stately, almost morose tune, with its sweet, soaring strings and gentle plucking, speaks to the pleading nature of the devout 5th century nun, a pious ascetic and vegetarian who spoke out on behalf of virgins, prisoners of war, and lenience to all wrongdoers.

Saints: Our Lady Of Fatima

Red Foley: Our Lady Of Fatima

[Out of print]

Some Catholic saints have more than one feast day, operating under several titles. None has more than Mary, the mother of Jesus. There are those that celebrate milestones, including the Immaculate Conception (which, trivia fans, refers to Mary’s own conception, not that of Jesus), others that mark her various ecclesiastical titles (Queen of Heaven), and others yet her apparitions to assorted people all over the place. The Catholic Church is reluctant to recognise most alleged apparitions, but can’t undo those that already have been approved and attract a massive following.

One of these is the alleged apparition of Mary to three shepherd children in the Portuguese village of Fatima in the 1910s. It was big news, and the deal was sealed when tens of thousands of people came to Fatima for the last of the scheduled apparitions, and saw the sun “dance”. Previously the shepherd kids, by now a national story, had said that the apparition would perform a miracle at an appointed time. Bang on time, the sun did all kinds of odd things, like swirling and zig-zagging towards the earth. Some witnesses, however, reported seeing nothing. Scientists explain the phenomenon as optical effects or mass hysteria.

Catholics are not required to believe in apparitions, but Pope John Paul II did. He credited his survival in the 1981 assassination attempt to Our Lady of Fatima, whose feast day it happened to be that day. The apparition allegedly gave the shepherd children three secrets. Two of them were boring, it seems, but the third was closely guarded. It was finally revealed in 2000 and was also boring. Catholic fanatics believe the Vatican released a fake secret and are withholding the real secret.

I don’t think country legend Red Foley was a Catholic, but his paean to the apparition at Fatima, released in 1950, is supreme kitsch, capturing the post-war American Catholicism of Bishop Fulton Sheen, that crook Cardinal Spellman, Going My Way and The Bells of St Mary's. Our Lady of Fatima was recorded with the Anita Kerr Singers, whose voices backed something like half of all RCA numbers recorded in Nashville in the 1950s; Elvis’ pals, The Jordanaires, appeared on the other half. Red Foley was Elvis’ childhood idol: his Old Shep was the first song Elvis Presley ever performed in public, at the age of 10.

Saints: St Stephen

Grateful Dead: St Stephen

[purchase]

The original St Stephen was the first Christian martyr. The story goes that he was criticizing the way Judaism was being practiced in Greece, and the Jews there stoned him to death. Bear in mind that this was while Christ was alive, and remember that Christ was himself a Jew. So it was Christ’s version of Judaism, which would become Christianity after His death, that Stephen was preaching.

The Grateful Dead song St Stephen may also be about Steve Gaskin. Gaskin taught a spirituality class in San Francisco in the 1960s, and he would later found a commune called The Farm. So Robert Hunter’s lyrics may be trying to equate the newness of Gaskin’s teachings with those of St Stephen in his time. Musically, St Stephen is one of the Dead’s most interesting songs, with its tempo and mood changes. I was surprised to find that the song has almost never been covered.

Update: One of our readers pointed out in the comments that I made some fairly serious errors in my telling of the life of Saint Stephen. For more on this, please check the comments to this post.

Saints: St. Thomas

Joshua Redman: St. Thomas

[purchase]

Poor St. Thomas. (To be more specific, poor St. Thomas the Apostle, not to be confused with St. Thomas Aquinas, or St. Thomas More, or St. Thomas of Becket, or any of the other dozen or so Thomases who are also Roman Catholic saints.)

Thomas had a long and productive saintly career. He is said to have travelled to India and introduced Christianity there (er, well, maybe not so productive there). But we know him best from one New Testament episode, and the story goes like this (with embellishment):

Thomas was not with the other disciples one fateful day---they probably sent him off for the beer and snack run. And when he returned, his apostolic buds had amazing news.

"Guess who was just here visiting with us? You'll never guess!" they told him.

"Dudes. Just tell me."

"Jesus!"

This must have struck Thomas as a really tasteless joke, since Jesus had recently gone through the "crucified, dead and buried" part of the familiar story.

