{"id":4730,"date":"2021-03-22T08:40:46","date_gmt":"2021-03-22T08:40:46","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/aata.dev\/?p=4730"},"modified":"2021-03-22T10:04:36","modified_gmt":"2021-03-22T10:04:36","slug":"crawl-into-the-promised-land","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/aata.dev\/index.php\/2021\/03\/22\/crawl-into-the-promised-land\/","title":{"rendered":"CRAWL INTO THE PROMISED LAND"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

CRAWL INTO THE PROMISED LAND<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

by Norman Warwick<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"\"
Roseanne Cash<\/em><\/strong><\/figcaption><\/figure><\/div>\n\n\n\n

\u00a8Some artists,\u00b4 said Tom Lanham in an article for Paste magazine in October of last year, \u00b4have utilized all the lockdown time attendant to the coronavirus to stop, take a breather, take stock, and possibly re-chart their creative course going forward. Not four-time Grammy winner Rosanne Cash. Like her legendary outlaw-country father, the late Johnny Cash\u2014who, when things looked darkest at the end of his life, was compelled to keep making comeback albums with producer Rick Rubin\u2014she mounted the bucking COVID-19 bronco and quickly tamed the beast down to an agreeable trot. And she\u2019s happy to share the rodeo results, via Crawl Into The Promised Land for starters.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"\"<\/figure><\/div>\n\n\n\n

That is the title of the \u00b4anthemic\u00b4 new CCR-swampy single she wrote and recorded with her producer husband, John Leventhal. The track is underscored by a homemade video partially shot by the couple\u2019s son, Jakob and showed angry images of social unrest and inequality flickering past, from early abolitionist Harriet Tubman (right)<\/em><\/strong> to the late Ruth Bader Ginsburg and more recent Women\u2019s March of 2017 and the sweeping Black Lives Matter of 2020.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

This surely served as  a perfectly-timed pre-election manifesto intended as a wake-up call to any voters asleep at the levered switch. It\u2019s time for change. Vast, Mother Nature-honoring change. The future of humanity depends on it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Perhaps it might have been easier for Roseanne, 65, to have stayed quiet and twiddled her thumbs when the pandemic hit.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u00b4First, there was that disorientation when my tour was cancelled, I was home, I was scared, and New York City was a pressure cooker,\u00b4 she recalled for the Paste magazine writer.<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u00b4It really was frightening, and I was just wandering aimlessly around my house. And things it just started opening up. And the first thing I wrote was this piece for The Atlantic called I Will Miss What I Wanted To Lose about the end of touring for the foreseeable future. And then I started writing lyrics, and now I\u2019ve written five or six new songs during quarantine. Other things can wait.\u00b4<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

In that last sentence she was probably referring to the fact that she had just been awarded the prestigious MacDowall Arts Medal, but the ceremony had been postponed until 2021.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

All proceeds are going to Arkansas Peace & Justice Memorial Movement but, still, she had to get her latest panegyric out there whilst it could do the most good, before it became too late. That she succeeded was, we might think, evidenced by Biden\u00b4s recent inauguration<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Tom Lanham obviously knows Roseanne pretty well, and mentions to her that she has \u00b4always had a calm, zen-like attitude about life, and you used to say that if you step off blindly into the universe, the universe will reward you.\u00b4<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"\"
Michelle Shocked<\/em><\/strong><\/figcaption><\/figure><\/div>\n\n\n\n

\u00b4<\/em><\/strong>Well, if you\u2019re kind of in the zeitgeist already, you\u2019re just picking up on everything, aren\u2019t you? And I think that happens to everyone, but you really have to pay attention. I mean, haven\u2019t you thought about someone, and then they call or you see suddenly see them on the street? That happened to me the other day. I posted this photo of me and Mavis and Emmylou and Michelle Shocked and Carole King, when we were singing this Bob Dylan thing on David Letterman\u2019s tenth anniversary\u2014that\u2019s how long ago it was. And I said something to John about Michelle Shocked. And he ran into her on the street hours later, after not seeing her for decades. I don\u2019t know if she\u2019s even still making music.\u00b4<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

The journalist wonders whether people are born with that sensitivity or ESP?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"\"<\/figure><\/div>\n\n\n\n

\u00b4I don\u2019t know if it\u2019s ESP. I think that if the way you organize your thoughts is kind of loose, you can step off the timeline once in a while. Was it Thornton Wilder who said that time is a river, and you can just step in and out? It was something like that, that I thought was really profound. And I find that applies to songwriting, too\u2014you have some sort of prescience, and you go, \u201cOh! That\u2019s what that song was about!\u201d I remember saying that to John Stewart once\u2014I had written a line in a song, and he said, \u201cThat\u2019s my favourite line.\u201d But I said that I didn\u2019t know what it means, and he said, \u201cOh \u2014 it\u2019s one of those. You\u2019ll find out later.\u201d And I did find out what it was about later. He was right.\u00b4<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

