I don't usually post music, and modern stuff is not my wont. I like to think of myself as more of the Bach and Mozart type, though in my weak moments (of which there are many) I fling myself in Rachmaninoffian strains.
I make the exception on this one, from a 65-year-old voice that some have described as "a catarrhal death-rattle."
The words are raspier, to be sure, but they echo deep, taste sweeter, and wander down the gullet like good port. Not whiskey anymore.
Despite the fact that he has some obvious affinities with Henry Timrod ("the Poet Laureate of the Confederacy") and Archibald MacLeish, for some as yet inarticulate reason, the coarse bard puts me in mind of "East Coker," whose author I don't need to identify here:
Home is where one starts from. As we grow older
The world becomes stranger, the pattern more complicated
Of dead and living. Not the intense moment
Isolated, with no before and after,
But a lifetime burning in every moment
And not the lifetime of one man only
But of old stones that cannot be deciphered.
There is a time for the evening under starlight,
A time for the evening under lamplight
(The evening with the photograph album).
Love is most nearly itself
When here and now cease to matter.
Old men ought to be explorers
Here and there does not matter
We must be still and still moving
Into another intensity
For a further union, a deeper communion
Through the dark cold and the empty desolation,
The wave cry, the wind cry, the vast waters
Of the petrel and the porpoise. In my end is my beginning.