"Yeah, right. Pull the other one, lads, it's got bells on."

"No, really. You just missed him."

"Look, next time, you can fetch your own damned beer if this is the thanks I get."

And then he said the famous words that he soon came to regret: "Unless I see in his hands the mark of the nails, and place my finger into the mark of the nails, and place my hand into his side, I will never believe you."

And for this, a statement of incredulity that I bet every one of us would have come up with in some form, he is best known by the not-very-cool epithet, "Doubting Thomas."

A week later, the resurrected Lord pops in again, but this time Thomas is hanging around. Now I don't think Jesus was at all harsh about Thomas's earlier doubts. He must have had a pretty good sense of humor, because you have to admit, the whole notion of resurrection was pretty unexpected. So Caravaggio is probably taking artistic liberties with the sort-of-icky scene above. I'm sure that Thomas, when invited to act out his earlier words, just said, "No, that's okay, Lord, I'm good, thanks anyway."

Thomas did get a pretty sweet Virgin Island named after him, though, so there's that.

The real reason I'm posting this song is that I just saw Joshua Redman in concert on Sunday and wanted to share something from one of the great tenor saxophonists alive today. This is a tune written by Sonny Rollins, performed in 1995 by Redman at the Village Vanguard. You may recognize the melody after the long introductory solo, at about 4:30.

Saints: St. Peter

Letters to Cleo: St. Peter

[Purchase]

Saint Peter, whose real name was actually Simon until Jesus renamed him, was one of the original Apostles, and considered to be chosen by Jesus himself as the first Pope. These days he's mostly known as the doorman at the Pearly Gates of heaven because of a line in the scripture about Jesus handing him the keys to heaven, thus he is often depicted holding a set of keys.

In scripture, Apostle Peter was considered the most devout, the most enthusiastic follower of Christ, and thus why he became heaven's proprietor. In the song, St. Peter is used for a bit of symbolism. The song is about someone who lies, who is not what he says he is. In the Bible, Jesus predicts that Peter will deny him three times in the course of a day, and in deed, he does deny his faith three times, despite being the most devout of all. But he also represents judgment of those who've sinned, a bit of a dichotomy, and both ways are expressed in the song. So, in this case, knowing a bit of history makes for a great song, despite it being a bit bitter considering it's name-dropping one of the Lord's close buddies.

And I can't believe I hadn't posted a Letters to Cleo song here yet. Perhaps this theme had some divine intervention?

Saints: St Teresa

Joan Osborne: St Teresa

[purchase]

St Teresa was an ecstatic saint, one who was said to receive holy visions. Hers involved painful experiences through which she received divine wisdom. Here is her description of one of her visions, of an angel:

I saw in his hand a long spear of gold, and at the iron's point there seemed to be a little fire. He appeared to me to be thrusting it at times into my heart, and to pierce my very entrails; when he drew it out, he seemed to draw them out also, and to leave me all on fire with a great love of God. The pain was so great, that it made me moan; and yet so surpassing was the sweetness of this excessive pain, that I could not wish to be rid of it...

Teresa battled various illnesses for much of her life, so the modern cynic might regard this not as a vision but as a fever-induced hallucination. However you see it, it is a fact that she developed a system of meditation which helped her in her studies of the Divine. Prayers are offered to her for relief from severe pain. Joan Osborne’s St Teresa is a perfect example of the kind of prayer I mean.

Saints: Prayer Of Saint Francis

Sarah MacLachlan: Prayer Of Saint Francis

[purchase]

If you visit Assisi, the central Italian hometown of the most revolutionary of Christian saints, among the many souvenirs flogged there you will find paraphernalia featuring the prayer usually attributed to St Francis (whose name meant Frenchman, after his father’s Francophilia). “Lord, make me an instrument of your peace. Where there is hatred, let me sow love. Where there is injury, pardon.” And so on.

The prayer has been influential. Mother Teresa adopted it for her religious order; Archbishop Desmond Tutu in South Africa has said it forms part of his daily devotions; Alcoholics Anonymous did use it for their inspirational literature. But there is no record of St Francis having composed such a prayer, even if it sounds like the kind of thing one would associate with the Catholic proto-hippie, who once was turned away from an appointment with the pope on account of his neglect in matters of personal hygiene — at an age when pretty much everybody stank.

