“Having been on the receiving end of ridicule for experimentation, I think of, whoever—Bob Dylan or Joni Mitchell or Neil Young—who had a veritable array of genres on any given album and it was just themselves. People are too focused on selling things and giving people what they want, which nobody used to do. I don’t want to give anybody what they want—but I hope that they realise that what I give them is what they did want.” —Daniel Romano
At age eleven or twelve, I was perusing David Dodd’s Annotated Grateful Dead Lyrics site, and came upon his (excellent) essay called “Ambiguity as a philosophical stance in the lyrics of the Grateful Dead” (read here). David quotes Robert Hunter saying, “The evocative power of that mysterious line is what got to me—the notion of evocativeness rather than pat statements.” David comments, “[The band] occupy the stage, but the words coming from the stage are not sermons, and they want to be unambiguous about their ambiguity.”
The message, or lack of it, wasn’t always understood, considering that Jerry suffered all his professional life from fans’ messiah complexes. Upon Jerry’s passing in 1995, his friend Bob Dylan (who spent a few years in the early 1970s moving from state to state and eventually nation to nation with his wife and several young children just to get away from rabid fans looking him up for answers to the problems and secrets of the universe) said, “[Jerry] is the only one who knew what it’s like to be me.”
The message may have bypassed many, but it reached me. The young Sigismund reading David’s essay realized that the foregrounded ambiguity was one of the main things that made him feel so at home in the songs of the Dead. “I say row, Jimmy, row / Gonna get there? I don’t know.” In Crazy Fingers, “Life may be sweeter for this / I don’t know / See how it feels in the end,” and some minutes on, “Life may be sweeter for this / I don’t know / Feels like it might be all right.” In Days Between, “No one knows much more of this / than anyone can see.” So gentle. Cautious. Nothing overstated. No false assurances.
This love of mine for ambiguity—which I think is, for the most part, a love of humility, wisdom, and honesty in song—has stayed with me. When I fell for the Beatles in my early twenties, I was stunned by George Harrison’s Something: “You’re asking me, will my love grow? / Well, I don’t know. I don’t know.” Yes, I thought, that is it exactly! Who could really promise more than that, to start with?
Now, at 32, I go on feeling captivated, touched, and comforted by open and vulnerable admissions of imperfect knowledge. I think of Keinan Abdi Warsame, in Take a Minute: “And any man who knows a thing knows he knows not a damn, damn thing at all.” And Abbey Hoffman, in The Drive Home: “Behind me the timekeeper inquires anew, ‘What hour did we leave? How long will it take to get there? How long will it take to get there?’ Oh my love, wouldn’t we all like to know?” And Daniel Romano, in Boy in a Crow-Skin Cape: “Sometimes I slip into somewhere / And everything else slips away / When I return, I’ve a melody’s yearn / Born of where? No one can say, but...” And Antonia and Peter Stampfel, in Little Sister in the Sky: “Does each star that’s in the sky / tell a bright and endless story / about God’s eternal glory, / or is every star a candle in the wind?” And Paul McCartney, in a gem of a song (and David Gilmour favorite) from Memory Almost Full: “Were we there, was it real? / Is it truly how I feel? / Maybe... you tell me.” And Colleen Kinsella, in The Archivist and the Archeologist, calling her husband Caleb “a man who forever escapes my grasp.”
Anomalous Events has no shortage of questions, mysteries, uncertainties. In a fantastic long interview with Al Joshua (here!), interviewer Owen Peters asked him about the title phrase, which does not appear in any song lyric. Al answered at length:
“‘Anomalous Events’ are mysterious, seemingly inexplainable occurrences—they undermine all our comfortable understandings, our assumptions about the world and the cozy conspiracies allow us to sleep at night and get up in the morning without questioning things. They reframe experience from a different point of view and sometimes bring horror, but most importantly, they give an opportunity for a deeper, better understanding of the world. And so we prefer not to see them or to write them off. But the world is full of them. We tend to think of them as things read about on a late-night internet spiral when you should be sleeping—the supernatural and all that, but I’m not talking about that. I see them everywhere in other things—does it not seem to be an anomalous event to us when we ask ourselves, ‘Why doesn’t this person love me anymore?’ or ‘Why don’t I love this person?’, ‘Why am I this way or that? Doing this or that?’ To our deepest minds, the coming and going of people and thoughts and the motion of memory like waves on the sea, these things are all anomalous events. And they are opportunities for insight.”
