Track of the year? Easy. Rickie Lee Jones' 'I was There', from The Sermon on Exposition Boulevard.
I am admirer of devotional music, music that seems to meditate on an events in religious narratives - not, though Taverner's 'musical icons' which seem kitschy to me (but perhaps I am put off my the image of the solitary composer that he presents; the creator-aristocrat), nor Arvo Part's petrified choral pieces, ice cold, out on the planet Mars.
It's a voice close to speech that I want to hear - a speech-song, close to popular idioms, vernacular, and the devotion revealed in a happy deformation of song, the stretching of some part of its elements - it's becoming jazz-like, improvisational. And a sense of that voice trying to find something, discovering, and not only the heart of the narrative (in Rickie Lee Jones' case, the Passion). A voice that also discovers something of itself - that looks for itself in the singing. That sings to dwell in itself, looking for itself, losing itself, and this even in the case of RLJ, who after all has had a long career.
You can hear it on the whole album - The Sermon on Exposition Boulevard, a long meditation on the life of Jesus that cluminates in its last, long track, 8 minutes long (I'm listening to it now): something has been lost - the assurance of an RLJ idiom (not simply the jazz-boho shtick of the early albums. More than that), and found because of the narrative and its musing, its recreation (but the last album, The Evening of My Best Day was also a renewal - out of political rage, was that it?). Jesus on the Saint Monica Boulevard. Jerusalem become Los Angeles, but keeping too the old Biblical signifiers (Jerusalem, Israel, and Babylon ('what happened was Babylon ...')) - keeping them, renewing them as those names are mixed with new ones.
A devotional music - guitar-work Astral Weeks-like: generous, opening the song out into a song-world. Chords that open out the song, that right away you know will let it encompass everything. And the voice - intimate, searching, virtuosic in its dynamic changes, its softnesses and risings. And the lyrics - extemporised, made up all at once, you can hear that, I think.
Who is the RLJ who sings this? I haven't heard her before (previous highlights: her cover of 'Comin' Back to Me' from Pop Pop; the many sweet songs of Traffic in Paradise; 'Last Chance Texaco' that Morrissey played very loud to the muscians who would play on 'Late Night, Maudlin Street', another miracle of extemporisation ...) A devotional music - because it really is the Passion story that allows it. That story, retold, that permits of an entirely new mood in her singing. I've never heard her like this before ... she's never been heard like this before ...
I admit that I love Messianic lyrics - as on Nina Simone's album 'There's a New World Coming, as it resonates strongly with the contemporaneous civil rights movement - RLJ sings at the same end of times, but in a different way, more tenderly, intimately. 'There you were in your white dress shirt/ Most of all I loved your hands/ I loved them so much that it hurt ...' Witnessing for whom? The one the bartenders knew. And the pimps.
A devotional music. A song-prayer, but to whom? A passion - but for whom? For the voice, in part. For the singer's own voice that has become strange to her, and strange for us, her listeners. A rapt voice. A voice that moves - with dips and rallying points. Drowsy sometimes, but suddenly attentive. Almost asleep - sensually drowsy, I would want to say that. But waking - tenderly, and in a new kind of tenderness.
'I was there', she sings. And 'you were there', sung many times. 'Where Jesus walked'. She addresses the others who were there sometimes. There - with Jesus, or drinking wine and eating bread with him? or in communion? - and sometimes sings to Jesus himself: 'We thought you were going to set Israel straight ...', but Israel, now, is only the Biblical Israel, the chosen ones who are also the benighted ones.
Verses? A chorus? None of that. The song pulses. Not quite revolves. But returns to itself, regathering. Musing, meditating. Returning to an event, to the significance of the event. A récit of the event. A Bhagavad Gita of the event - a divine song that sings of the divine song. The song lodged in the greater song. 'You've been travelling in so many universes ...' Pulsing - the song rediscovers the song. And the singer her own singing, reaching deeper into her voice than she can. Devotional.
Don't mistake me. The song is not great because it undertakes a journey of faith. The Passion is the Passion of the song first of all. And the faith is given entirely by the voice, of the voice (just as Bob Dylan says: I don't believe in anything but those old songs). A voice rediscovers itself in the Passion. Rediscovers tenderness, sensuality. Rediscovers Babylon and Israel (the Biblical Israel). And the Nazarene? A name for what calls the voice, what draws it from itself. A name for that singing called forward in its maximal tenderness, in its stretched-out sensuality. Generosity - is that the word? Giving - is that it?
Who is RLJ's Jesus? Who is he, sung of in tenderness? Who that awakens this devotional song? A name for the sufferer of all suffering. A name for Jerusalem at the heart of Babylon, where suffering changes its direction, where it rears itself up into a life - where it lives concentrated in one agonised form. The Passion names nothing other than this. To suffer - and for whom? For everyone, and with the suffering of everyone. It is not that the meaning of suffering is changed. It is not. 'The Son of Man' is a name for all suffering. For suffering in the kingdom of Babylon, which is to say this world, the only world.
But there is the promise of a kind of redemption, too. The promise that is Messianism. Not of the transmutation of suffering. Not the end of pain. But the fact that it can be spoken - sung. That it is given issue and can be heard. That the wrongs can be heard, and perhaps right can be done. Babylon speaks and sings of itself. Babylon discovers Jerusalem and sings of it (the Biblical Jerusalem). That is devotion. That is what it had meant to be there. That's what it means to sing from there.