Just Another Sense Of Wonder

I've heard some good albums and songs this year, seen a few good shows, but my musical "best of" for 2009 consists of a singular experience I've been fortunate enough to take in close to ten times: seeing/hearing Bill Fox play his guitar and sing his own and others' songs. In a year when Bob Dylan has released two new albums (belated review of the Christmas album--A for effort, B for content [though "Must Be Santa" is an instant classic]), that's no small praise from me. You might be tempted to chalk it up to a long anticipation, as I first fell in love with Bill's music in 1997 when he released his Shelter From The Smoke album and, despite his being a native Clevelander, I had never gotten the chance to see him before. It was a long ten years waiting to hear live and in-person the likes of "Over And Away She Goes," "Lonesome Pine," and, from 1998's Transit Byzantium record, "My Baby Crying," but when I finally did, the day after Christmas last year, I was transfixed. Fixed, perhaps, being the operative word, because making the trek west to Cleveland's Happy Dog, where Bill seems to play most often, about once a month, quickly became a sort of drug run for me. And as I was happily re-fixed again just last night, I can tell you I'm not looking to enter rehab for this addiction anytime soon.

You have to start with the voice. Last night I turned to Sean, Happy Dog proprietor, breaking our usual awestruck silence to say, "If I could ever describe Bill's voice accurately, it would be the greatest piece of writing I've ever done." Ineffable and ineluctable are words that come to mind, like trying to describe the breeze. It's high but not really lonesome. Dignified somehow, knowing, respectful, intelligent, and steeped in his experience of life. Metaphors fail: his voice is like the first high-pitched drag on a cigarette, scenery flying by a fast train's window, the breeze you thank God for.

Hardly. It's a voice you have no choice but to listen to when you hear it.

Maybe the best praise I could give Bill is to say that he never seems to perform. You listen to the voice, and the guitar, and take in the songs, and that's all you do, listen because there's no choice or desire to do anything else. And that's probably good enough for Bill, I guess--your listening to his songs and his singing. There's little stage patter from him, maybe a nod to the writer of a song he's just sung that isn't his, Woody Guthrie, Bob Dylan, The Byrds, but that's it. Usually by the time you're finished applauding one song, the next one's started. It's the music that matters, not the performer, it seems. I catch myself watching his feet every once in a while, one--usually the left--tilted back on its heel, toes several inches from the floor. Outside of that, nothing distracts you from the songs.

And the songs, my God. Torrents of words and images, entwined within and around ancient sounding folk melodies, internal rhymes, tales of love and place and character. The term singer-songwriter is way too pedestrian and cloying for these songs. Troubador sounds too pretentious, but there's definitely a sense, to me at least, of something classical, wise, dependable in so many of the songs. And something certainly Romantic (and all that the capital R suggests) in Bill's words and voice and melodies. To say, "this guy's read some classic poetry," might sound horribly precious, but to me it's high praise--the proof is in the cadences, the compact language, the overall informed sensibility of his songs.

Bah. You try expressing what a thing of beauty something is and you end up sounding like an overly educated architecture critic writing greeting cards. Bill's songs and his singing and playing are beautiful, and really, nothing else matters. Why even bother to put the experience of hearing such wonderful music into mere words? Listen for yourself. Shelter From The Smoke and Transit Byzantium both recently have been re-released. Get them. Better yet, catch him at the Happy Dog. It's great music. Merely. Simply. Thankfully.

Bill Fox-Lonesome Pine