Concord | Karen Solie

My boyfriend dropped me on the Greyhound station in Nice Falls, Montana. A January afternoon, already darkish, and he had a protracted drive north forward of him. I purchased my ticket and sat close to the gate with my guitar and lime-green cardboard suitcase, one in all a set Mother had been given for her honeymoon. I’d deliberate on being in Austin for 4 months, and took astonishingly little. This was a very long time in the past, the Nineteen Nineties. No laptops, then, for one factor. No passport. In a shoulder bag I had vacationers’ cheques, a mickey of vodka, Ondaatje’s The Collected Works of Billy the Child, Stevens’s Chosen Poems, a Penguin version of The Full Poems of William Blake. I’d justified the journey as analysis towards an unbiased examine on Blake as half of my undergraduate English diploma on the College of Lethbridge in Alberta. I couldn’t inform you now the main focus of that paper. However the College of Texas at Austin holds a group of Blake’s drawings and prints, and no matter my thesis was, I’d pitched these holdings as central to it. 

In reality I used to be going to Austin to play music with my buddy B–, who’d moved there a yr or two earlier to make his title. It was an open invitation, no guarantees however for the prospect, to paraphrase B–’s letter, to begin my life. I believed it had began. After graduating from group faculty with a journalism diploma, I’d labored as a reporter for The Lethbridge Herald, lined the canine reveals and bake gross sales of mid-market dailies in addition to the humanities, native disasters, rural politics, and court docket. After I obtained my first demise menace the newsroom applauded. I cold-called the mother and father of a younger man who’d died in a office accident, and the identical day argued with the proprietor of a furnishings retailer over an promoting function he thought of underwhelming. A gradual author who disliked battle, I wasn’t, as they are saying, a terrific match. Assigned to write down up just a few folks membership occasions, I fell in with B–’s crowd of musicians and visible artists, which additional eroded my already porous curiosity within the scoop. 

You’ll discover your individuals, we inform the misfits. My early comrades got here from my mother and father’ bookshelves. Flannery O’Connor and Shirley Jackson, Gogol and Steinbeck, two of Dad’s favorites. Once we returned to the farm this February from Regina Basic Hospital, his books have been open to the pages he’d been studying. He all the time had a number of on the go. From the time he was a toddler, Dad farmed the southwest Saskatchewan homestead his Norwegian mother and father made, however he skilled additionally as an engineering technologist. Alongside Richard Flanagan’s Gould’s Ebook of Fish and Anna Burns’s Milkman, a reference textual content titled Power of Supplies: “The maximum value of the bending moment is under the load.”

My new artwork pals learn too, and most extra extensively than I had—philosophy, drama, essays, even poetry, of which I used to be woefully ignorant. Working jobs within the CP railyard or as carers for adults with mental disabilities, in grocery and liquor shops, as handbook laborers or within the bars had made them diplomatic and collaborative. This being southern Alberta, a number of have been no less than partly Mormon. A job on the paper had been the closest commerce to literature I may consider, and in some ways it was good coaching, the way in which firefighting is sweet coaching for arson. After practically three years on the Herald, intoxicated by new affect, I went again to highschool.

B– taught me to play guitar and in return I paid him in groceries, largely whiskey and cheese. He was a great musician and songwriter, and a born frontman, charismatic and sort, an uncommon mixture. I used to be none of these issues. However I performed and sang with B– and with the revolving cohort of our pals for years within the bars, at festivals and events, within the thriving scene of Lethbridge in these days of overseas movie sequence and bizarre artwork reveals, of listening to Townes Van Zandt, Gram and Emmylou, Neil Younger, The Band, honkytonk and Delta blues, sitting on the flooring of low-cost flats with shared bogs. I’d began to learn poems by that point and had come to acknowledge that the subset of excellent track lyrics which might be good poems—and vice versa—is vanishingly small. The subset of writers who can do each is even smaller. Because the poet Matthew Zapruder and others have identified, the distinction is contextual and due to this fact structural. The phrases of the poem are accompanied by silence. Track lyrics are in dialog with different parts: melody, instrumentation, the singer’s voice and elegance. I used to be underneath no phantasm that I used to be a musician. I wasn’t a lot of a author both. However when it got here right down to it, I merely hadn’t been wherever, and when my boyfriend selected an abroad internship I noticed in B–’s invitation my very own journey.

