Crime Fiction In Music
Through the Lens of Dan Reeder, Townes Van Zandt, and Jason Isbell.
INTRO
I have always been fascinated by crime, in some form or another. Books about bank robbers, murder investigation doc series, and plenty of crime fiction - not to mention my multi-year addiction to the subreddit dedicated to uncovering the identity of EAR/ONS (colloquially the Golden State Killer).
Much has been written about our centuries-long fixation on crime. But recently I realized that there wasn’t anything out there about crime fiction in music - or music as crime fiction. A quick Google search doesn’t do much:
You may have already guessed that “Suspenseful Crime Scene Background Music” is not my bag. Instead, I want to talk about some of my favorite folk and country songs, especially the ones that function as - or borrow from - crime fiction.
Dan Reeder
Reeder is an oddball folk musician and favorite of mine, an aging American expat in Germany who was signed to John Prine a few decades back and writes uniformly short, brilliant songs on handmade guitars. He has confessed to not knowing how to write longer songs, but as a fan I hope he never does. There’s something special about his electric brand of brevity, which is always rendered in soft-toned vocal layers and simple chord progressions.
In his song “Stay Down Man,” Reeder doesn’t stretch his crime story across a longer timeframe. In fact, it’s hardly a crime story at all, but a window into one that takes place before and after the events of the song. But we are certainly in the world of crime fiction, which Reeder clarifies instantly with his aesthetic reference points:
Nightclub parking lot south of L.A.
The end of a long night, at the end of a long day
The warm wind blows, and the palm trees sway
You’ve had that shitty look
On your face all day
I should’ve known the night would end this way
Not the nightclub, but the parking lot. Not in LA, just south of it. It’s the end of the night and the day, because you haven’t slept. You hate the face of the person you’re with. These low-life signifiers, juxtaposed with the warm wind and palm trees, is the vivid contrast that drives LA crime fiction aesthetics. It’s this beautiful, picturesque city with perfect weather - but it’s also a chaotic, teeming den of desperate people doing bad things.
The titular chorus gives us some more data. There was a confrontation in the lot, and shots were fired - or a gun was pulled, at least. And the narrator’s friend appears to be the problem:
Stay down, man
If you get up again he'll probably kill you
Stay where you are
I'll go get the car and we can go
But I swear to god I'll leave you here to die
If you say one more word to that guy
The song is cruelly funny. What kind of guy would leave his friend to die? One with strong survival instincts, and knowledge of the streets. In other words, a criminal - or someone who exists on the outskirts of criminal life. Much like Elmore Leonard, Reeder loves to play around with kinda-sorta criminals.
“Nobody Wants To Be You” is another gem from Reeder. The subject of the song has borrowed some money from the wrong guys, or maybe played in a poker game on credit. He’s in over his head.
You're gonna have to tell her where the money went
Why you can't pay the rent, why you have to move
You're gonna have to tell her what happened to the car
And who those guys are in the living room
Oh whoa whoa nobody wants to be you
And who's that girl who's been hanging around?
The one in the white tube top and the tattoos
And why's she showing everybody her ultrasound?
And what does that have to do with you?
Oh whoa whoa nobody wants to be you
“Nobody Wants To Be You” is a corrective elixir for the glamour of crime fiction. It is about the quotidian miseries brought on by the criminal life - the bad things that happen when you hang out with the wrong guys - and it has no sympathy for its subject. Because the truth is, nobody wants to be you, man.
Townes Van Zandt
Townes Van Zandt was a brilliant singer-songwriter born into wealth, a sucker for punishment who willfully found his way into an ascetic, miserable existence because his art demanded it. He was the outlaw country musician. He was also an addict who treated everyone around him like shit, himself included. He eventually died of alcoholism and heroin addiction in the 90s, leaving behind a wealth of great music.
