Murder ballad

According to biblical tradition, it was Cain who laid the foundations of the first city in history. From its very origins, human civilization seems marked by the stain of blood. A voice rising from deep within the earth, one that continues to echo through some primal dimension, reminding us of the burden of evil we would like to exorcise.

The murder ballad is the voice of blood that, from the shores of Old Europe, crosses the Ocean all the way to the land of the New World. Laden with a mythic past, in which the ghosts of gothic literature coexist with folklore and popular chronicle, it reaches us intact in all its primordial evocative power.

Rather than claiming to map out the modern geography of the murder ballad, the aim of these pages is to try to capture its allure, tracing its roots and essence through the language of contemporary music. Not a catalogue, but a cross-cutting reading guided by a handful of emblematic voices, in search of how an ancient canon is being reshaped in the present.

“All beauty must die”

 Nick Cave And The Bad Seeds – Where The Wild Roses Grow

       from “Murder Ballads” (Mute, 1996)

They called her “the wild rose”, but her name was Elisa Day. It's impossible not to start with Nick Cave when talking about the modern murder song: “Murder Ballads” is the standard text through which recent generations have gained access to an entire world. One of the most successful albums of the Australian troubadour's career, though not necessarily the most inspired: above all, a collection of songs capable of conjuring images so vivid that they've managed to sink into the collective consciousness.

Credit goes largely to the single that, in the autumn of 1995, served as the album's preview: “Where The Wild Roses Grow”. A rewriting of classic forms that pays homage to tradition with devoted elegance, to the point of creating the illusion of belonging to that very past. All of it bolstered decisively by the video shot by Texan photographer and director Rocky Schenck, a perfect translation of the murder ballad's iconography into the language of MTV.

From the first day I saw her I knew she was the one

That grew down the river, all bloody and wild

The strings' prologue stretches out with a cinematic aura, hands plunging into the river with a tragic sense of prophecy. Then she appears, cloaked in a dazzling whiteness, lips scarlet as blood. It would have seemed like madness to anyone, imagining a duet between a shadowy songwriter like Nick Cave and a pop diva like Kylie Minogue. And yet, here she is, floating in the water, a snake coiling at the hem of her white dress.

Nick Cave had always harbored a secret obsession with her: "It has to do with her beauty and her innocence, in a way... With her uncynical approach to things." Purity and damnation: that was the hidden bond Cave wanted to explore by weaving his dark timbre together with the voice of the Australian pop star. Over the slow waltz of "Where The Wild Roses Grow", the fatal encounter between Elisa Day and her lover-turned-executioner unfolds to the tolling of bells and piano, orchestrating the dramatic tension as the point of view shifts between the two protagonists. And guilt takes on the shape of an inescapable drive toward the annihilation of beauty.

On the second day he came with a single red rose

"Where The Wild Roses Grow" contains all the fundamental tópoi of the murder ballad: the first-person account, the reportage-like tone of the narration, the passionate backdrop to the crime. Its roots reach back to an even older song, "The Willow Garden" (or "Down In The Willow Garden"), chosen not by chance as the single's b-side. It tells of the murder of a girl named Rose Connelly, along a riverbank lined with willows. This is how "Murder Ballads" works: it's like an invitation to trace back through the universe from which its songs spring, climbing up the family tree to the ancient ballads that are their ancestors. In doing so, one discovers that the figure of the girl drowned in the river already belongs to "The Knoxville Girl", a ballad that, under various names ("The Wexford Girl", "The Oxford Girl", "The Cruel Miller"), travels through Ireland and England before disappearing into the mists of the seventeenth century; in the year of grace 2009, the ghost of the Knoxville girl still lingers uneasily, conjured up by Jason Molina and his Magnolia Electric Co. among the tracks of "Josephine": gradually, one finds oneself immersed in the vastness of an oral culture that, handed down through generations of minstrels, carries its testimony all the way to the present day.