Peter Owens glosses his own early impressions this way:
“Anomalous Events is not for everyone. The album is typical of Joshua in its diversity, range and lyrical content. Having listened to the album more than a couple of times, it strikes me that it has the structure of a performance piece. He is constantly setting up scenes, scenarios, images of life, death, comings and goings. Lovers enter, lovers exit. The unsettling I Get the Urge to Destroy Everyone offers just 23 seconds of potential mayhem. Whilst my particular takes from the album, Boy with the Pigeon Chest and Green Valley, provide over twelve minutes of sumptuous melodies and rhymes. I wonder if I’m the only one who doesn’t want to know exactly what the lyrics and stories mean? Somethings are better left unknown.”
But now on to what I really wanted to say.
Only after getting to know Anomalous Events fairly well was I able to identify a certain element in Al Joshua’s work—not unique to it, but unusually artful and prominent in it—that helps me love it as passionately as I do, and be as touched by it as I unfailingly am. It is something that is as common, honest, and beautiful in I Am Alive and You Are Dead, Out of the Blue, and Anomalous Events as uncertainty is in the Grateful Dead songbook.
Assurance.
Effectively all of Al’s songs burrow into realms of unmasked emotion, vulnerability, poetry, and imagination. The songs are like maps of these spirit-countries, and the mapmakers who speak to us from the curving lines tend to be stout of heart. This must be a reflection of the actual living artist, the man who sends the ghost cartographers down on their errands to the underworld. But more on that later.
If uncertainty—the ready admission of things one does not know—is the language of a true and honest soul, then why isn’t assurance? If it is commendable to be honest in song about the things that appear to a songwriter to be great mysteries, isn’t it just as commendable to be honest about the things that appear clear?
“An old woman stops me in the street. And her body’s homeless and dying, and when she touches me, it’s such a treat. She takes my hand in her two hands and says the earth is flat. How’d she know that? How’d she know that?”
How can I explain the thrill these lines from Terra Firma give me?—the chance to look in on an encounter between two strangers (“...passing in the street / by chance two separate glances meet / and I am you, and what I see is me”), to witness the sudden intimacy and understanding blooming into bright green life between them? I come away from it in awe of both the narrator and the woman.
I think also of Mysterious Skin, of the narrator (like his kin in that crueler but similarly ardent song, Van Morrison’s T.B. Sheets) who says to his friend, “You know, I hate to leave you here, but I’ve gotta go. I hate to leave you here in an ugly graveyard in Charlesville-Mezieres, but your shirt’s covered in blood, it’s speckled on your neck and below your ear, and your mountains are covered in snow.” Or of Christopher, who is ready to head back to the cabin by the sea, despite everything—despite Argyle Square, maybe, even. Or of Metropes, which is written, performed, and delivered with such glorious fire in the throat that by the time the narrator is raving, “Now be a good boy, Jim! And run up and help, Jim! Be sure to roll over and tuck your tail behind your legs and beg, Jim! You’re my best friend, Jim!! You are my servant, Jim!! You are not worth the shit that dribbles from my chin, Jim!!!”—I jeer along.
The boy-wraiths who narrate Out of the Blue seem, on the surface, to have little in common with the passionate, powerful, searching, romantic figures that populate I Am Alive and You Are Dead. But that’s only on the surface. There is just as much invincible strength in the speakers in Out of the Blue—probably more, in fact, because while Orphans & Vandals songs contend with the pains, indignities, dreams, and grand unspeakable wonders of youth, Out of the Blue looks back on those more (for lack of a better word) innocent years from the lip of the abyss of loss—and I mean, from the awful far lip of that abyss, with Souvenirs’ anchor already low in the water, the ship gone still.
“We were there, we did those things,” insists the narrator of the forlorn Judd Street, “I was the witness.” And in Finsbury Park, the great unreleased epic from the Out of the Blue sessions, “Who would remember or tell this story, but me?”
The album is the story of these survivors and record-keepers. The songs are like S. Y. Agnon’s Forevermore, the researchers in which give their lives over to the study of the city Gumlidata, buried in the dust of war countless years before—and yet they want, they need, the histories that they write to be absolutely correct, down to details now impossible to uncover: how tall and thick were the walls, precisely? At exactly which point, and how, were they breached by the enemy? In Al Joshua’s Johnathan: “One day I will solve this crime for you.”
