Way back in the dark ages when I first began writing this blog, I called it an mp3 blog and featured some of my favorite music from around the world. Those posts and songs are still here, though they’ve been subsumed under thousands of posts about the daily horrors of the Israeli Occupation.
But in honor of the wonder, beauty and power of song, I’d like to take you back to those days of yesteryear and feature one of the most wonderful pieces of songwriting I’ve heard in years. I first heard this song a few weeks ago on my local roots radio station, KBCS. I knew it was Marianne Faithfull singing and I knew the lyrics were killer. But you know how it is: I was in the car, only heard a few snatches of lyrics, didn’t hear the song credits, meant to look it up in the program playlist. Never got around to it.
Tonight, for some reason I started looking for it. Couldn’t find anything digging through old program playlists. Then, thinking perhaps the DJ may’ve been playing something from Faithfull’s most recent album, I hit pay dirt. The song is That’s How Every Empire Falls. It was written by a hitherto unknown Knoxville singer-songwriter, R.B. Morris (website), and appears on his Spies, Lies and Burning Eyes. John Prine recorded a masterful, haunting (as only John can do) cover in 2008 on his Fair and Square EP.
Finally, Faithfull recorded her own cover of the song for her new album, Vagabond Ways.
The lyrics are a haunting allegory in which the frailties of the human heart are woven into the decline of an empire. It seems, at least for me, that the best songs are the ones that somehow connect the heart with the deeper truths of human society. First, listen to the song and as you hear the last words (lyrics here), read these words and think of the 9/11 attacks, all those miserable years under George Bush, and all the lost opportunities we’ve had as a great nation humbled by our own hubris:
A bitter wind blows through the country
A hard rain falls on the sea
If terror comes without a warning
There must be something we don’t see
What fire begets this fire?
Like torches thrown into the straw
If no one asks, then no one answers
That’s how every empire falls.
What is it about such a song that distills human experience in such a primal, powerful way? It’s something like the role prayer and religion served at one time (and still for some) in human society.
Haunting in today’s world ! By a literature Prof from Univ of Tennessee and could not have been presented any better than by John Prine. Sounds very much like something he could have written himself.
A little too real and eerie now !
I had no idea the songwriter was a professor. His original version is beautiful as well. But Prine always makes his songs haunting and tragic and deeply human .
I think that I have sat and listened to this song countless times now, and can’t get it out of my head.Beautiful and what a voice that John Prine has – thanks!!
Loved the song, especially the lyrics:
What fire begets this fire?
If no one asks, then no one answers
Zionists of all kinds don’t ask, they just don’t want to know the truth. The truth is their empire too will end one day.
John Prine is a great songwriter. His song called “Say Hello In There” is a masterpiece, especially compelling when sung by
Bette Midler.
Before you buy Marianne Faithful, remember her refusal to honor the boycott of Israel.
link to thejc.com
If John Prine goes there, it would break my heart.
Great great song, Richard.
I don’t understand her claiming she couldn’t boycott because the situation was “too complicated.” That mystifies me.