"A murder ballad essentially recounts the details of a real or imagined killing: who the victim is, why she was killed, how the murderer managed to lure her in, and the murder itself, followed by the killer's flight and capture. The ballad often closes with a description of the murderer imprisoned and awaiting the gallows, sometimes accompanied by a warning to the listener not to commit the same misdeeds"¹. Its grounding in real events links it to the broadside ballad, born from the news sheets sold on street corners since the invention of the printing press. In America, this genre took root in the soil of Appalachian music: music built around banjo and fiddle, in which the sounds of the Celtic and Anglo-Saxon tradition are found in their purest form².

The favored victim is a young woman, but there are no shortage of cases in which it's the man who gets killed, from "Henry Lee" to "Frankie And Johnny" (or "Frankie And Albert", in some versions), where the heroine pulls the trigger after discovering her man with another woman: a figure so elevated into popular myth that she was brought to the screen in 1991's "Frankie and Johnny", with Michelle Pfeiffer and Al Pacino playing Frankie and Johnny respectively. In the United States, you can even find tourist itineraries inspired by the (macabre) settings of the most famous ballads...

On the last day I took her where the wild roses grow

And lent down and planted a rose between her teeth

Harry Smith's "Anthology Of American Folk Music" opens precisely with a murder ballad ("Henry Lee", also performed by Cave in "Murder Ballads" alongside PJ Harvey), and the entire volume of the collection devoted to ballads is deeply steeped in it (from "Omie Wise" to "Stackalee"). As Greil Marcus notes, in the tradition of the "Anthology Of American Folk Music", murders "are rites, deeds instantly transformed into legends, facts that in all their specificity turn everyday life into myth [...]. Crimes immediately become legends charged with such drama that the drowning of a pregnant woman appears to the eyes of the town as more significant and important than the assassination of a president"³.

Many artists draw more or less explicitly on that lineage, from the noir folk of Handsome Family and Alasdair Roberts to the crystalline, spectral singing of Marissa Nadler, who leads tracks like "Lily, Henry And The Willow Trees" into a timeless realm. "The fact that these songs, with roots firmly planted in society, have survived for hundreds of years and made their way into the twenty-first century" is nothing less than "proof of humanity's eternal desire to bring dark themes out into the open and examine them, in the hope that somewhere, amid all this chaos, confusion, blood and guts, something might begin to make sense"⁴. But it isn't easy to truly immerse oneself in the mythic dimension of the old ballads: today, Marcus continues, "the most brutal crimes seem to vanish from consciousness almost immediately after appearing in the pages of the newspapers"³. Our language has lost the capacity for memory because it lacks an openness to mystery: "the writers of traditional music", observed Bob Dylan in his famous 1966 interview with "Playboy", "managed to draw out of their songs the fact that mystery is a fact, a traditional fact".

To tackle the subject of the murder ballad, one could simply follow its traces through the countless voices that, over the years, have taken those ancestral songs back into their hands. The aim here, instead, is to confront the mystery head-on, seeking out artists still capable of writing songs that dig into that very same spirit, even without necessarily respecting its traditional form.

"Evil don't look like anything

 Okkervil River – Westfall

       da “Don’t Fall In Love With Everyone You See” (Jagjaguwar, 2002)

Austin, Texas, December 1991. Four girls working at a frozen yogurt shop never make it home again. Among the ashes of the shop, burned to the ground, their remains are found: they had been tortured and killed before the fire was set. The press wasted no time coining a headline: "Yogurt shop murders".

"The authorities charged a guy, and for quite a while the local media kept airing footage of him at the trial", recalls Will Sheff, frontman of Okkervil River. "The hidden reason, I think, was so that people at home could X-ray his face through the television, searching for the evil hiding inside. I remember thinking that evil isn't so easy to recognize."

