390“Split Ends” - Ben Weaver
It’s beginning to seem we’ve elapsed some significant, unnoticed hour. That there is no mirth left in this fall. It’s all cold harvest and bucked-up sensibility, all cleaning up the fields and putting down the yards. All the colors that will be have been and the rest of the leaves will fall from green straight to gone.
We are entering quiet days. Between the spoils of autumn and the snow.
The snow can get you by, no doubt. Once it all comes down and the city tucks and settles into itself and grows plum under the street lamps and the insulation of a laden night sky. Once we are in miniature again, risen and anchored by the weight of winter. Once the next adventure arrives, we will be ok.
But these days. They are purgatorial and slow growth. Too mild to be dangerous, too cold and old for the rush of ellipses or dashes. This midseason is all perfunctory graphite periods and no brackets. No subtext, all subtext. And “the longing could sink a ship.” We need something to hold on to, you see. Something better than everything that has grown slim and spare as black branches and the frosted gardens, decomposing in the cold. We need something to sustain us through the void, while we abide this inbetwixt.
I’ve been waiting for October 19th like a crop.
And now it’s here and I can tell you to do yourself a favor: To go buy Ben Weaver’s sparse, beautiful new album Mirepoix and Smoke and drive around listening to it for the next four, five, six weeks until the snow comes, until something sweeter than all of this falls and saves us.
Some people do good and some people are good. Ben is both.
Someone from the Utne Reader wrote a review about Ben and compared him to Greg Brown and Tom Waits, then said he’s like that “spooky old guy who lives in a trailer but tells amazing stories.” And there is a creel full of ghosts in this album and on that stage when Ben drawls these hymns and his compatriot plucks at a bass taller than she is, so maybe that writer was on to something.
The other day Ben said that he is leery of translations, but wrote and told me he trusted Charles Wright to get Eugenio Montale just about right because he is a poet too. And I wonder how many people I know care about words enough to consider the integrity of whoever will describe them to us.
Ben is a good man and a kind friend with no pretensions in a world lousy with them and it just so happens that he also makes music that carries you around the city like freight tracks, past all the old scenery and the hidden beaches in the tangle down at the river’s edge and the broken warehouses and shared gardens for four families or five. Indirect but not lost. Indirect, but still headed home.
It just so happens that you might need this album more than Ben needs to sell it.
I hope you find it like I have found it. That it keeps you through these days too.