My recollections of Austin, already fragmented and unreliable, really feel much more distant now within the instant aftermath of Dad’s demise. He appreciated a number of the music we have been into—bluegrass, folks, basic nation, and a few of what occupied the newish class of alt-country. And he valued the independence and curiosity my half-baked plan represented, whilst its sensible points involved him. Many particulars of the journey are like small elements rolled into the darkish, underneath the damaged machine of significance they’re essential to. I don’t know the way it all provides up. What has been assembled may be taken aside, Dad would say. What’s taken aside may be put again collectively. To dwell is to fly/each high and low. Within the farm store that was, that’s, an extension of him, one in all my jobs as a child was to carry the difficulty mild. Possibly now he’ll maintain it for me. 

I see in on-line images that the Nice Falls Greyhound depot is the sort of vaguely deco public constructing I’m keen on now. My lingering impression of its inside casts it in a frugal palette of browns. Tile, plastic chairs, fake wooden. Brown as a sensible philosophy. A merchandising machine offered me the primary bottle of orange juice for my vodka, a cigarette machine’s lever pulled was the mechanical sound of irrevocable alternative. Goodbye to all my pals/it’s time to go once more. Behind a kiosk, a middle-aged lady hardened by gratuitous dispute. A chilly static of intuition switched on when a pair of trainers appeared inches from the place I sat with my nostril in a ebook. He stood till I appeared up at him, whereupon he requested the place I used to be going. I advised him. He opened his ticket in entrance of my face. Waco. 

He pestered me relentlessly over the three days on a bus, however not solely me. As a pest he was versatile, a pure, lived and breathed it, was both pestering or asleep. In all probability he was lonely. However there was a free wire in it. I’d recognized individuals who have been pleasant till they weren’t. You keep well mannered. You retain to your self. You don’t need to give them any concepts.

To journey by Greyhound means fifteen minutes of believable consolation adopted by the determined pursuit of unconsciousness. The journey to Austin reappears as a picaresque lit by noon or studying mild, streetlights of nameless predominant drags, neon, blowing snow, moon a frozen hen’s eye, then blowing mud, the bus both full or near-empty. The phrases have been spoken as if there was no ebook,/Besides that the reader leaned above the web page. I attempted to fabricate round myself a Stevensian capsule of summary calm. Endeavored, like Ondaatje’s hunters and assassins, to come back to chaos impartial. I washed my hair within the rest room of a Texaco in Cheyenne. Once we reboarded the driving force stated, Smoke ’em when you bought ’em, I’m certain as hell gonna, and the half-dozen of us rolled by means of the evening as in a coach to the Underworld, over the mountains and into Colorado. 

Are you excited, we’re virtually there, requested the pest in Amarillo. Throughout a layover in Dallas I found a room reserved for moms and infants, neither of whom stated something; I stayed and sipped my screwdrivers. At Waco the pest advised me he was fairly certain I ought to change for the direct path to Austin. The one I used to be on was a milk run. Takes ceaselessly. He knew the buses round right here. I ought to comply with him, and hurry. A retaining wall crumbled inside me and I stated to the driving force I would have to get my issues, that I’d been advised the opposite bus to Austin was the one I wanted. He narrowed his eyes, leaned ahead, abdomen in a white shirt over his belt, and stated Miss, you go ask on the counter. This bus gained’t go away till you come again and speak to me. And there may be there the identical stress as with stars,/the one altered transfer that may make them maniac. It wasn’t the one time in Texas a stranger got here to my assist. Thought so, he stated, once I returned. The pest had made himself scarce. Indignant climate in my head, too.

Luck, probability, destiny. Stevens’s very important, smug, deadly, dominant X. As if it have been Rome, all roads appear to guide there, to the middle of the labyrinth that the felony Scharlach in his delirium, in Borges’s story “Death and the Compass,” acknowledges because the world. 

            Ondaatje: I’m unable to maneuver,/with nothing in my arms. 

            Stevens: That’s what distress is,/Nothing to have at coronary heart.

            Van Zandt: I didn’t see nothing, I didn’t hear nothing/I stood there like a block of stone realizing all I needed to know.

Coincidence stacked within the vertical dimension of a chord. Dad’s docs, helpless and defensive. Every part that might go fallacious went fallacious. My anger a nothing that confuses previous for current, rattling the door that has locked behind it. 

I need to return by means of that door, restart time with Dad speaking out an issue on the kitchen desk. What to seed and when. What and the right way to construct or modify. How a lot water would wish hauling to place two inches on the ball diamond to inexperienced it and preserve down the mud earlier than the sportsday, as a result of when the fellows on the town had an issue like that, they referred to as Dad. Given sufficient time, he stated, he didn’t suppose there was something he couldn’t work out. It was a course of that started most frequently with the phrase What a man may do is . . . My query right here is clear. I think that, typically, Dad loved the issue as a lot as having solved it. 

