Music As Divine Consolation

Back in August I participated in an event called Found in Sound: Tales from the Record Store Universe, which was part of a larger event called Transfigurations, which is what Harvest Records calls its anniversary celebration that takes place every five years. Transfigurations has typically been a day- or evening-long music festival of sorts. But this being the twentieth anniversary, Harvest wanted to do something extra-special, and under the guidance of Erin Brethauer (who, alongside her husband, Tim Hussin, runs the creative production company This Land Films), they curated an evening of storytelling, inviting people from their record store universe to share perspectives on how “music speaks to our shared humanity.” I was lucky enough to be one of those people.

In January I received an email from Mark Capon and Matt Schnable, the owners of Harvest Records, where I was a part-time employee from 2015 to 2018, when my therapy practice wasn’t yet robust enough to suffice as my sole source of income. Aside from myself, Matt and Mark are the best bosses I’ve ever had. They pay more than a living a wage, provide substantial year-end bonuses, and treat their employees to a five-day beach vacation every summer. (Although this year they’re going even more above and beyond and taking the whole crew to Seattle for ten days.) But more important than all of that, they’re just lovely people to work with—genuinely kind and caring, and incredibly funny.

When I received the email inviting me to contribute to what would become Found in Sound, my first reaction was to feel deeply honored. Harvest Records is a much beloved institution in Asheville, and I knew this event would draw a large crowd of, well, really cool people. My second reaction was trepidation: Diana Wortham Theater seats 500. The most people I’d ever performed in front of was probably 100, max—and that was at Goddard College, at the end-of-residency talent show, where expectations were pretty low. Then again, that performance had involved singing and playing the guitar, which felt way more vulnerable than simply reading something. And actually, most of my trepidation wasn’t due to any fear of public speaking. It was due to the general lack of interest I’d had in music for the past couple of years. I’d gotten extremely burnt out on it after seven years of hosting a weekly music show on Asheville FM. I hardly even listened to music anymore, aside from occasionally switching over to my iPod while driving around town, and listening to the songs it contained in alphabetical order. (That’s something I’m still doing, and I’m only in the D songs.) Mostly I listened to books on CD, and podcasts. So the notion of writing a “story” (that was another thing—I’m more of an essay writer than a storyteller) about music simply didn’t light me up.

But I said yes. I met Erin Brethauer for coffee a couple days later, and found her to be thoroughly lovely. She was kind and smart and funny and encouraging and totally wide open to any flimsy wisp of an idea that I floated her way. Driving home from that meeting, I switched my car stereo from the Wallace Stegner novel Angle of Repose to my iPod music, and began to think that maybe I could come up with something, some foundation of a story that I could then build on, with Erin’s help.

And that’s exactly what happened. I started writing that night, just typing up random notes about random songs, and eventually landed on a theme that felt workable for me: music as religious experience. Within a week or two I was sending Erin a first draft. And thus began a back-and-forth of her providing feedback and me making revisions based on whatever ideas that feedback inspired. “Music as religious experience” morphed into “music as divine consolation,” and after several more revisions (all along aiming to shorten the damn thing as much as possible, so that instead of being twenty-seven minutes long it was more like eight to twelve), I landed on something that felt deeply true to me and my experience. Something I felt excited about sharing with an audience of five hundred.

And then Erin informed me that Matt and Mark had decided to make Found In Sound a two-night event, which meant that I and my fellow contributors (whoever they were! it was all very mysterious) would be reading our stories twice. And: they were going to pay us! Erin said it might not be much, but I had a feeling it would be more than I expected, and indeed it was. Matt and Mark are nothing if not generous. And I should mention that tickets to Found in Sound were free, as was entry to all of the other Transfigurations events happening that weekend, which included multiple live in-store musical performances, a party with tons of vendors in the gravel lot behind the shop, and a Helado Negro concert at the Orange Peel. They really went all out.

