Spain / Josh Haden

The wonder of music is that there's a song for every moment in life, for every state of mind. For a heart light with joy or heavy with farewell. Nostalgia, for instance, must sound something like “Leb Wohl” by Neu!: Klaus Dinger cuts the engines and lets the sea's waves wash in, beading with magnificence piano notes not yet ambient but far more than minimalist. Michael Rother intones in a hushed tone, opening with a trembling “Tears come in my eyes”. His the eyes, yours the tears. Loneliness, on the other hand, can take on different musical shapes depending on the context. When it's accusatory, it's easy to picture yourself as the Duncan of Paul Simon, lying in a motel bed listening to the crude moans of two people having sex in the next room. That's more or less what a lonely New Year's Eve sounds like in some freezing metropolis. Being alone by choice. As if anyone in the world could actually choose not to be. You don't always find the answer, but sometimes you still need something that resembles one, and that something is the warm, enveloping whisper of Josh Haden: the man who breathed a soul flame into the frigid body of slowcore.

He carries a heavy surname, Josh does. His father Charlie was an outstanding double bassist who made an immense contribution to the development of free jazz, playing, among others, with Ornette Coleman and releasing a genre classic such as “Liberation Music Orchestra” (1969). When he formed a band in 1993, Haden Jr. was careful never to disown the genetic inheritance he'd been given. Even though grunge and crossover had won an attention that went well beyond the confines of indie niches, Josh craved the narcotic hush of those who — like Codeine — had walled themselves inside that enclosure, building an impenetrable fortress. His heart, however, pumped the blood of the Black music he'd grown up with. Two plus two always makes four, especially when the sums are done by fate. That's how Spain came to be in Los Angeles: Haden (bass and vocals), Ken Boudakian (guitar and organ), Merlo Podlewski (guitar) and Evan Hartzel (drums). More a chamber quartet than a soft-rock band — the kind of chamber you're left alone in, staring at the wall.

Their debut, “The Blue Moods Of Spain” (1995), sounds exactly like the title promises: it has the bitter taste of certain blues wept under the stars, the mood of a jazz club you'd beg for asylum in during boozy sleepless nights, and the soul warmth that heats your skin when there's no other skin to press against. It's inside this sometimes underrated masterpiece that you should look for the answer to the loneliness of a day, or of a lifetime: “Jesus, I don’t wanna die alone/ My love was untrue, now all I have is you”. The aching opening arpeggio — wrapped in an organ that strings together grams of pathos like beads of a sacred rosary — has the flavour of an old R&B ballad, a style that few white artists have managed to claim as their own without sounding fake: the Stones of “I Got The Blues”, Gary Lucas in service of another illustrious son — Jeff Buckley — and precious few others.

If men are truly capable of prayer, then prayer must be music. This music. The last moments of a dying man, the thoughts of someone about to leave everything behind. Alone. Like everyone. Life, loved ones, what has been and — worse still — what never was. The final reckoning, watching yourself die and realizing you never truly loved. And the only thing left for him is to cling to the Lord's mercy, to the hope that there's some goddamn afterlife that might grant him a little of that love he thought he could give while betraying his own solitude. Maybe that's why he begs not to be left to "die a lonely death" (“Don’t leave me here left to die a lonely death”). Because he didn't understand it while there was still time, that he was alone. Because he didn't understand, before it was too late, that love is nothing but solitude in its highest, most perfect form. Not two people keeping each other company to cheat their sins and sorrows. For those — at best — there will be a redeemer's pardon at the end of the last ride on the carousel: “All my troubles/ All my pain/ Will leave me/ Once again”.

"Spiritual" is a fitting title for a song that closes such an intimate album like a form of catharsis. It's an unmistakable nod to the musical genre of the same name that, up until 1865 — the year slavery was abolished in the United States — accompanied Black people in the cotton plantations where they were segregated. The roots of the blues lie in spirituals (many musicologists agree that this archetypal music is the origin of the blue note and of the call-and-response structure imported from Africa); it's from its evolution that gospel would eventually emerge. But while gospel would become the joyous choral announcement of the good news, the spiritual was the (a cappella) song meant to soothe the pains and abuses of slavery, the word of Christ as a blank check for a future of joy and freedom. In this sense, from a more ontological than aesthetic perspective, Josh Haden's song can fully be considered a spiritual: an interior monologue, an ultimate plea for protection, for liberation, for authentic light before the artificial kind goes out completely.

This deeply hymn-like quality — bordering on a desperate plea — would go on to captivate Johnny Cash, prompting him to record a version of it on "Unchained" (1996), the second installment of the American Recordings, the series produced by Rick Rubin through which the wounded lion unexpectedly climbed back up after the pitch-black darkness of the Eighties. An old country star on the edge of existence (within a year he would be diagnosed with a degenerative illness that would wear him down until it finally claimed him in 2003), reinterpreting a song written by a young man thirty-six years his junior. This time the electric guitar arpeggio is courtesy of Tom Petty, while the bass is provided by Flea. Cash himself offers an acoustic distillation that caresses and consoles, much like his unmistakable voice, both cavernous and reassuring: a cave offering shelter when outside there's nothing but frost. The same merciless frost of an empty room. Filling it with the celestial notes of "Spiritual" is a way of filling one's solitude with love, a solitude which — with its burden of unanswered questions — will always sound like Paul Simon's "Duncan". And every time, standing guard over us, will be Spain's finest song. Maybe it isn't an answer, but it's certainly a certainty.