The prayer’s first documented appearance dates to 1912, almost 700 years after St Francis’ death, in a French devotional magazine titled La Clochette (The Little Bell), published by a Catholic association known as La Ligue de la Sainte-Messe (The Holy Mass League). In 1916, during World War I, the prayer was reproduced by the Vatican newspaper L’Osservatore Romano and the French mass circulation Catholic daily La Croix, giving it wider exposure and a reputation as a peace prayer. The prayer was first attributed to St Francis in 1927 by a French Protestant movement, Les Chevaliers du Prince de la Paix.

It has been put to song several times, most often obviously within a religious context. Singer-songwriter Denison Wittmer (a Christian musician of the Sufjan Stevens and Rosie Thomas variety) has recorded it. And Canadian singer Sarah MacLachlan recorded it as a bonus track for the Japanese version of her 1998 album Surfacing. It was made available to non-Japanese consumers on her Rarities, B-Sides, and Other Stuff Volume 2 collection, released in 2008.

MacLachlan has performed for a pope and recorded a couple of songs with Christian themes, but also covered XTC’s “Dear God”, a hymn to atheism. Apparently her deal is agnosticism.

I Have A Dream -> Saints: I Dreamed I Saw St. Augustine

Bob Dylan: I Dreamed I Saw St. Augustine

[purchase]

Thea Gilmore: I Dreamed I Saw St. Augustine

[purchase]

Of the several saints titled Augustine, it's not clear which one Dylan meant to reference here. But most folks assume it's Augustine of Hippo, an early Roman convert and philosopher whose work dwelled heavily on the nature of good and evil - patron saint of brewers, printers, theologians and sore eyes, framer of the concepts of original sin and just war, and often considered one of the theological fathers of Reformation due to his teaching on salvation and divine grace.

Pensive and spare in the '67 original, the song has been covered many times, by some of the stalwarts of folk music, from Joan Baez to Earl Scruggs. Most manage to retain the original guilty tone of the lyric, which decries the absence of martyrs in modern society, but holds us responsible for that lack even as it portrays us as powerless to fix it. My favorite cover, though, is Thea Gilmore's - in no small part because of the loud wash of echoey electric guitar which lends so much depth to its slow, gritty Americana pulse. For fans of the Cowboy Junkies, especially.

I Have A Dream: I Dreamed A Dream

Aretha Franklin: I Dreamed a Dream

[purchase]

Last year, YouTube was abuzz with a version of this Les Miserables song done by a previously unknown vocalist, Susan Boyle. She went on to turn that wildly popular debut into a pretty successful album, and the rest passes for pop history.

This is not that version.

Instead, this is from a truly historic event: Bill Clinton's 1993 Inauguration. It's sung by one of the greatest vocalists of our time, a woman who was awarded Grammy's Living Legend and Lifetime Achievement Awards, and whose voice is an official natural resource of Michigan.

Life must not kill the dreams that we dreamed…

I Have a Dream: Innocent When You Dream

Tom Waits: Innocent When You Dream

[purchase]

There is a history of other artists missing the point when covering the songs of Tom Waits. I love Bruce Springstein’s version of Jersey Girl, but it has a completely different backstory from Waits’ original. As for Rod Stewart’s Downtown Train, don’t get me started. There are a scattering of covers of Innocent When You Dream as well. Probably the best known artists to try the song are Great Lake Swimmers and Mark Ereli. Something very strange happens in these versions: the narrator sobers up! No! Innocent When You Dream starts with the line, “The bat’s are in the belfry.” Here is a guy who lost his love through his own mistakes, and he is drinking himself into oblivion, trying to forget. And that’s not beer either, it’s the strongest whiskey he can find. Tom Waits has portrayed characters like this throughout his career. They scrape the bottom of society, but Waits has always been able to find the beauty in their lives. That is his particular genius, and it is also the quality that is missing in so many covers of his songs.

I Have A Dream: Dreaming's Free

Ryan Adams: Dreaming's Free

[don't purchase; download]

I've said it before: though it's blasphemous to say so, I'm a much bigger fan of Ryan Adams the sensitive folkpop artist than Ryan Adams the alt-country rocker. And this delicate piece is a beautiful love song, of the same acoustic playbook as Elliot Smith, Evan Dando, Beck, and other sensitive men who swing both ways musically.

