Shearwater: "You as You Were"

I first came across Shearwater via Jonathan Meiburg’s devastating cover of Randy Newman’s “God’s Song (That’s Why I Love Mankind).” This fact has always struck me as a little ironic, since Meiburg’s last LPs have come across as loving, meditative, ecstatic: in a word, holy. So there he was, on the AV Club, singing achingly, gorgeously, a song about God’s general spitefulness in the face of his suffering people, the very fact of existence a cruel joke second only to the awareness of that existence. “You really need me!” Meiburg sang, and you could hear God surprising Himself at the revelation.

Perhaps it’s only contradictory on the surface level; I once heard someone define holiness as the struggle itself to attain it, that the tension produced between temptation and idealism is where life is lived, becomes beautiful, sublime. Shearwater’s music is in that middle struggle, which they cast as the disconnect between the wonders of nature and the modern man’s preoccupations. It pits impressionistic, vital images of nature against expert, virtuosic arrangements, polished production and operatic singing. It’s compelling, in conception and execution—an attempt to reconcile the tiny size of the human with the expanse of the world, with the latter’s destruction based on the former’s geological imprint, with the vivid dreams inside of people that, when felt, seem like they can enclose the universe. God told Randy Newman that man meant less to Him “than the lowliest cactus flower on the humblest Yucca tree.” Maybe it was merely his attempt to get right-sized.

“You as You Were,” a track from the band’s typically beautiful Animal Joy, continues developing the same theme. Beginning simply with a presto piano figure, Meiburg sets a shamanistic scene heavy with natural imagery (“You fell in the rocks at a bend in the river / With the blood from your nose running hard on your fingers”) and goes through an intense metamorphoses, each verse more sensational than the last. The music behind him evolves with him, launched especially by percussion, so that the track feels less like a driving rocker than a visual run through a field, a seat on the same beast Meiburg seems to be travelling. “You were back on the road / Through the worst of the winter / Through the valley of light / Passing through like an arrow.”

He varies his meters to accompany the music, the singer finally as breathless and enraptured as the scene his words describe. He lays his choice in front of him: “You could stand on the back of a shuddering beam with a pistol firing shots inside of you,” he shouts, that final “side of you” a shout of joy. “Or go back to the east where it’s all so civilized,” he declaims, and in that melody’s fall you can hear the disgust, “where I was born to life. But I’m leaving the life. I’m leaving the life.” The record’s been described by our own Kaylen Hann as “pretty dark,” and there’s a way to read this all as a frightening suicide note. Back east is not merely boring civilization, after all, but normality, and reliability: safety. But the heart can never be settle once it’s seen the mountaintop, and for all its terrors, this mountaintop offers too many unopened doors for spiritual growth than anything routine can offer. When Meiburg shouts “I am leaving the life” over and over at the song’s finale, it’s impossible to not hear the sound of a wondrous, rapturous jailbreak of the soul. One hears, in fact, holiness.