"Into the Mystic", the ep and the Van: oh, man—winds, boats, bunkers, whistles, screams, sounds, sea, sky, silence, signs, souls, hearts, brains, gravedirt, fire; the metaphysical bent of this season, which is in so many ways text and meta- taking stock of itself, where heaven and earth and hell are all off-kilter with death-loss (death death?), all, well, if the universe ain’t gonna right itself, to what, binaries, brothers, demons, angels-- who will.
“Prison Grove”: Dean's goodnight ballad --Zevon's goodnight ballad (gallows ballad, really) from his final album( self-elegy, really), "The Wind”; the elegiac tone in brother-righting exchanges over graves, or guns, or cold ones, in the sundown and the life-and-death and the how-to-live-right; the memory box, the open-and-close, the quiet undercurrent of the whole season. Beg those portentious prisoner-lyrics, those bars and bunkers and bible-black; ask for light when light isn’t the answer.
"Into the Mystic": what do you do when you're so full of loss (es) that (you can’t sleep, you dream of the dark, you hear the bean sidhe); you hope there are still places that aren't hell or heaven or purgatory or the empty, you get faith o the kind that lets you mouth off to the devil,gaze into monsterless suns, keep memories, believe in retirement, in gypsy souls that can still come home. Yeah, that.
“Prison Grove”
"Into the Mystic" (live)