Townes released “Pancho and Lefty” in 1972, and no one really noticed until Emmylou Harris released a cover of it in 1977. Willie Nelson heard her version, and recorded a cover with Merle Haggard that was released in 1983. It shot to the top of the Country charts, and has remained a standard of the genre ever since.
For my money, Townes sings his songs better than anyone else, and “Pancho and Lefty” is no exception. The song tells a strange, elliptical crime story, with shifting perspectives and a remarkable level of wordplay through which Townes mines autobiography and makes clear his dark, nihilistic philosophy.
Briefly, the events of the song:
Lefty is a mama’s boy who ventures out for a life on the road, which turns him hard.
- Pancho is a Mexican bandit, famed for his aggressive confidence.
- The Federales never manage to get ahold of Pancho.
- Lefty is (implicitly) paid to kill Pancho by the Federales.
- Lefty has to go on the run, and ends his life living a lonely existence in Cleveland.
Living on the road my friend
Was gonna keep you free and clean
And now you wear your skin like iron
And your breath as hard as kerosene
Weren't your mama's only boy
But her favorite one it seems
She began to cry when you said goodbye
And sank into your dreams
The opening lines of this song are probably the most famous, for good reason - Kris Kristofferson once said that he felt like the iron skin / kerosene breath couplet described his own life perfectly.
Townes was known for writing from his own experience, and I believe that the character of Lefty serves as a Townes avatar here. The biographical analogy is easy to draw, as Townes was a mama’s boy who turned into a hard, bitter man on the road. This is also the only verse of the song written in the second-person. As he addresses Lefty directly, Townes speaks to a younger version of himself.
He switches to the third-person perspective as he introduces Pancho:
Pancho was a bandit boy
His horse was fast as polished steel
He wore his gun outside his pants
For all the honest world to feel
Pancho met his match you know
On the deserts down in Mexico
Nobody heard his dying words
Ah but that's the way it goes
Townes uses “polished steel” to describe Pancho’s horse instead of his gun, a classic example of his savant feel for the texture and color of words. To close the verse, he doesn’t bother telling us how Pancho was shot, or his dying words. Instead he just notes that no one even heard his dying words. You see this theme over and over in Townes’ catalogue: light turns to dark, life turns to death. We are all alone.
All the Federales say
They could have had him any day
They only let him slip away
Out of kindness, I suppose
My understanding has always been that the chorus is meant to situate us inside Townes’ direct perspective, listening to the Federales tell their tall tales about how they could have caught Pancho. Sitting in a bar somewhere, perhaps, as Townes often was. He slips into the first person in the final line, sarcastically suggesting that Pancho was allowed to slip away out of kindness.
Lefty, he can't sing the blues
All night long like he used to
The dust that Pancho bit down south
Ended up in Lefty's mouth
The day they laid poor Pancho low
Lefty split for Ohio
Where he got the bread to go
There ain't nobody knows
These are the lyrics that tell us Lefty killed (betrayed?) Pancho, and was paid to do so. My instinct is that he was paid by the Federales although I don’t think we get a definitive answer on the identity of his contractor. The Federales are the easiest answer, but presumably Pancho had a long list of enemies. As to why Lefty split for Ohio, specifically? It isn’t clear. Probably because it rhymed, and because it felt aptly random.
The poets tell how Pancho fell
And Lefty's living in a cheap hotel
The desert's quiet, Cleveland's cold
And so the story ends we're told
Pancho needs your prayers it's true
But save a few for Lefty too
He only did what he had to do
And now he's growing old
Townes enters a contemplative mode in the final verse, as he draws a powerful contrast between the twin fates of Pancho and Lefty. The poets recount tales of Pancho (+), and Lefty’s living in a cheap hotel (-).
Again I am struck by the way that Lefty’s experience lines up with Townes’ life. Given Townes’ existential commitment to nihilism (see: “Big Country Blues,” “A Song For,” “Nothing”), it is easy to understand his attraction to Pancho’s fate. After all, Pancho got to die, and be remembered by the poets. And Townes’ other most famous song? “Waitin’ Around To Die.”