We went out one night and took a flashlight

Out with these two girls Colin knew from Kenwood Christian

One was named Laurie, that’s what the story

Said next week in the Guardian

"Westfall" is the perfect example of how the poetics of the murder ballad can be translated into the language of an era in which brutality has become an everyday matter. Its trembling banjo evokes distant seasons past, but the images running through its epic-toned climax belong entirely to the present. In the age of "C.S.I.", it feels as though we're immersed in a kind of generalized criminological scientism, whereby crime could supposedly be dissected and infallibly solved thanks to advances in investigative technique. But the illusion of being able to put evil under a microscope — from Lombroso onward — always ends up crashing against a reality that resists any theory: forensic science must reckon with its own fallibility, and the criminal personality continues to slip free of every label. It's a contradiction emblematically condensed in the figure of Dexter, the character born from Jeff Lindsay's pen in the novel "Darkly Dreaming Dexter" and turned into the protagonist of one of the defining TV series of the 2000s: behind the mask of the Miami police department's blood-spatter analyst hides a serial killer of serial killers, driven by the inner voice of a "Dark Passenger" that pushes him to obey an insatiable need for blood. What better icon to represent the hidden side of the Gil Grissoms of our time?

When I killed her it was so easy

That I wanted to kill her again

I got down on both of my knees

She ain't coming back again

It's rare to find an explanation for the crime in a murder ballad. Sometimes the killing is framed in a social perspective (as with early-Sixties Dylan, from "Ballad Of Hollis Brown" to "The Lonesome Death Of Hattie Carroll"), but in most cases blood is spilled for no real reason, with nothing that might offer a reassuring justification for the murderous act. The passionate motive underlying many ballads is nothing but a pretext: in the classic "Omie Wise" (also covered by Okkervil River on the 2003 album made with Canadian singer-songwriter Julie Doiron), it's the baby young Naomi is carrying that drives John Lewis to throw her into the river after strangling her. But the sinister light burning in the killer's eyes speaks of a darker impulse: “John Lewis, John Lewis, please tell me your mind / Do you intend to marry me or leave me behind? / Little Omie, Little Omie, I’ll tell you my mind / My mind is to murder you and leave you behind”.

Likewise, in "Banks Of The Ohio", the subtle sense of satisfaction with which the blade sinks into the throat of the victim begging for mercy goes beyond the mere rejection of a marriage proposal. This is murder in its rawest form: "Went out one night for to make a little round / I met little Sadie and I shot her down", announces the protagonist of "Little Sadie", making no attempt to add anything to the plain violence of the act. This void of meaning still finds voice among modern heirs to the murder ballad: in "Dirty Knife" (included in 2006 on "Fox Confessor Brings The Flood"), Neko Case draws on her Ukrainian grandmother's memories to describe madness bursting forth ("So suddenly the madness came"), underscored by the dramatic weight of the cello. That same lucid madness seems to find its seal of ancestral and rural inheritance in "This Is How We Do Things In The Country", a driving track by folk-punksters Slim Cessna's Auto Club from 2004: "This is how it's always been / This is how we do things in the country".

Now with all these cameras focused on my face

But evil don't look like anything

Evil doesn't look like anything, sing Okkervil River in "Westfall", giving themselves over to a rousing chorus. Evil has no face, it's an abyss that swallows the soul: nothingness is its very essence. "I shot a man in Reno just to watch him die", confesses the protagonist of "Folsom Prison Blues" in one of the most famous lines by Johnny Cash. And Bruce Springsteen echoes him amid the barren landscapes of "Nebraska", drawing on imagery from Terrence Malick's cult movie "Badlands" about the murders committed by a young couple in the late Fifties: "They wanted to know why I did what I did / Well, sir, I guess there's just a meanness in this world". "I think you can get to a point where nihilism, if that's the right word, takes over, and the fundamental laws established by society – religious or social laws – become meaningless", Springsteen explains. What makes "Nebraska" so unsettling is precisely its tone of icy apathy and indifference: there's a kind of "split between traumatic content and the flat, expressionless style within the narration of the protagonist/poetic self"⁵.

To borrow Hannah Arendt's words, it's the silent eruption of the "banality of evil": "evil is never radical, only extreme, and it possesses neither depth nor any demonic dimension. It can overgrow and lay waste the whole world because it spreads like a fungus on the surface"⁶. Legal scholars are aware of this too, for whom the very traditional notion of criminal responsibility, the premise for punishability, is taking on increasingly uncertain contours: faced with the limits of understanding crime, the sheer eruption of evil as such looms ever larger⁷. "Thought tries to reach some depth, to go to the roots, and the moment it concerns itself with evil, it is frustrated because there is nothing there", Arendt continues. "That is its banality. Only the good has depth and can be radical"⁶. At the heart of every murder ballad lies exactly this: evil laid bare in its deepest nature.