In Rosy Red Seagulls, the narrator interrupts his story to remark, “I like the rainy black railings of London, four o’clock, / the street where everything has stopped.” One of the reasons that moment is so gorgeous is that, in its very expression, it shares itself. The images and the tone make the love the narrator feels so clear and powerful that we might as well be present with him ourselves, running our hands along those same wet railings, breathing the night air into chilled lungs.
By the time you complete a listen to Skinned Alive, if you listened right, the claim its narrator makes that “love is not kind or careful or gentle, / it’s a rabid dog and it’ll clamp you down in its jaws / and toss you around like a rag doll” should appear as self-evidently true as (to bring in an example from the opposite end of the album’s tonal spectrum) the soft, enchanted pronouncement in Love You Madly: “the boys play basketball in winter, / and I watch them from my window, / and my own true love is the fairest of them.”
The ending of Good Times seems to be no more than wishful thinking, but I cannot say so with full certainty, because the narrator is so commanding, so apparently deserving of my confidence and trust: “I’m walking along a very fine line, my love, / and on the one hand, darkness falls away, / but there will be dreams and amazing things / and you won’t even recognize me.” Similarly, it is no use when the narrator of Souvenirs tells us that “the name of that ship was the Golden Vanity”—we still take him at his word when the reverie begins, “Foreign music will disorientate my senses...”
And the closer, Peacocks? Could anyone who listens to Out of the Blue from start to finish deny its authority? “I do believe / you will be bereaved, / piece by piece, over time— / first your things and then your mind— / up the ladder as you climb.”
In Anomalous Events, it seems to matter little to the characters how bizarre or askew the worlds of the songs they inhabit are; one way or another, they find their footing. When the rape and murder in Father of Flies is complete, the violated narrator rises: “It was many, many hours ‘til I escaped, / and when I did it was very, very hard, / but I did anyway, ‘cause God loves a tryer!”—joking after the murder as before it (“at least you’ve got your health”). It’s interesting to note, by the way, that the circumstances differ only in certain details from the fantasy in My Queer Heaven: “Oh, to be murdered by someone very beautiful here in my room!”
There are outbursts of violent conviction: “Now there’s a growing consensus that humans are empaths but, dear friends, we must admit this is wrong! I don’t know which species to which you belong, if something happened, or you were born dumb, but humans are a disease and it’ll only be cured when we’re gone” (My Queer Heaven). “Did you know an infinite number of monkeys will type the complete works of Shakespeare? It’s interesting, I just don’t think that they do” (It’s Going to Rain).
And outbursts of violent emotion, as at the end of Green Valley, in what is currently my favorite verse on the album. The narrator, having been betrayed, in a certain sense, by the man he took for his spiritual guide, flings an accusation at the absent and in any case uncomprehending would-be traitor: “You left me raging in the barley! How could you leave me this way?”—a response extraordinary, for one thing, as an image of alcoholism, but also in the way it shows the narrator to be no worse off for having received a response to the letter he was not certain would get to where he had meant it to go. The Guide’s answer is all flat rejection and impeccably polite insinuation that not all is right with the narrator’s head. But the narrator does not read the Guide’s answer and think: “Ah. Then, could I have been mistaken?” Instead, it’s evidence to the contrary be damned, he knows what he knows. What took place is a betrayal, not a misunderstanding: “You left me...!”
And outbursts of actual violence. The Father of Flies, though he initially gives the narrator an impression of weakness and frailty (“at first, it was almost funny to watch his puny, bony body writhing”), is in fact vampiric and immortal, and capable of tearing the young narrator to shreds. The killing in the title of The Killing of a Swan is not—or not only—metaphorical. In its companion piece, The Boy with the Pigeon Chest, as in Metropes of yore, I perceive no false or jarring distance between the preternaturally charming narrator and his pronouncements (Metropes) or his actions (The Boy with the Pigeon Chest). Although his general manner is gentle and soft-spoken, there are indications of the turmoil inside the narrator’s heart—in Al’s vocal delivery, in certain turns of phrases, in the imagery (“I was breathing smoke up into the night’s starry air”), in the quiet but relentless percussion. We can figure out that he is in fact powerfully self-contained, and dangerous, like a coiled snake.