In Lethbridge we performed a number of covers. To cowl a track you have to examine it, perceive its phrasing and modifications. It’s essential to dwell in its caesuras, hear how your voice would possibly carry there. The quiet was a part of the that means, a part of the thoughts. The method is intuitive and technical, and what I discovered from finding out songs is that method and instinct develop collectively and may’t be separated. Inside this relationship you be taught your vary and, with it, your limitations. For those who can’t, say, decrease your voice on its rope right down to the place the primary phrases of “I Fall to Pieces” dwell as if on the backside of a properly, and when you can’t, on the apex of the primary verse, permit its confession of failure to flee with the excessive word out of the aperture, comply with it along with your voice virtually the way in which you’ll along with your eye—then you need to keep it up working towards awhile longer in non-public, out of respect. You be taught respect for the way troublesome it’s to make a track appear easy, for the mechanics that make doable an immediacy of feeling, and also you be taught to like the issue. I can’t discover it, we’d say, trying to find the word, the timing, the tone. I can’t fairly get there. The apprenticeship of covers by no means ends. It’s not about imitation, although might have to start there. You may’t get artistic with the issues songs pose till you’ll be able to determine these issues. You may’t create your personal songs, your personal units of issues, till you may get artistic with the issues you have already got. 

One of the best I’ve been capable of do in a band as a participant is to fill in some fundamental acoustic guitar and keep out of everybody’s manner. One of the best I can do as a songwriter might be to not do it. I do know this as a result of I’ve executed it, have written songs that handle to be wordy in only a few phrases, each overthought and unfinished, and missing good rhyme’s simultaneous inevitability and shock. I’ve even carried out them. Not in Austin, although. It wasn’t concern or self-consciousness that restrained me, it was cause and fundamental human decency. I had not dedicated to the artwork among the many many individuals who completely had dedicated to it. Austin taught me that you may be good at one thing, even nice, and by no means make a residing at it, a lot much less be well-known (there may be ample proof that the obverse can also be true). Ready at a bus cease with my guitar on the way in which to follow, I used to be approached by a person who stated if I used to be a musician I ought to take into consideration promoting my plasma. Actually, he stated, I simply got here from there, and gave me a card. 

I appreciated follow finest. The blokes in B–’s group have been variety, no less than to my face, which was just about all anybody needed to go on then. I appreciated arranging and understanding the vocals. Even when my half was minimal or nonexistent I discovered from listening to the others do it. I’ve described my most well-liked place in a band dynamic as “happy second banana,” however in Austin I used to be third, fourth, or fifth banana. The additional banana. I loved the privateness of the complement whereas I explored my fascination, my topic of examine, which was concord. My place, as I noticed it, was at an interval.

I can’t keep in mind a time when concord wasn’t as pure to me as singing itself. In a really early reminiscence, adults drink round a fireplace within the yard, Mother performs guitar, and he or she and her buddy sing “Tom Dooley,” “You Are My Sunshine,” “Where Have All the Flowers Gone,” and I sing the third above with out fascinated by it, the structure of chords in my thoughts’s ear, the intervals between pitches, having been constructed by data: Peter, Paul, and Mary, the New Christy Minstrels, the Hollies, the Byrds. I studied classical piano by means of elementary and highschool, discovered the rudiments of concept, sight studying, and ear coaching. A thriller developed between what I felt on the within and discovered from the skin. The primary time you hear your voice by means of a monitor will educate you. There isn’t a denying then whether or not capability is satisfactory to feeling, whether or not feeling informs capability. However the thriller is greater than the sum of those elements, the way in which that concord is greater than intervals. 

There may be in concord, the Austrian composer Ernst Toch writes, a “desire, leaning and tendency.” In a dialog with Rodney Crowell, Emmylou Harris acknowledges the magic of sibling harmonies—she references the Louvin Brothers, the Everly Brothers—however says, “I love singing with somebody else who’s totally unrelated to me because then you really are coming from different planets in a way. And so this third voice that you create is like nothing that has ever existed before.” When Emmylou and Gram sing “Love Hurts,” within the lengthened second syllable of “togetherness” this third voice rises like a phoenix from the ash of loss. Crowell says {that a} single voice “calls out to you in the night. But then when there are voices raised together, there’s some kind of joy that comes into it.”

