DOUG GAY - LIFE AFTER DEATH

The voice. It catches you in the very first line and draws you in. It is like Nick Cave’s baritone with better pitch.

The songs. Lyrical. Melancholic but endearing. Beautiful in melody and delicate, grace note riven, in arrangements.

Doug Gay wrote a suite of songs after his father’s death eighteen years ago. He performed it at Greenbelt in a one off show and I have been bullying him to record and release these songs ever since. That is me declaring my conflict of interests. My name in the liner notes reveals my complicity in this record seeing the light of day.

There came some pressure with that. When Doug finally decided that he should record them, and was telling me that he was in the studio, it was then time to start worrying that it might not come out as I had hoped. What if it simply wasn’t any good?! 

From the very first verse of Days Of Rain, not actually in the original suite, relief was released to utter joy and joy is not the mood of the piece… BUT I hope you understand what I mean.

Doug has looked across the horizon of grief and thrown a panorama of songs. Memories, theology, the funeral and pure inner grief all become the seam from which Doug draws a sea of emotions that we all sail, and are tossed about on, after the loss of a loved one. 

The very best art, in my opinion, is when an artist goes into the core of their own subjectivity and creates something that becomes objective for us all. Minister and writer Frederick Buechner once said that good art is spilling blood on the page. In these songs Doug spills his personal blood for his own catharsis to conjure something that is universally helpful. 

The journey through grief is artistically but oh so accurately traversed. It is all so clever yet seemingly effortless.

In Pilgrim No More we are at the graveside:

 

“We carried you 

Into the sunlit air 

Bone of your bone 

Wept as we laid you there 

You're pilgrim no more 

And all you were hoping for…” 

 

Tying Up Roses listens in as his mother deals with the loss of a soul mate:

 

“And the days just can’t get full, 

they’re filled with holes, the joy runs through 

And the nights just don’t get warm, when there is no-one holding you 

And the weeks just won’t go by, they crave the scent of that perfume 

Another year will never come, another rose will never bloom…” 

 

In The Things That Made You Happy, Doug trawls through his father’s photographs, life and memories:

 

“The things that made you happy make me cry 

The things that made you happy make me cry 

You with your back to the Canada skies 

Was this the time of your life?” 

 

Keep Looking Up is a look back at the last conversation with his dad. It touches on another theme. This and the opening Days Of Rain deal with growing up in the Exclusive Brethren:

 

“I have not been 

The witness I should be 

I’m glad that you 

Believe in spite of me

 

I am ashamed 

Of what we put you through 

I think you know 

The system hurt me too” 

 

Saturday’s Train is for that day in-between Good Friday and Resurrection Sunday that those who grieve find ourselves more than once a year. Charlie Irvine and Sandy Butler’s guitars add to the edge, the agitation and despair of that tunnel where we deal with the valley of the shadow of death with no immediate hope of light at its end: 

 

“I’m in a tunnel of grief 

On a Saturday train 

Hurtling along 

In the echoing dark 

 

Til it slams to a stop 

And the train powers down 

So they dim all the lights 

And I wait in the gloom 

 

While it stops for too long 

and all I can hear 

Is dark water running 

And rats on the track 

 

What if I never get out of here? 

What if I never can reach the light? 

What if this Saturday train never moves again?” 

 

Eventually, like so many of us, resurrection is found after the Saturday tunnel. So on Beyond Blue:

 

“Will you get better where you are? 

And will they mend your broken heart? 

Are you with God and with the Lamb? 

Healed by the sorrows of the Son of Man?”

 

Mansion Town’s takes us to the full blown hope of the eternal. A gorgeous picture of heaven, full of love, justice and shalom:

 

“Nobody needs love 

Every last soul has more than enough 

Peace has broken out, no-one can take it back”

 

In the end, there is a realisation. With all our hopefulness, grief leaves us ever changed with Some Things never healed:

 

“Time heals some things

Other ones remain

Like a shadow, or a stain

You can’t paint over

Some things you don’t get over.”

 

Life After Death is as satisfying a collection of lament as it was when it made a deep impact on me fifteen years ago. The players and Steve Butler's production have enhanced it into an exceptional record. If Jason Isbell had made this record it would be all over the 2018 Albums of the Year… but it would lack that sprinkle of theology… so I am glad Doug Gay made it… and that it is even better than the record I have been asking him to make all these years!

https://douggay.bandcamp.com/album/life-after-death

 

Comments

[Simon Curran]

Excellent album. Thank you for highlighting it, I wouldn't have come across it otherwise.