“This can’t be undone”

 Wilco – Bull Black Nova

       da “Wilco (The Album)” (Nonesuch, 2009)

Blood on the couch. Blood in the sink. Blood in the trunk. Heart in the throat, mind clouded over. The insistent piano notes, repeated and pounded out like an obsession, press forward without offering any respite.

"Bull Black Nova" doesn't conform to the canons of the murder ballad. And yet rarely has identification with the killer felt so intense: a murder just committed, a tension-charged getaway and, above all, the guilt that devours everything. "I don't know what's happening in this song", confesses Wilco frontman Jeff Tweedy. "Definitely nothing good. Except the idea that no matter how desperately you run from something you wish you hadn't done, you can't escape it". Its claustrophobic structure seems to carry an echo of "Spiders (Kidsmoke)", the kraut-rock epic Wilco included on "A Ghost Is Born". Tweedy compares it to a phone left off the hook: Nels Cline's guitar weaves its usual acrobatics, then shatters into jagged fragments, building toward an electric crescendo over which the vocal turns hoarse with frantic despair.

Blood on the sofa

In 1999, Wilco had already written a sort of ideal prologue to the scene depicted in "Bull Black Nova": it appeared on the album that marked a turning point in the band's sound, "Summerteeth", and it was destined to become one of the cornerstones of their catalogue. It's "Via Chicago", which opens right from its first lines with a terrible fantasy: "I dreamed about killing you again last night / And it felt alright to me". Sitting on the pier, the protagonist stays perfectly still, watching his victim die, staring at the flowing blood with a mad sense of satisfaction.

Ten years later, on "Wilco (The Album)", the tragic fulfillment of the dream from "Via Chicago" plays out as if through a distorting mirror, where the yawning abyss of evil warps one's very perception of things: the violence of the crime is nothing but a corruption of one's relationship with reality, it is "the desire, however fleeting, to destroy the thing you theoretically love above all else, in order to possess it fully"⁴. As criminologists put it, "the psychopathological state found in crimes of passion is marked by a sudden fracture with reality, a shift in the surrounding world and its meaning, as well as by intense self- or other-destructive anguish followed by sudden acting out"⁸. A fracture emblematically summed up by Tom Waits over the skeletal blues of "Murder In The Red Barn": "For some, murder is the only door through which they enter life". The red barn that provides the song's backdrop is one of the most famous settings in murder ballad lore: the site of the murder of Maria Marten, committed in the Suffolk countryside in the 19th century by her lover William Corder. The unlikely pairing of Mick Harris of Scorn and Martyn Bates of Eyeless In Gaza also revisited that fateful place in "The Murder Of Maria Marten", a funereal litany included in the ambient murder ballad trilogy the two recorded in the Nineties. But Waits's sarcasm turns it into a sort of symbolic effigy of American gothic, with a streak of black humour that belongs deeply to the tradition's imagery: "There's always some killin' you got to do around the farm".

It's in my hair

There’s blood in the sink

I can't calm down, I can't think

I keep calling

There’s blood in the trunk

I can’t calm down

Pick up!

What happens after the murder? The classic murder ballad's answer is rooted in the most traditional conception of retribution, that of the law of retaliation. "Injury of injury," Hegel would call it: violence can only be annulled through violence⁹. Prison, death, eternal damnation: "these songs of violent crime and punishment serve the function of supporting norms of conduct and consensual forms of punishment"¹⁰.

This is the case with “Pretty Polly”, also sung by Dock Boggs (an ancestor of Nirvana's Nirvana "Polly"?), in which the beloved Willie throws her into the grave he dug for her with cold premeditation: “Oh gentlemen and ladies, I bid you farewell / For killing pretty Polly my soul will go to hell”. "There's something vaguely supernatural that emerges from Boggs's performance, even though nothing otherworldly is ever named or hinted at. A sulfurous odor rises up, because in the way Boggs tells it, there seems to be no will in the story, only fatality or ritual"³. The jaws of hell also gape open before the protagonist of “Down In The Willow Garden”: “Hell is waiting for me / For I did murder that dear little girl / Whose name was Rose Connelly”. And Delia's killer (masterfully portrayed by Johnny Cash both in the Sixties and at the start of his partnership with American Recordings) finds himself haunted by the ghost of his victim within the walls of his cell in “Delia's Gone”.