John Stewart, referred to there by, wrote Runaway train which she recorded on the King\u00b4s Record Store album and released as a single to top the country charts.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Lanham asks if she has ever found herself glancing at digital clocks at odd times, like 12:34 or 11:11?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u00b4Yeah. Or waking up at the exact same time, too. But maybe that\u2019s a biological thing. And I can\u2019t remember what time it was, exactly, but that was happening for a long time and then it stopped. But you know, we\u2019re kind of out of time right now anyway\u2014we\u2019re in some virtual universe that we were not in 10 years ago. Have you ever heard of this thing called the Mandela Effect? Let me ask you one question\u2014did Nelson Mandela die in prison? Some people, a high percentage of people, think he died in prison, and I thought he died in prison. But it\u2019s not true\u2014he got out of prison and he lived longer. But many people thought he died in prison, so this Mandela Effect designates a parallel universe. It\u2019s not exactly like Schr\u00f6dinger\u2019s Cat, it\u2019s more like time slipped at that moment. So I think we\u2019re in a parallel universe, and those of us who are in this universe are getting mighty exhausted with it.\u00b4<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Her interviewer reminds her that she was already a jigsaw-puzzle geek, way before it became this post-pandemic fad.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u00b4You know that? After my parents died, I really got into jigsaw puzzles. And it was kind of a metaphor of putting things back together, freeing up the other side of my brain. And I still like \u2019em, and I\u2019ve done some recently, a couple during the pandemic. But John will never join me. And I still sew. In fact, I\u2019m at my daughter\u2019s house in Nashville, we came down here and quarantined for 12 days, Airbnb\u2019ed, and moved into her house, because she\u2019s about to give birth any second. And I brought my sewing with me. I\u2019m excited for the future.\u00b4<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Tom Lanham asks if he is right to assume that Some very specific things spurred the  Crawl songs.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u00b4With Crawl Into The Promised Land, I was just so outraged, outraged at the [Trump administration\u2019s] attempt to take away my hope. That Dystopian vision of tribalism and violence, and just the vile bullying coming out of the White House\u2014all of that felt so exhausting and unfair. So I felt outraged and grief-stricken, and these lyrics just started coming out. And then the Black Lives Matter movement started, and I had gone to the Equal Justice Legacy museum in Montgomery, Alabama, whenwe went there for my birthday last year, and it just was devastating, and it opened up my eyes and my heart. So when the protests started happening after George Floyd was killed, I wrote this song called The Killing Fields about my own Southern ancestry, because my grandfather was definitely racist. So I was breaking the chain of all that. And it\u2019s so dark. We\u2019re putting out a vinyl single of Crawl into the Promised Land with The Killing Fields, and it\u2019s going to be like a double A-side.\u00b4<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

The interviewer remarks on the fact that Roseanne and her family  have a cool home studio in New York now, too, where you can put down any track that comes up.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u00b4Yeah. And we\u2019ve done a ton of those since the pandemic started, for every possible charity you can imagine.<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Mostly for independent musicians, health-care workers, Save Our Stages, and then some full shows. I put together one for Carnegie Hall, one for Americana. So we\u2019ve gotten used to it. I mean, it\u2019s not as satisfying as having a live audience, of course. But there\u2019s a certain thing about it that\u2019s not only satisfying, but humbling. Because it really helps people. It really does. And I realized that a lot of people who didn\u2019t have the means to go to live concerts, or they were in rural areas and couldn\u2019t get to a concert really appreciated this. It\u2019s touching. And all the comments we\u2019ve gotten have just been filled with gratitude, like \u201cThank you so much\u2014this really lifted my spirits, because music is getting me through this.\u201d<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"\"<\/figure><\/div>\n\n\n\n

photo 5<\/strong> Ishmael Mr. Lanham, <\/strong> mentions her being a fan of the novel Ishmael, by Daniel Clarence Quinn, which posits that mankind has selfishly doomed itself to extinction, and suggest that it\u2019s all, horribly, irreversibly, coming true.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Daniel Clarence Quinn was an American author, cultural critic, and publisher of educational texts, best known for his novel Ishmael, which won the Turner Tomorrow Fellowship Award in 1991 and was published the following year. Quinn’s ideas are popularly associated with environmentalism, though he criticized this term for portraying the environment as separate from human life, thus creating a false dichotomy. Instead, Quinn referred to his philosophy as “new tribalism”.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u00b4Oh, God, that book was scary as hell But that\u2019s what our son Jakob, who\u2019s 21 and doing his own music now as Jakob Leventhal, believes, too. He and all his friends are angry, like, \u201cYour generation totally fucked it up!\u201d But I agree with him. And the frustration of trying to reason with people, the low-information kind who have already decided what they believe without getting any new information? That is so deeply annoying. But I believe there are more of us than there are of them.\u00b4\u00b4<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"\"<\/figure><\/div>\n\n\n\n