That's David Rawlings and Gillian Welch on guitar flourishes there, by the way, as in most of Destroyer, an album blocked by Adams' label as "too folk", and still living a life as greyware, bootlegged and distributed through the 'net.

Dreaming is free, by the way. It's getting "all locked away," as Adams says, letting our dreamlives become all-encompassing, that's costly. The result is a slight hint of bittersweet in an otherwise simple love song, reminding us that dreams without action don't change the world much, save through our absence. As our week's theme comes to a close, it's worth remembering that - lest we lose sight of the dream which got us here in the first place.

I Have a Dream: Coming Apart at the Dreams

Peter Himmelman: Coming Apart at the Dreams

[purchase]

There is a state between waking and dreaming that can be very disorienting. I remember a morning a long time ago, when my alarm went off, I got up, showered and shaved, and went to get breakfast. At that point, my alarm really went off, and I woke up for real. Now take that disoriented state and add in the memory of an old relationship. That’s my take on Coming Apart at the Dreams. But you may hear it differently, because dreaming is like that.

As a side note, I am currently reading Neil Gaiman’s The Sandman series. I’ve been meaning to read it for many years, and I finally took the plunge. Call it a comic book series if you don’t care what people think, or graphic novels if you do care, but it’s serious weirdness, and right up my alley. Gaiman’s depiction of the relationship between the waking world and the land of dreams is fascinating. I can imagine someone making an animated film out of the series, and I can imagine Coming Apart at the Dreams playing during the closing titles.

I Have A Dream: Dreaming

Blondie: Dreaming

[purchase]

Yo La Tengo: Dreaming

[purchase]

Has it really been two and a half years since we last posted a tune from Yo La Tengo? Then since I seem to be on a track to post originals and covers this week, let's return to the fold with a bang, letting their take on this Blondie classic stand up against the original as a perfect exposition of the difference between the disco-punk new wave at the end of the seventies and the post-punk grunge rock of the early nineties. Because when it gets right down to it, doesn't the original sound just a little more anthemic than you remembered, perhaps only a single step away from both Abba and the Go Gos?

I Have a Dream: All I Have to Do Is Dream

The Everly Brothers: All I Have To Do Is Dream

[Purchase]

When I was growing up I had an unshakable crush on a boy in my grade who wouldn't give me the time of day. It was one of those crushes where I perked up and had memorized the sound of his sneeze, cough, yawn...and it would make my heart swell just a little bit to hear it from across the room. Oh, childhood crushes...they call them crushes for a reason though, they hurt.

Needless to say, nothing ever became of it, but whenever I heard this song it made me think of him, as I spent a lot of time daydreaming about what it would be like if he would just like me a fraction of the amount that I liked him. But in my dreams things could be exactly as I wished they'd be, in my dreams he liked me back. This song still makes me think of that old crush, but now it just makes me shake my head.

I Have A Dream: Dreaming My Dreams With You

Cowboy Junkies: Dreaming My Dreams With You

[purchase]

Waylon Jennings: Dreaming My Dreams With You

[purchase]

I am the last person you'd ever want to ask about country music. I have a superficial grasp of it, at best, and I've been eager to dismiss it for most of my life. For no good reason, of course: It's outside my comfort zone, is all.

I grew up in a hayseed town (literally), and took a Greyhound outta that berg the day after I graduated high-school. My first big city job was at - what a quaint idea, nowadays - a newsstand. We sold out-of-town papers, periodicals, comic books, trading cards, and A LOT of adult product. These were pre-internet days... all the sketchy stuff was paid for with folding money and put into plain brown bags.

One bracing Minnesota January night I was positioned at the front register. My "boss", Trea, took my They Might Be Giants cassette out of the box and sent me down to the basement with his pinch-hitter, while he popped in a cassette. From the basement, through the concrete floor, I could tell he was playing music above the regulation level, but it didn't sound like the normal punk-rawk we all listened to...

I floated, muzzy-headed and cotton-brained, back upstairs and took my place behind the register again. Music blasted and echoed off the concrete walls. Not the serrated buzz-saw guitars and aggitated drums, which I was used to. Concrete-pure and mellow: The Cowboy Junkies - The Trinity Sessions. A neck-snap revelation.