In "Bull Black Nova" there's nothing of the kind: we don't know how the story will end, we don't know what fate awaits the killer. And yet the torment is no less profound, the condemnation no less radical: the impossibility of erasing the guilt committed weighs on the soul like a burden that takes one's breath away. It's as if we can hear the words of Cormac McCarthy in "No Country for Old Men" echoing: "That's the thing about the ones you kill, they're not the ones you got to worry about... Every step you take is forever. You can't make it go back. Can't make none of it go back." Punishment is inherent in the very nature of reality: it stems from the "objective structures of man and the world", it is "a natural consequence of guilt, flowing from its very essence and therefore not something that needs to be added to it at all"¹¹. That crack in one's relationship with reality, sooner or later, ends up rebounding on its author like a curse from which there seems to be no escape.

“Look beneath the floor boards”

 Sufjan Stevens – John Wayne Gacy, jr.

from "Illinois" (Asthmatic Kitty/Rough Trade, 2005)

He called himself "Pogo the Clown". A grotesque smile painted on white face paint, a garishly colored disguise masking his bulky frame. He entertained at neighborhood parties, handed out balloons to children. By trade he ran a construction business, and was even a Democratic Party activist. But beneath his house lay the buried bodies of at least twenty-seven boys.

John Wayne Gacy is one of the most notorious American serial killers. Between 1972 and 1978 he killed more than thirty victims in Chicago, all boys between the ages of 14 and 21: lured in under some pretext, subjected to violence and torture, and finally strangled. He never showed any remorse: "the only thing they can accuse me of is running an unlicensed cemetery," he once declared. Books, films and songs have been dedicated to him. But the most striking portrait is the one sketched in 2005 by Sufjan Stevens, in the stop of his imaginary tour of America dedicated to Illinois.

The neighbours they adored him

Oh, the dead

The history of the murder ballad abounds with songs dedicated to more or less famous killers: a veritable gallery of faces with sinister grins. There's Thomas Dula, a Civil War veteran barely in his twenties, guilty of stabbing his girlfriend Laura Foster, perhaps with the complicity of her sister: sentenced to hang in North Carolina in 1868, his crime was immortalized in the verses of “Tom Dooley”, the only classic murder ballad to reach number one on the Billboard chart, thanks to the 1958 version by the Kingston Trio, which marked the dawn of the folk revival. There's John Hardy, a West Virginia railroad worker who is the subject of the ballad bearing his name, who killed a man during a dice game. And of course there's Lee Shelton, an African-American cab driver and pimp who shot Billy Lyons in a St. Louis bar on Christmas night in 1895: his figure, sung over time under the names “Stagger Lee”, "Stack-A-Lee", "Stagolee" and others still, became the archetype of the Black outlaw, a forerunner of the antiheroes of gangsta rap¹². Since the days of Mississippi John Hurt and Woody Guthrie, his ghost has kept demanding a place in American mythology: Nick Cave rewrote his story as a pulp regurgitation, the Clash made him the protagonist of their "Wrong 'Em Boyo", and even today you can find him in the smoking blues of the Black Keys' "Stack Shot Billy".

On Wikipedia there's an entire repertoire of songs about serial killers, from Jack the Ripper to Charles Manson, passing of course through John Wayne Gacy. In Thatcher's England, the Smiths caused a scandal with their depiction in “Suffer Little Children” of the so-called "Moors murders", the killings carried out in Manchester in the first half of the Sixties by Ian Brady and Myra Hindley, who buried the bodies of five children on the moors. And the vivid, novelistic imagination of the Decemberists depicted, in a song from “The Crane Wife”, the grim deeds of the Shankill Butchers, a loyalist paramilitary group that spread terror through the nights of Belfast in the mid-Seventies, slitting the throats of anyone caught crossing the city's Catholic neighborhoods after dark: “They used to be just like me and you / They used to be sweet little boys / But something went horribly askew / Now killing is their only source of joy”. In “John Wayne Gacy, jr.”, however, Sufjan Stevens doesn't stop at the horror: he tries to dig deeper.

