Becoming-Horse

Days in the Wake is an album whose becomings are marked in its lyrics. Whose lyrics, packaging and even the name of the band under which it was released are indices. To where do they point? To the singing itself – to the singing and the music. What are these indications?

The song of one in the corner who turns around and is burning. Do you see me burning?, he asks? He is the only one who knows there are wolves and awful things around. The first song is sung in the second person. Another is addressed, and there are others besides that other. The singer asks the addressee to blind them. He will burn, sings the singer, but the others should not see him burn.

As Steve writes, when you first hear this song, you may mistake the lyric for one of self-pity. But the clue is in the title: ‘You Will Miss Me When I Burn’. It is not called, ‘When You Have No One’ – it is not a song about loneliness but about burning and it is the song itself which is fire. The song enacts that turning around in which the singer confronts us in flames. He is burning. He has longed to be missed, and therefore real – he was obscure, unreal – but he is real only as he burns, which is to say, sings. But this song is the last song, because to sing is to burn.

What is the becoming of this song? A dying, a burning, the reaching of that ‘to sing’ which is linked to no one in particular. A singing of the dying and the burning, a singing of flames in the throat.

The next song becomes towards God. But which God? ‘God lies within’, it is sung. The singer sings of himself in the third person. The song is called Pushkin and it is Pushkin who sings. Over and again, the refrain, ‘God is the answer’ – as if it were difficult to find God. As if the stridency of the vocal is a correlate of the absence of God. Where is he? Within. But what is within?

Now Pushkin entreats a second person to leave him behind. ‘The statue marks the place here/ Where Pushkin stood is claim’. What does this mean? Perhaps the song is the statue. No, not the song as if it could be sung again, but this singing, the singing recorded in this performance. The song is the marker, but what does it mark? ‘And though a lead slug would have felled me/ Pushkin rides the lightning’: it marks the execution of Pushkin, the singer. His electrification.

Again, death – this time, death by execution. It is God, within, who sings and it is by his singing that Pushkin must die. And as with the singer of the first song, it is an extinction which comes from without.

Inextricable from the music of these songs is the persona who sings. The urgency of singing is marked in the lyric: these are songs which must be sung; they leave a statue in the place of the singer. The song is the testament. It grants a kind of reality to the singer. As though the singing were more than that of which the singer would be capable.

The third urgent song I want to remember is the waltz, ‘No More Workhorse Blues’. Another song addressed to ‘you’. And in this one, the celebration of a transformation. The singer is no more a workhorse. He is singing. The song reaches its climax: ‘I am a racing horse/ I am a grazing horse/ I am your favourite horse’. Is it in song itself the singer becomes such? Is it of a becoming-animal that he sings?

Not the imitation of the horse, but the becoming-horse of song, a transformation of horses just as it is a transformation of singing. To become-horse – what would this mean? Not an imitation of a horse, but the ‘to horse’ – the  infinitive which echoes the ‘to sing’: to sing is to become horse, to race or graze alongside horses. The singer sings of nothing other than his singing and the gift of song. Singing is his wealth (‘I am a rich man, I am a very rich man’), and the song is one of the triumph of reaching song.

It is not a metaphor which transports the sense of singing to that of becoming a racing or grazing horse. Singing and becoming-horse are one and the same; to bring singing into relation to horses, to burning or to riding the lightning is to figure the movement from the attempt to sing to singing itself. Then this album is equivalent in many ways to Kafka’s ‘merciful surplus’ – to the extraordinary surprise that singing is possible and that it can provide the singer with succour, with strength.

Perhaps that is already marked in its title: ‘Days in the Wake’ – days lived after singing was possible, after the giving of singing. Wonderful that this title came to Will Oldham only after the album was done and released. It was written only on a later pressing of the album (mine still reads: Palace Brothers). It is the album which gave itself to itself, in which Will Oldham lifted himself by his own bootstraps out of the ditch.