There is no music I relate to bitter-cold Minnesota nights more.

We've got one of those nights tonight,

I dreamt of that picture here

I Have a Dream: I Will Dream

Emmylou Harris: I Will Dream

[purchase]

I Will Dream is a song of unrequited love. There is a tenuous quality to both the emotion and the song. Emmylou Harris captures this quality perfectly with her performance. The song is a co-write with Harris and Kate and Anna McGarrigle. Jane Siberry contributes the wonderful intertwining background vocals. Three of my favorite acts all do their best here, and the collaboration works, well, like a dream.

I Have A Dream: Dream On (Live)

Greg Brown: Dream On (Live)

Purchase

Dream On is a cynical song, suggesting that it is in vain that we hope for true love, a peaceful world, and politicians who will respond to the needs of the people. Of course, the comedic quality of the lyrics blunts the edge of this theme.

Although I'm an optimist in my private family life, I have to admit that I am cynical most of the time when it comes to overall social progress. It so often seems that for every forward step we take, we take two steps back.

On Monday a friend's Facebook status was "Happy birthday MLK, we're still trying our best."

I appreciated that positive attitude. Most of us really are trying our best. So in spite of Greg Brown's comic cynicism, I will do my best to continue to dream on.

I Have A Dream: Dream Baby

Cherilyn: Dream Baby

(Out of print)

Cherilyn, who released her single “Dream Baby” in late 1964, would very soon find greater and lasting fame going by the shortened moniker Cher, initially as part of a duo with Sonny Bono, who wrote and produced “Dream Baby” for her.

It was not Cher’s first record: first there was the novelty single “I Love You, Ringo”, released as Bonnie Jo Mason. That was not her first appearance on record either: with Sonny Bono, who worked for Phil Spector, she sang backing vocals on classics such as The Ronettes’ “Be My Baby”, The Chiffons’ “Da Doo Ron Ron” and the Righteous Brothers’ “You’ve Lost That Loving Feeling” (which was recorded around the time “Dream Baby” was released).

“Dream Baby” was arranged by 24-year-old Gene Page, who would go on to create gorgeous arrangements for the likes of Barry White, Roberta Flack and George Benson. It flopped, as had the Spector-produced “I Love You, Ringo” (so did her first outing with the 11-years-older Sonny, released around the same time under the ghastly moniker Caesar & Cleo). But “Dream Baby” received airplay in Los Angeles, encouraging Salvatore Bono and Cherilyn Sarkasian to persevere with their dream of stardom as recording artists.

Things did move rapidly in those days. The paean to Ringo was released on 4 March 1964. Within a year and a few months – via “Dream Baby”, the Caesar & Cleo thing, backing vocals and a change of record labels – Sonny & Cher had their breakthrough with “I Got You Babe”, on Frank Sinatra’s Reprise label. By October, Cher released first solo album, All I Really Want To Do. It included “Dream Baby”, but I don’t know whether she re-recorded it for that album – given the sloppy production of the single, I do hope so.

I Have A Dream: Don't Dream It's Over

Crowded House: Don't Dream It's Over

[purchase]

Crowded House: Don't Dream It's Over [live acoustic]

[purchase]

There are days when I worry that we've lost the dream. Two generations past the assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr., my daughters are growing up colorblind and feminist, and I'm proud of my culture for supporting this stance, and making it seem natural. But as I noted this weekend at Cover Lay Down, that doesn't mean the fight is over: rather, having peeled away the obvious layers of discrimination, we find ourselves living in the murky core of cultural dis-ease, where it is harder to name the abstract injustices which still linger deep at the root of society.

Like my previous entry into this week's theme, this well-known EnZed pop ballad is clearly intended to be romantic in nature. But strip away the pop production, as in the above live take from the Netherlands-based 2 Meter Sessies, and it, too, transforms effectively as an anthem for our times, a call for change in a world where the vitriolic stream of talk radio madness overwhelms any attempt at rational discourse, where the news stations dumb down our world daily in their attempt to demonstrate that every idea has two equal and equivalent sides, where my inner city students struggle to find safe haven in a culture which seems to have forgotten them.

Don't dream it's over. The walls between us remain, and their slippery abstraction makes them more poisonous than ever.