Whenever you discover the interval along with your voice a tuning fork is struck inside you, you turn into a resonator, and the second expands. The vertical dimension of the chord widens to accommodate fashion. Concord attends to melody by means of the horizontal dimension, as counterpoint over time. “While the notion ‘chord,’” Toch writes, “carries much more the flavor of something solid, static, substantial, measurable, the ‘harmony’ notion implies the aspect of the fluid, unsubstantial, immeasurable. We may say chord is to harmony as body is to soul; or harmony is the soul of the chord.” The soul is a physique in time. Concord is a perceiver. Alongside the route of the track concord accompanies melody—during which Schopenhauer sees mirrored humanity’s “most secret story”—however concord accompanies much more so the singer of the melody. Concord falls again and converges, crossing the trail of the result in take the excessive highway or the low, gauging how its singer feels contained in the track that day, anticipating variations, and also you lean towards one another. The American musicologist Edward Lippman writes that “the basic prerequisite” of concord is “the existence of two or more distinguishable entities somehow capable of mutual adjustment.” You may follow a track a thousand occasions and nonetheless its first word sends you into the unknown. When the acquainted and unknown coincide in your voices you’ll seldom really feel as shut to a different human being. 

I used to be onstage just a few occasions with B–’s band or with B–, simply the 2 of us, taking part in for ideas. However largely—hanging out on the Continental Membership, the Gap within the Wall, the Austin Outhouse—I listened to different individuals: Junior Brown, Kelly Willis, Blaze Foley, Jimmy LaFave, Alejandro Escovedo, Jimmie Dale Gilmore, and dozens of native artists and bands whose names time and Shiner Bock have erased. Raised up on Canadian high-test, B– and I may drink a number of Shiner Bock. Invited alongside by a buddy of B–’s to a home social gathering, I discovered myself in a circle of musicians warmed by long-standing friendships and alcohol, and thought, in a match of excessive romance, that that is how individuals get faith, these voices, the double bass, six-string, dobro, mandolin. A clearing inside a lineage, a wellspring, Blake’s Eternity in an hour. By raging nerves however nonetheless largely harmless of the corporate, I sang with B– the outdated songs we’d discovered in Lethbridge. Heartbreak, homicide, coal mines. Towards the tip of the evening our host took up her guitar and stated she had a brand new track she wasn’t certain about. It was referred to as “Jackson.” The subsequent time I noticed Lucinda Williams she was accepting a Grammy Award. 

A view from the creator’s household farmstead, Saskatchewan, Canada, 2023

The creator’s father’s mix harvester, Saskatchewan, Canada, 2023

Enamored of Austin, of my pals by proxy, I used to be constantly distracted, at occasions fantastically inept. Having simply cashed my traveler’s cheques, I left my pockets with $500 in it on a metropolis bus. Panicked and humiliated, I advised no one, discovered the tackle to the primary depot on the east aspect, and caught one other bus. A number of, truly, earlier than I boarded the appropriate one. By the point I arrived, so had the pockets. Each greenback was there. Jesus loves you, stated the girl on the misplaced and located, and proper then I believed that he did. In a fog of elation I left the station to search out the cease for the bus again downtown. It was nightfall. I used to be catcalled from a shifting automotive that circled the block and drove by once more, slowly. When doubtful, ask, Dad stated; however ask somebody who is aware of. I don’t keep in mind if I heard his voice then, however I’m listening to it now. I hightailed it again to the depot, to Jesus and the girl on the desk. She despatched me out on a shift change in a gauntlet of burly drivers who noticed me to my cease and waved me off. 

At this time Austin is among the dearer cities within the US. Solely a decade in the past, it was probably the most inexpensive. Within the Nineteen Nineties there was money and time to go to reveals, to eat out, to have little road-trip adventures. That I completed that examine on Blake appears outrageous, contemplating all we bought as much as. In the home B– had organized for me to lease a room in, I sat on the couch surrounded by notes and photocopies made at UT Austin’s libraries, wrote longhand as my roommates’ three golden retrievers lay on the ground at angles like fallen directional indicators, and the odd rat out on enterprise scurried by. Lots of people I knew in Austin had rats. Cockroaches have been all over the place. The large flying variety. It appears there are two methods to get used to one thing: in a short time or by no means. Waking within the white rooms of Texas after a nasty evening should be like heaven I feel now.

