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By Root 851 0

nine o’clock. I knew what Lanois had in mind and thought that there might be something to it. The dichotomy of cutting this lyrically driven song with melodic changes, with a rockin’ Cajun band, might be interesting…but the only way to find out, is to find out. Once we started trying to capture it, the song seemed to get caught in a stranglehold. All the chugging rhythms began imprisoning the lyrics. This style seemed to be oblivious to their existence. Both Dan and I became plainly perplexed. Every performance was stealing more energy. We recorded it a lot, varying the tempos and even the keys, but it was like being cast into sudden hell. The demo with just me and Willie and Brian had sounded effortless and it flowed smooth. Certainly, as Danny said, it didn’t sound finished, but what recording ever does? Dopsie got almost as frustrated as me. It was a strange bull we were riding. He and his band never lost their composure, though. This song is not exactly a twelve-bar song and needed to project the perception of intimacy to be effective. It was becoming way too complicated and convoluted. An ambiance of texture and atmosphere is what the song called for and what Lanois is so good at. I couldn’t figure out why we weren’t getting it. You work hours on something and you get dizzy. After a while you lose your judgment.

At about three in the morning we had played ourselves out and just started playing any old stuff: “Jambalaya,” “Cheatin’ Heart,” “There Stands the Glass” — country classics. Just fooling around, playing like we were on a party boat. Two of Dan’s engineers had been changing shifts since the beginning, and it had been hot and sweaty all night. I was wearing a blue flannel shirt and it was soaked through. Sweat was pouring off my face. In the midst of all of this, I played another new song I had written, “Where Teardrops Fall.” I showed it quickly to Dopsie and we recorded it. Took about five minutes and it wasn’t rehearsed. In the finale of the song, Dopsie’s saxophone player, John Hart, played a sobbing solo that nearly took my breath away. I leaned over and caught a glimpse of the musician’s face. He’d been sitting there the whole night in the dark and I hadn’t noticed him. The man was the spitting image of Blind Gary Davis, the singing reverend that I’d known and followed around years earlier. What was he doing here? Same guy, same cheeks and chin, fedora, dark glasses. Same build, same height, same long black coat — the works. It was eerie. Reverend Gary Davis, one of the wizards of modern music…like he’d been raised upright and was watching over things, keeping constant vigilance over what was happening. He peered across the room at me in an odd way, like he had the ability to see beyond the moment, like he’d thrown a rope line out to grip. All of a sudden I know that I’m in the right place doing the right thing at the right time and Lanois is the right cat. Felt like I had turned a corner and was seeing the sight of a god’s face.

The next night, we began listening to all the different takes of “Dignity.” Lanois had kept them all. There must have been more than twenty. Whatever promise Dan had seen in the song was beaten into a bloody mess. Where we had started from, we’d never gotten back to, a fishing expedition gone nowhere. In no take did we ever turn back the clock. We just kept winding it. Every take another ball of confusion. Takes that could almost make you question your own existence.

Then, from out of nowhere in the midst of it all, came “Where Teardrops Fall.” It was just a three-minute ballad, but it made you stand straight up and stay right where you were. It’s like someone had pulled the cord to stop the train. The song was beautiful and magical, upbeat, and it was complete. I was wondering if Danny was thinking the same thing, and he was. “I can’t remember that at all,” Danny said. Okay, we were going to forget about “Dignity” for a while. (We never did go back to it.) Lanois said that he liked the ballad, too, that it’s got something, but — and it was a big “but” — he said we could do it