The 333 Best Pop Songs of the 2000s: #128

#128: "Four Winds" (2007) - Bright Eyes

About a year or so before I got married, a close friend talked me into seeing a fortune teller. This oracle lived in a trailer* right on the side of a four-lane highway, right underneath a gigantic billboard proclaiming her Sister status. My friend and I were just riding around one night, and she spotted the sign. It sported a nifty, hieroglyphic-like eyeball. The sign was yellow, the test was red, and the writing was on the wall. We had to go.

I knocked, and Sister Mary opened the door for us. I walked in and nearly tripped on a child's pop-up/bubble mower. I then nearly tripped on a child. Sister Mary shooed her half-naked young'uns** back to their bedroom, and she ushered us through some love beads*** into her sanctum sanctorum.**** She sat down behind a small wooden table, and I sat opposite her. I think my friend was behind me, but I didn't know, for there wasn't room enough to turn my head. Sister Mary then asked us what we wanted. I don't remember anymore what fortune we ordered (Ooh! I'll have the #13, the Voodoo Hoodoo Chooka Chooky Choo Choo special), but I remember Sister Mary pulling out her deck o' Tarot cards with the fancy pictures and layin' 'em straight. She then stared at the cards, looked up at my friend, and asked her to leave the room.

After my friend left,***** Sister Mary asked me if I liked this woman,****** and I told her that I did. She returned to the cards, and she grimaced, and then she grabbed my hand and looked into my eyes and said, "the cards do not lie." She unclamped the vise grip and then explained what each card represented, and I have no recollection of what stood for what, and I didn't much listen to her closely. Not because I thought it was mumbo jumbo, but because her intense glare and hand clamp had mystified me. "Why so serious," I wondered.

After she finished her analysis of the signs of the Tarot, I asked her, "Tell me, what does it all mean?" She glared at me again--not angrily, but...I don't know...seriously. She held her gaze and grip--without speaking or moving--for a good five seconds. I know, now, that five seconds doesn't seem to be a long time, but...okay, I got it. Imagine sitting in small wooden chair in a small cramped closet of a room with someone squeezing your hand and looking you in the eyes. Got it? Okay, now let's count: one Mississippi, two Mississippi, three Mississippi, four Mississippi, five Mississippi. See? That's a long time, my friend. I mean, imagine if someone you knew well held your hand while staring in your eyes that long without speaking...it'd creep you out, wouldn't it? Well, imagine a total stranger doing it. Uh-huh. I thought so.

It didn't matter the future and fortune she foretold; what mattered was her delivery...and the atmosphere. The whole time she was reading the cards and staring into my eyes, I could still hear her children in the living room, but that dose of realistic background noise greatly reduced the level of hokum: it didn't seem like a show. Sister Mary was dressed in ordinary, lounge-around-the-home clothing, and she never lit any candles or incense, nor did she ever darken the lights, or play any mood music. All she had were her instruments and her words and her versimilitude and her presence. These qualities, against a realistic backdrop--all unaffected--made for a compelling and believable performance.

Hence, Bright Eyes' "Four Winds," Conner Oberst's & co.'s cerebral re-imagining of Stevie Wonder's "Superstition" for a new era. Oberst--in full symbolist form*******--pens a satiric-apocalyptic poem full of heavy doses of Yeats and Twain and Lovecraft and Rushdie and Dylan. Lyrically, it comes across more-than-a-mite pretentious and arrogant. Musically, it's brilliant. Oberst's best vocals lie in this song, as he suppresses his worst tendencies--his too-sincere breathing, his too-precious pauses, his adenoidal delivery--in favor of singing the melody straight but passionately, all archness away. The country-folk instrumentation (Bright Eyes is a band) sounds sincerely country, and then there's the fiddle. Oh, my! Anton Patzner's licks are not only melodically memorable, but full of country soul also, as he seems to slightly rush and squeek at the end of a line, or dip and sway, pulling us in and letting us go and pulling us back again. In fact, Patzner's performance here is one of the best individual instrumental performances on a pop record in the past, oh, eighty years.

The music on this record is so good, that I believe it undercuts Oberst's message: what he's condemning in the lyric his band's in fact invoking. The spiritualism that Oberst (perhaps too********) smartly********* deconstructs he first has to construct, and his band gets a hold of that construction and never lets go. No matter the message, the messengers are so convincing and adept that we have no choice but to ride along and go with the flow, as we fall under sway, the words themselves mere constructs, conduits for what we perceive to be the spiritual truth because the tellers tell us so as they gaze and grip with such intensity that we dare not look away. We cave.

NOTES

*I want to note that I am not putting down trailers, as I once lived in one.

**I want to note that I am not putting down half-naked young'uns running around a toy-strewn living room. I might have back then, but I would never do so now. You should see my house. Then again, maybe you shouldn't.

***I want to note that I am not putting down love beads. If it were completely up to me, I'd put ours back up.

****This private and sacred shrine occupied what was once a closet.

*****She told me that she then went and played with the kids, but I distinctly remember hearing the trailer door shutting.

******I assumed she meant my friend, but she could have meant her--her meaning Sister Mary, speaking of herself in the third person. I mean, who knows sometimes, right?

******* All you college grads and religious researchers will have some serious party-time fun noting and detailing this song's every analogy.

********I've known several people who've believed this record was a religious song.

*********Smart, at least, in the sense that the lyric's symbolism (pretentious or not), though cryptic at first listen, actually works well as poetic symbolism, meaning it not only seems literary but it is. Second-rate poetry, maybe, but dead-on target.