I continued in bands, in duos, once I returned to Lethbridge, and even periodically in Victoria, the place I went to graduate college. After I moved to Toronto, I made pals who would collect sometimes to sing and play. Music felt so necessary to writing that it was a shock when, after a troublesome private loss, it left me. This occurred cruelly, casually, one other slow-blooming flower in a backyard of spoil. My voice dried up. So did my want to be taught songs, the place as soon as I practiced for hours because the room darkened round me. I couldn’t even hearken to music anymore, no less than to not something of magnificence. It isn’t an unusual expertise, I collect, and could be linked to Aristoxenus’s concept of musical understanding within the Elementa Harmonica: “For we have to perceive what is coming to be and remember what has come to be. There is no other way of following the contents of music.” In a depleted current, the perceived fullness of the previous could trigger ache. The road between what offers solace and what requires it may be very wonderful. 

At an public sale in Victoria, Dad purchased a basket containing a pile of elements that had been a four-string banjo. Within the farm store he rebuilt it, then taught himself to play. He typically inspired me and my brother to carry out the devices. That I pleaded callousless fingerpads, that I had forgotten all lyrics, couldn’t sing, now appears egocentric. Flip away no extra:/Why wilt thou flip away. However within the last days earlier than Dad died, within the room the employees had given over to us, my brother having introduced from the farm his Nationwide Metal guitar, we sang John Prine, Johnny Money, Hank Williams, Townes. Nothing like sibling harmonies, Dad stated, absolutely current for all of it, lower than per week earlier than his birthday in a winter of file chilly, and we sang and laughed and cried by turns previous the time we have been normally advised to depart on the evening they didn’t make us go away. 

The Pythagoreans believed that the identical mathematical rules that govern the relationships and actions of the cosmos reveal themselves to us in concord; that mathematical and pure rules are each other’s voices. This is the reason, they thought, music regulates its listener’s temper and character, the way in which the moon regulates the tide. The spirit, ever suspicious of the bounds of its mortal container, affirms in concord its sense of scale, of itself as present in extra of these limits. It’s reacquainted with, as Toch writes, an “inborn urge to move.” Shake the mud off of your wings/and the tears out of your eyes, Townes sings, whilst we are able to hear in his voice the tears accumulating in his personal. 

One in every of my final gigs with the band was close to La Grange, me and the boys within the van out to some sort of social gathering in a wooded space midway to Houston. Low cost beer and biker colours, evening gathering within the bushes, fairy lights and folding tables. At all times I used to be nervous, and nerves made me tentative, have been a noise I needed to battle by means of to search out the interval. B– advised me I wanted to be braver, and he was proper. A lot of life is dependent upon deciding how a lot disgrace to have. Possibly it was a mixture of the partygoers’ inattention, the anarchic woods, and the temper of the band, however I felt good onstage. By the primary refrain of “Dead Flowers”—the Stones’ model, not Townes’s unhappy, shattered cowl—my toes have been underneath me. When it goes properly the flexibility to anticipate and adapt is an athletic feeling of physique reminiscence. We tore it up, train-crashed the ending, and B– rotated and hugged me. When within the crowd a battle broke out we didn’t care to stay round for, we threw the gear within the van and drove again to Austin.

We bought the sky to speak about/and the earth to lie upon. Dad wasn’t a non secular individual. He met spirit within the land, household, music, in determining the right way to make issues work and the right way to have enjoyable. On the prime of his checklist for his memorial have been dwell music and liquor. The group corridor in my tiny hometown stuffed up with individuals I now not acknowledged. Most of those that spoke about Dad used the phrase “methodical,” even when the tales have been about entering into bother. In her eulogy my sister recalled A small job for the farm store as one in all Dad’s signature sayings. I sang concord to Townes’s “If I Needed You,” a track Dad liked, my brother on the Nationwide Metal. He needed to tune right down to accommodate my narrowed vary so I may sing lead on a verse, as Emmylou does in her cowl with Don Williams. That was all it took to unravel the issue, to tune down a bit of. And also you’ll miss dawn when you shut your eyes/and that might break my coronary heart in two.

Concord is the sound of construction. It’s additionally a deeply intuitive expertise of sample recognition. “Given a world replete with internal relationships,” writes Lippman, “music can easily account not only for the mathematical meanings of harmony, but for the entire generality of the term which develops as part of a progressive musicalization of every aspect of experience.” I don’t know if the metaphor of expertise as music can ease the issue of expertise; however music because the voice of inner relationships would possibly permit one to really feel a part of the world, inside the internet of relation that, just like the spirit, appears to exceed bodily boundaries. Concord is simultaneity, and it comforts me to think about Dad as concurrently right here and never right here, as if he weren’t gone, however at an interval. The concept is a little bit of a attain, however that’s what discovering any consolation appears to require.