And in my best behaviour

For the secrets I have hid

The police dig beneath the house. Bones, skulls, skeletons. Dreams, hopes, desires. Where to find the courage to look in the face the shattered lives of those boys? “Twenty-seven people / Even more, they were boys / With their cars, summer jobs”. The voice becomes a plea, a gaze turned to the sky, as if on the verge of breaking and succumbing to dismay. “Oh my God / Are you one of them?”. The question mark is left hanging, forcing us to fully share in that pain, to completely put ourselves in those faces. And it's at this point that the perspective suddenly flips.

“I am really just like him”. Stevens's whisper sends chills down the spine. How can one be just like a monster? And yet we know it all too well: we all have secrets to hide, we all bury our violence against reality somewhere. “Look beneath the floor boards / For the secrets I have hid”. As in David Lynch's journey through the fog of "Twin Peaks", no one can truly call themselves innocent. The stigma of the monster is nothing but a way of denying that truth even to ourselves: it's a process of repression that leads us to see evil as something alien to man, something in-human. "One's own evil, which one fears and detests, is projected, through an unconscious process, onto one's neighbor, onto the so-called scapegoat, and it is in him that it is hated, fought, tamed"¹³. It's the warning to have the courage to look into the mirror, delivered through Steve Earle's verses from the convict of “The Truth”: “What scares you is the me in you”.

Singing about murder can be a way of escaping the dilemma, of projecting the shadow outside oneself. Or it can be a way of acknowledging one's own bloodied hands: "to accept the shadow as the expression of one's own imperfection, of which evil is especially a part, means first of all that man must accept the fact that he has a dark side that constitutes an integral part of his personality"¹². The fascination of the murder ballad lies right here, in this intimate connection with the shadow side of the human soul.

"Face to face"

 The Mountain Goats – Ezekiel 7 And The Permanent Efficacy Of Grace

from "The Life Of The World To Come" (4AD, 2009)

A car crosses the desert. Hands grip the wheel. In the trunk lies a man, tied up. The mind tries to focus on the road, as driving rain streams down the windshield.

John Darnielle, the mind and soul of the Mountain Goats, has the gift of true storytellers for sketching a scene in a few decisive strokes: a flash that splits the sky, arms bound behind the back, the road leading to a drug-trafficking crossroads. That's enough to picture the story behind "Ezekiel 7 And The Permanent Efficacy Of Grace": "it's a song about someone torturing another person to death," its author explains, without mincing words. The tale, set to the rarefied, nocturnal accompaniment of piano, takes on the dry chill of a scene straight out of the Coen brothers' "Fargo".

But, as in every song on "The Life Of The World To Come", there's also another layer of meaning, hinted at by the biblical reference in the title: in this case, the seventh chapter of the Book of Ezekiel, in which the prophet announces to the people the coming of God's judgment. The very same Ezekiel from which "Pulp Fiction" draws the monologue on divine justice that Samuel L. Jackson recites before every execution: a justice ready to descend from above upon the iniquities of the wicked. So why, then, the reference to the "permanent efficacy of grace," deliberately added by Darnielle in the second half of the title?

The clouds explode and then the desert blooms

Keep driving

In the epilogue of a murder ballad there's room only for punishment. Repentance, amends, reconciliation have no place in its vocabulary. But every rule has its exception: such is the case of "Poor Ellen Smith", a ballad that, as usual, mythologizes a real event: the killing of a young woman by her lover in North Carolina in 1894. Among its countless interpretations, that of the legendary Throwing Muses voice Kristin Hersh (who devoted an entire album to murder ballads in 1998, "Murder, Misery And Then Goodnight") lends its bluegrass gait an almost candid lightness.