But all in all, people seemed to be most impressed by and grateful for the Found In Sound event—which didn’t just consist of people reading stories on a stage. Behind each of those storytellers was a huge movie screen, on which were projected films and images of various sorts, which reflected what the person was talking about. Some were cartoons, some were videos, and one was an eight-minute stop animation movie. My essay was accompanied by lovely images from the natural world, and footage from a certain very long movie, and pictures of gorgeous album shrines that Erin made. And there was a perfectly subtle musical score by Lynn Fister.

You’re obviously not going to get any of that on this blog, but I still want to share my essay with you. And I also want to share that, thanks to Mark Capon, Bill Fay read the essay you’re about to read and had very nice things to say about it, and, as a special surprise to me and the audience (though I at least found out about it at the dress rehearsal), Kevin Morby wound up performing the Bill Fay song in question, after I finished reading. If you don’t know who Bill Fay or Kevin Morby is, you will soon…  

Music as Divine Consolation

 It is not easy to be here—in this body, this moment, this life. Being human is incredibly difficult.

“Everything is hard.” That’s my motto—my version of the Buddha’s first Noble Truth: there is suffering. And we need all the help we can get, so that we might meet with some degree of courage and equanimity what religion scholar Karen Armstrong calls “the relentless pain and injustice of life.” 

As a psychotherapist, I am highly aware of people’s need for such help. And psychotherapy can certainly be a great support when it comes to accepting life on life’s terms. But what I find most essential to accomplishing, day in and day out, the herculean feat of being human is a regular connection to what I will call the Divine. The word Divine can have a lot of meanings, but what it ultimately means for me is this: a profound source of comfort. The sense that no matter what happens, I’ll be okay. Even in death. 

Connecting with the Divine can look like many things: going to church, spending time in nature, meditating, creating art, making soup, watching baby cows run. 

And I bet for many of us here tonight—gathering to celebrate the twentieth anniversary of our beloved Harvest Records—it looks like listening to music. 

I agree with the musician Nick Cave, who, in the 2022 book Faith, Hope and Carnage, said:

“Music is a spiritual currency unlike any other in its ability to transport people out of their suffering... The indisputable goodness of music, the clear benefits it brings—its capacity to enlarge the spirit, provide solace, companionship, healing, and, well, meaning—is much like religion in a way.” 

Music has been a source of profound comfort for me since I was four years old—probably since before then, perhaps even when I was in utero, soothed by the rhythm of my mother’s heartbeat, and by her singing along to Van Morrison, Jackson Browne, the Grateful Dead, and others. 

But when I was four years old, my father sat me and my older sister down and told us in a voice constricted by tears that he wasn’t going to be living with us anymore. He and my mother were getting divorced. And then he took us out to eat, and then he brought us back home and we watched a long movie together before he left to spend the night at some other house we’d never seen before. The movie that we watched was The Sound of Music. 

I have no memory of that night, or of watching that movie. I only know about it because my dad told me a couple of years ago. But I do remember watching The Sound of Music—the story of a bereaved family brought back to life by song—over and over and over again for many years after that sad night. I was not aware that the story, told in so many enchanting melodies, was comforting me, but it absolutely was. Julie Andrews captured my experience in the very first song: “I know I will hear what I’ve heard before. My heart will be blessed with the sound of music. And I’ll sing once more.”

In another potent music-related memory I am five or six. I’m sitting on the sky-blue carpet of my bedroom floor, gazing at the cover of a Gram Parsons album (my father’s) while that same album hisses and crackles on the turntable. At that age I already knew every word, every note, every tender quiver in Gram’s voice. My mother, worn thin by depression, was probably downstairs taking a nap, and the fallout from the divorce was probably still a source of great sorrow for all of us, but I don’t remember any of that. I just remember feeling perfectly content, gazing at Gram’s face while listening to him harmonize with Emmylou, both of their voices carried aloft on the sweet, mournful tones of Al Perkins’s pedal steel guitar. I did not know I was connecting with the Divine in that moment, but now I do.