photo 6 Continuing to mine the literary seam Lanham refers to a \u00b4great book out now called The Future We Choose, by Christiana Figueres and Tom Rivett-Carnac, architects of the 2015 Paris Agreement, which expands on Lovelock\u2019s Gaia Theory and says we have to attack climate change with the same universal work ethic that we employed on COVID-19\u00b4 b ecause that\u2019s the only way humanity will survive.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u00b4Right. But as my daughter says, who\u2019s a really intense environmentalist\u2014she said Yeah, we can recycle, we can plant trees, we can do all of this. But until corporations change, it\u2019s going to make very little difference. And that\u2019s the truth. But you know what? I feel like, in writing these songs, that the end result is that we can crawl out of this into the future that you just spoke about. Because if you say, \u201cWell, I\u2019m not gonna be around to see it,\u201d that\u2019s the most selfish thing in the world. So it\u2019s like, \u201cYeah. But the next generation is where my little grandbabies are, and my children. But you\u2019re going to check out and let them suffer?\u00b4<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u00b4Are there some other new song titles you want to share?\u00b4 Lanham asks Rosanne, \u00b4And do you see a new album with a unifying theme forming?\u00b4<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u00b4Yeah. And a lot of it is about the chains that you break, and the ones you keep. But Crawl Into The Promised Land is obviously about what\u2019s going on now, and my insistence on optimism. And my insistence that we break with this toxic, toxic person and all the grifters he has working for him. And then The Killing Fields is about lynchings in the South, and racism and breaking the chain of that. Then I wrote another one called Who Was the Hurricane?, as in Who was the hurricane, who was the kite? And that\u2019s really about my parents. I don\u2019t know why I\u2019m writing songs about my parents. But I had to follow what came up in lockdown.\u00b4<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Lanham punctures any tension in that introspection by saying that when he looks at the Crawl video, he feels sure women everywhere are probably thinking the same thing\u2014\u201cHow does Rosanne keep her hair so red-tinted and fluffy?\u201d  He asks her what\u2019s her secret?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u00b4It\u2019s a lot of money. A lot of money. But I feel an urgency to complete my work on this planet\u2014I feel that every day. And I guess it\u2019s natural. I dunno. I guess I just can\u2019t see myself quote-unquote retiring and then slipping into obscurity and death. I feel urgent. I read this philosopher, and she was actually a professor at Columbia\u2014Carolyn Heilbrun years and years ago, back in the \u201980s, and one thing she said that stuck with me for all these years was that women need to live their lives out loud, just to balance millennia of men living their lives out loud. And then what Margaret Graham said was that no matter what you yourself think about your work, you still have to put it out there. Which is a hard one to get over, you know? And I think she\u2019s talking about people who have achieved a level of mastery, and you know their work as quality. But she meant that the world won\u2019t have it if you don\u2019t put it out, and the world needs it. And I feel like my responsibility as a parent is to be optimistic. I feel like this is a model instance where everything has to disintegrate before it can come back at a higher level, and I have to be believe that\u2014I have five children, and I can\u2019t steal their future by not believing that.\u00b4<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Lanham suggests thatthe authors of The Future We Choose were asked how they can rationalize an obstacle like Trump, and Figueres said we had to view him as a temporary wave, not the actual current.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u00b4That\u2019s really smart. I talked to Angela Davis and we were talking about this, and she said, \u201cWe have to put parentheses around the current occupant and just set him to the side.\u201d Because it\u2019s like the movie Idiocracy right now\u00b4<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u00b4Pretty soon, anyone who dissents will be rounded up by people wearing \u201cGUARD\u201d T-shirts,\u00b4 says Lanham just like in that film.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u00b4We\u2019re already there! ICE! What colder kind of a name could you imagine?\u00b4<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"\"
Sam Cooke<\/em><\/strong><\/figcaption><\/figure><\/div>\n\n\n\n

Her interviewer then refers to that interestingsong on the new Springsteen album called The Power of Prayer, where he sings, \u201cBen E. King\u2019s voice fills the air\/ This is the power of prayer.\u201d And as Roseanne had just sang Stand By Me with forty other stars, Lanham bets she\u00b4d agree with that line. In the same way that there is no day so dark that it can\u2019t be lightened by a Sam Cooke song.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u00b4That\u2019s interesting you say that, because one of the things that\u2019s gotten me through the pandemic\u2014I\u2019ve listened to a lot of Sam Cooke over the past few months. Just for the beauty and the timelessness. Of course, things didn\u2019t end well for him. But he was so special. But hey\u2014you know I just wrote a piece about Sister Rosetta Tharpe for the Oxford American next month. I really love her so much, and then I created a playlist to go with that all-music issue, so that\u2019ll be out, too. But what else are you gonna do if you\u2019re a musician in this time? You\u2019ve got to push back with music!<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

The primary source for this article was a piece by Tom Lanham in Paste on-line magazine, a wonderfully opinionated and informative site well worth checking . <\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

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