So when he hears “a kid perched along the pavement” singing the song of the Boy, and hisses at him, “Where did you learn that song?” and “beats him around the eyes” without waiting for an answer, and goes on beating him until an answer is given, it does not come as a surprise: or, rather, it does, but it feels right, like something we sensed the narrator was capable of, or even always on the edge of doing. That surging, ultimately uncontainable, oceanic strength carries the listener through the rest of the song, even as the narrator lays wondering, thinking, dreaming; for all his thoughts culminate in the question, “And should I go out hunting? and for killers, or a swan?”
The question’s form is deceptive. There is no doubt in the narrator’s mind about whether he will go hunting. The only perplexity is the second half: who? or, more accurately, who first?
The Boy, for his part, has strength of his own. It is he who decides to leave the narrator. The beat-up kid, surrendering the story of the Boy’s death, says: “It was his will! When the rest of us scattered, he went willingly with them to the place where he was killed.” And at the end of the song, the narrator proclaims, “I know he’s gone the distance, I know he passed the test.”
The mixture of certainty and indecision in the narrator’s question about the hunt is echoed in the closing words of A Bird Flew In. The narrator of the final song on Anomalous Events seems so timid and fearful, so unlike the people who speak to us from It’s Gonna Rain, Father of Flies, When We Broke into the Garden... “The figure at first seemed not to hear us, but then he spoke of a shortcut, and slipped into the woods where the light was dim. And my lover without caution he followed, and I in my turn, without choice, followed him.” The narrator’s lover is a more familiar kind of character: “He turned, and for the first time in our time together spoke harsh words to me. He said, ‘The path cannot go on in this way forever.’ And to the figure he said, ‘So you can plainly see: we, to him, are strangers...’” All at once turning mysterious, distant, harsh; and devoted, but not to anything very comfortable, necessarily.
Yet listen through to the end. The narrator confides, “I can’t think, keep a thing straight in my head since that time. Now I don’t know who I am, or this stranger beside me. Is this my old friend, or someone I met later? Did we do something not allowed?” In these lines, he seems lost entirely and forever in the murk that so many of the other characters in Anomalous Events are able to navigate or pierce their way through. But in the last sentence of the song, the narrator adds, “And all would be well if I could find a mirror, if I knew my own name and could say it out loud.”
It is as beautifully cryptic a closing line as one could hope for in an album like this, but at the same time, what it makes evident is that the narrator is not lost forever. For all that he has gone through, and all the years that have vanished since the event the song narrates, he nevertheless remains certain that a way out, a path back to clarity, does exist and can be found. The “if” formulation occurs three times, as in a fairytale: “if I could find a mirror,” “if I knew my own name,” “[if] I could say it out loud.” “All would be well”—happily ever after, after all?
No amount of suffering and confusion has been able to convince the narrator that hope has faded. He knows what would need to happen for the situation to change—like the narrator in The Boy with the Pigeon Chest, who knows for certain that he will go hunting. It is not that redemption is impossible in A Bird Flew In, but that the elements that would constitute it have not yet been collected.
Speaking of strength—and finally I can tie this piece back to the Daniel Romano quote I opened it with—I cannot think of the way the theme manifests in Anomalous Events without thinking also of the conviction and strength of the artist who wrote, recorded, and released it. In the Peter Owens interview, Al outlined the album’s creation:
“I decided I needed to make something, do something while I was locked down and locked in so I decided to make an album using just my phone. I listened to a lot of traditional folk music, old old songs, read lyrics of Child Ballads. I thought about those melodies and the images used, the stories told, and decided to make my own collection of new ancient songs, weird stories and tales. They infect you, get in your blood. It’s another way of seeing the world ... it’s not for everyone, not my most accessible work. But it’s an extremely singular album. I’ve not done anything like it before and probably won’t again. I don’t see how I could. Those songs came out of an ancient seam ... [Anomalous Events] is not attempting to make you like it and it has no interest in comforting you. It comes not with peace but a sword.”
Al understood all this, and released the album anyway.
“So you know your purpose? Get up and go to it. Don’t ask for forgiveness or apologize,” the narrator of My Queer Heaven enjoins. “Don’t second guess your instinct. It’s often wrong—but fuck it, go with it. And remember, your stomach should be much bigger, much bigger than your eyes.”