And then I’m twelve and thirteen, and every night I lie down on that same sky-blue carpet and do sit-ups and leg-lifts in the dark, while a needle coaxes Joni Mitchell’s voice from grooves in vinyl. I was in the exhausting and lonely throes of an eating disorder and exercise addiction, but my one consolation—my one way of being consoled in that moment—was the 1972 album For the Roses—Joni’s fifth studio release, which is to this day probably the album I’ve heard more than any other in my life. I loved those songs, but more importantly, those songs loved me. In that dark time, they epitomized the literal definition of compassion: to suffer with. Those songs did not cure my sickness (my parents’ loving attention would do that soon enough), but they were with me all the way through it, night after night, assuring me I would be okay—assuring me I was okay.

And that’s pretty much what I’ve been seeking in music ever since. 

When I was a DJ at Asheville FM, it brought me great pleasure to share songs that I liked with my community, to introduce people to artists they might not otherwise have discovered. But I didn’t want to simply like a song. I wanted to love it. And I wanted it to love me. I wanted it to feel helpful somehow, like it was connecting me with all that is sacred about being human. 

One day, for instance, while working at Harvest Records, Mark stuck a post-it note onto a Kevin Morby CD that was on display at the front of the store. 

On that bright square of paper he’d written a brief review of the album Singing Saw. This review included a “recommended if you like” list. And that list included someone named Fay. F-A-Y.

“Who’s Fay?” I asked.

“Bill Fay,” Mark said. “He’s a British singer-songwriter from the seventies. You should check out his album "Time of the Last Persecution.”

It was Fay’s second album, recorded in one day and released in 1971, when he was twenty-eight. Inspired by the books of Daniel and Revelation in the Bible, it did not sell well, and Fay’s record label dropped him. 

For. Shame.

Even if all the songs on that album sucked—which they definitely do not—it should have been flying off the shelves if only for one song: “Plan D.” Here was a song I’d been seeking: a song I loved, and a song that loved me.

Right out of the gate it reminded me of Bob Dylan. The opening guitar strums are very reminiscent of his songs “Tangled Up in Blue” and “Visions of Johanna.” Then there was Fay’s voice—also reminiscent of Dylan, and yes, Kevin Morby—so warm and earthy and full of genuine feeling. And there were his words, which instantly grabbed my attention and held it: “Well now soon Plan D will be released, and the seas shall rise, and the skies open.” 

I vaguely knew that this was a Biblical reference, probably from the Book of Revelation—the apocalyptic prophecy of Christ’s second coming—but for me it resonated as a reference to something far more modern: climate change. One of the many things that makes being a human today so difficult and scary.  

But what Fay says next is deeply comforting. He says, “Can’t you see you’re in on it? You were born, though you need not have been born here at all.”

Scientists have determined that the chances of you being born as you are one in four hundred trillion. So, basically zero. Each of us is essentially an impossibility. So how could we not be in on it? In on everything that happens here? Including the apocalypse, or any other way in which we’ll meet our demise? This notion of being “in on it” endears me to death, which is something I need to feel at least somewhat endeared toward because the alternative is fear. To quote Joanna Newsom in the song “Sawdust & Diamonds,” “Enough of this terror! We deserve to know light, and grow evermore lighter and lighter.”

Then comes my favorite line in “Plan D.” It’s actually one of my all-time favorite lines in all of music: “Is that not some cause for worship, being born among these trees, though the beast is lurking?”

This one line contains the entire human condition, or what Nick Cave calls “the human predicament.” We are born into—or you might say out of—a mind-blowingly beautiful world (here symbolized by trees) that is also a world filled with danger and hardship and grief. 

We are born “among these trees,” with that word “among” implying that we are not so different from said trees. We come out of the earth just like they do. But these trees—this beauty—cannot protect us from “the beast.”

And for Bill Fay, that is a reason to worship. Being born among these trees isn’t reason enough. The beast has to be there, because without it, all the beauty would be meaningless. Without it, we would never know the exquisitely human joy of divine consolation. And what comes with that consolation—indeed, what imbues it with joy—is gratitude for its source. As a child, listening to Gram Parsons and Joni Mitchell over and over again, I was not just receiving comfort from their songs. I was sending love to them. And I think we all know how pure that love is, the love for a song. We know what it’s like to be grateful for a song, right down to our bones. We know we will hear what we’ve heard before, and our hearts will be blessed.