Pierce Pettis has kept himself alive through his songwriting and live performing for over a quarter of a century, perhaps funded more by those who have covered his songs such as Garth Brooks, Joan Baez and Jill Phillips than his personal fame or commercial success. A songwriter in the traditional sense you could see him as folk version of the more jazz infused Bruce Cockburn; a combination of literary poet and finger dancing guitar virtuoso, all with a huge dollop of the spiritual. In his song for fellow songwriter Don Dunaway, whose song Sparrow Pierce covered on his hard to get debut album twenty five years ago, he quotes Dunaway’s belief that:
“I am nothing
But the angels sometimes whisper in my ears
Yeah, they tell me things
And then they disappear
Though I am nothing
Sometimes I like to make believe.”
It is a great song about the songwriter’s vocational task particularly if there is a spiritual dimension to that vocation. Pettis would seem to have a good ear, not only for the melody or the poetic couplet but also for the angel’s whisper. His spirituality runs through his veins making Hallelujah Song almost a companion piece for Leonard Cohen’s Hallelujah in weaving the romantic and Divine loves. Lion’s Eyes is a three and half minute précis of CS Lewis’s The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe and the closing Something For The Pain is one of those Pettis songs that should be ministered as a soothing balm to the spiritual scars of any life.
The “something” of that particular song gets its glorious expounding on the two central songs of the record. You Did That For Me is everything that modern worship music lacks; artistic skill and deep theology. It is worship all the same, in a thanksgiving song where liberation is not left all ethereal but has a historical source:
“Man of sorrow
Well-acquainted with grief
Dragged to the city dump
Spread-eagle on a cross beam
Propped up like a scarecrow,
Nailed like a thief
There for all the world to see”
The title track is then like an immediate follow on. The love earned by the “man of sorrow” radiating out into the cosmos to turn everything around and making right everything that this world has seen go horribly wrong, from the personal to the global:
“Pride and hatred cannot stand
That kind of love
Greater love hath no man
Than that kind of love
Won’t be kept unto itself
Spreads it’s charm, casts it’s spell
No one’s safe this side of hell
From that kind of love.”
Pettis’s songs carry both story and theology. He brings the detailed eye of the novelist with a rare gift for the theological depth in economic verse. When he does both, as this album has him do so well, he is a gift from above, a real listener to those angels. He is dangerously helpful and no one should be safe; this side of hell!
Comments