Right after recounting the deed, the focus shifts to the killer in his cell: a letter arrives to inform him that the flowers on Ellen's grave have withered. "Some day I'll go home and say when I go / On poor Ellen's grave pretty flowers I'll sow." Every night, Ellen appears to him in a tearful dream, reminding him of a guilt that can never be erased. "I'll never be free from the sins of my past." Yet his only thought is that one day he might visit his victim's grave, by the old willow tree, and lay a flower on that headstone.

In even starker terms, the war criminal described by Okkervil River in "The War Criminal Rises And Speaks", responsible for wiping out a village of women and children, addresses the jury and admits to the massacre with trembling hands, as the melody swells like the surge of a rising tide: "If I could climb back through time / I'd restore their lives and then give back my own."

Pull over and blast off when I get the chance

Clear as an insect's wings in sunlight

Flip on the high stakes radio

Try to sing the words right

Drive ‘til the rain stops

Keep driving

At bottom, the killer's need for atonement is the same need that drives every human being: it springs from the recognition of the evil that dwells within us all. It's the first glimmer of a new day: as Flannery O'Connor once observed, "for the writer of fiction, violence is never an end in itself. It is the extreme situation that best reveals what we are essentially. [...] It is strangely capable of returning characters to reality and preparing them to accept their moment of grace"¹⁴.

It is precisely from this vantage point that John Darnielle recounts violence throughout his songbook: as a tool capable of laying human nature bare. In "Against Pollution" (from "We Shall All Be Healed"), the triggering event is a liquor-store clerk shooting a robber who has come to hold him up: the memory of that instant leads him, in the silence of a church nave, to question what his true face really is. “When the last days come […] We will recognize each other / And see ourselves for the first time / The way we really are”. In "Love Love Love" (from "The Sunset Tree"), the same revelation befalls Raskolnikov, the protagonist of "Crime and Punishment," in the moment he discovers his own features reflected in his victim's eyes. “Now we see this / As in a mirror dimly / Then we shall see each other / Face to face”.

Seeing reality face to face: for the Mountain Goats, the fulfillment of justice is a longing that has more to do with truth than with condemnation. And indeed, in the biblical prophecy at the heart of "Ezekiel 7 And The Permanent Efficacy Of Grace," the "purpose of judgment is not death but life": it is a "prospect of salvation through judgment," in which "the announcement of judgment never comes without that of salvation"¹⁵. Paradoxically, judgment ends up coinciding with the "permanent efficacy of grace": not a retributive justice, but an initiative impossible to foresee. Because for someone crushed by guilt, forgiveness cannot be reached unless someone else takes the first step: just as with Dostoevsky's Raskolnikov, who can only be redeemed through the love of Sonja, the young woman who persuades him to confess his crime. "Unlike revenge, which is the natural, automatic reaction to transgression and which, because action is irreversible, can be expected and even calculated, the act of forgiving can never be predicted; it is the only reaction that acts in an unexpected way and thus retains, though it is a reaction, something of the original character of action. Forgiving, in other words, is the only reaction which does not merely re-act but acts anew and unexpectedly"¹⁶.

I had his arms tied up behind him

Flying

The piano notes slowly fade, until all that remains is the rhythm of a heartbeat marking the silence. It's the victim's heartbeat, it's the murderer's heartbeat. It's the echo of every man's heart, with its endless tangle of desires.

All murder ballads end with a moral: but life never lets itself be so easily confined within the boundaries of a scheme. It's made of contradictions and unforeseen twists, and the most mysterious of all is the fact that evil can be defeated by mercy. If there is a moral, perhaps this is it: the mark of Cain, despite everything, is not the last word.

Note

¹ O.W. Burt, American murder ballads and their stories, Oxford University Press, 1958

⁴ T. Graeme, I shot a man in Reno. Storia della morte nella popular song: di omicidio, suicidio, incendio, alluvione, droga, malattia e altre sventure, Arcana, 2009

⁵ A. D'Amore, Mia città di rovine. L'America di Bruce Springsteen, Manifestolibri, 2002

¹⁶ H. Arendt, Il pensiero secondo, Rizzoli, 1999

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