Merce Lemon and her band recently joined Colin Miller at Asheville’s Drop of Sun Studios to cover Will Oldham’s signature tune.
I must admit that I had never listened to any version of “I See a Darkness” before today. I’m not quite sure how that happened–I recognize the skull from the Bonnie ‘Prince’ Billy album cover, after all–but all I can do now is be grateful that I’ve heard not just one, but multiple versions of the song, and be grateful to Merce Lemon for being my gateway to all of them. Her cover has a bit more crunch than the original, with smoldering guitar taking the lead from funereal piano, but her delivery captures the song’s intimate weariness, rising and falling as the lyrics glance back and forth between the void and the candle that illuminates a tiny part of it.
I used to think that sadness was something to be pushed away, run from, eliminated, and it’s no wonder. Ads pop up online exhorting us to think more positively, telling us that we can achieve bliss if we follow certain simple steps or subscribe to certain podcasts, assuring us that those bad things we feel while we’re lying awake in the night are mere products of faulty wiring in the brain. But sadness, or whatever clinical terms can be used to describe it, is foundational to the experience of being human, and always has been. The darkness is there, looming. People do terrible things to each other, on purpose and by accident. People try and fail. People go away. There are some days, weeks, months, years where you will feel hopeless. It is ok to acknowledge all of those things, because happiness can exist too, sometimes, and burns brighter against the black backdrop. After all, Merce Lemon, Will Oldham, Johnny Cash, and more have looked into the darkness and sung, “My best unbeaten brother/This isn’t all I see.”
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