Andy
: ?I've recently been rediscovering Pierce Pettis—his album State of Grace makes me want to turn in my Yankee identity card and claim my Southern heritage—and he only gets better with time.?Since 1996’s Making Light of It, Pettis’s lyrics have become increasingly spare.
The result is lyrical coherence, in the sense that laser light is coherent: every wave in step, reinforcing the entirety to an unexpected intensity.
Pettis’ latest release, That Kind of Love, is in that vein, another step on the way to making every note and rest crucial to the whole. . . . What struck me immediately about the realizations on this CD is how much Pettis has slowed the tempo.
“I am Nothing,” a call to artistic humility (“I am nothing / But the angels sometime whisper in my ear…. / Sometimes I like to make believe / I hear”), pulses at half the speed I heard it in Santa Fe or Cincinnati. “Farewell,” recalling one of Pettis’s ancestors who left Rhode Island at sixteen years of age for an arranged marriage to a man in Alabama, has slowed to a Chopinesque dirge, each chord ringing long and beautifully without sacrificing the melody’s sad energy. Anyone who attends to this song without some struggle against tears is surely dead from the neck down.
All of which returns me to a dilemma I’ve felt with particular acuity since the Over the Rhine twentieth anniversary concerts this past December: if music can so powerfully, effortlessly, and immediately move the human heart, why am I wasting my time with words alone?