Jason Isbell
I’ve written about Isbell at length here, so I’ll spare you the biography, except for a pertinent reminder that the country rock singer-songwriter used to be an alcoholic, and sobered up for his now-wife Amanda Shires. One of Isbell’s strongest - and strangest - songs is “Live Oak.”
I was rougher than the timber shippin' out of Fond du Lac
When I headed south at seventeen, the sheriff on my back
I'd never held a lover in my arms or in my gaze
So I found another victim every couple days
But the night I fell in love with her, I made my weakness known
Through the fighters and the farmers diggin' dusty fields alone
The jealous innuendos of the lonely-hearted men
Let me know what kind of country I was sleeping in
Well, you couldn't stay a loner on the plains before the war
When my neighbors took to slightin' me, I had to ask what for
Rumors of my wickedness had reached our little town
Soon she'd heard about the boys I used to hang around
Isbell generally writes in a straightforward way, using metaphor to describe rather than elide. The narrator was a roughneck Casanova who headed south to evade law enforcement, and found someone to settle down with (and seemingly marry) in his new home on the plains. But “you couldn’t stay a loner on the plains before the war,” and it turns out that his jealous neighbors were spreading rumors about his past. So he has to tell her the truth:
We'd robbed a Great Lakes freighter, killed a couple men aboard
When I told her, her eyes flickered like the sharp steel of a sword
All the things that she'd suspected, I'd expected her to fear
Was the truth that drew her to me when I landed here
Up until this stanza, “Live Oak” is fairly easy to explicate. The protagonist tells his wife the truth lurking behind all those local rumors: he and his fellow outlaws robbed a freighter. And when things went bad, they killed a couple men aboard. But the last few lines here trip me up.
In the verse prior to this one, the wife had “...heard about the boys I used to hang around.” But she hadn’t heard the details of his criminal background, right? Otherwise there’d be no point in telling her. So in this verse he tells her, and instead of scaring her, it seems to arouse her, as her eyes “flicker like the sharp steel of the sword.”
Her lack of fear is also a lack of surprise: “All the things that she’d suspected, I expected her to fear.” Simple enough. But then we hear that those “things” (the narrator having committed murder) “Was the truth the drew her to me when I landed here.”
Do you see the problem? We have a revelation, a truth-telling…and immediately afterwards, we are told that that the narrator’s wife already knew the truth, and that it’s what drew her to him in the first place!
One potential clue lies in the word “Was” (singular), which can’t apply to to “All the things that she’d suspected…” (plural) Isbell is an obsessive, nitpicky writer who wouldn’t make a grammatical error like that. Hence, these two lines are two separate sentences.
Sentence 1: “All the things that she’d suspected, I’d expected her to fear.”
Sentence 2: “Was the truth that drew her to me when I landed here.”
This makes more grammatical sense, but we still have this paradoxical revelation of a truth that the wife somehow already knew. And she can’t have known the truth when he got in town, because the rumors - and the attendant confession - would have no impact. And the truth did have an impact - it made her eyes flicker like “the sharp steel of the sword. “
My conclusion is that Isbell’s use of the word “truth” is an interpretive one. It might be better understood as “aura,” or even - excuse the Zoomer language - “vibe.” When the narrator got to town, his eventual wife got the feeling that he had done such things. Because of that, the ultimate factual revelation didn’t stop her from loving him, but actually turned her on. Of course, this conclusion is further complicated by the song’s final verse.
Well, I carved her cross from live oak and her box from shortleaf pine
And buried her so deep, she touched the water table line
I picked up what I needed, and I headed south again
To myself I wondered, would I ever find another friend?
This is one of the most beautiful stanzas in Isbell’s catalogue. I also, frankly, cannot figure out how the fuck it fits into the song. We have fast-forwarded past something very important: how his wife died. The popular interpretation (on lyric sites, and on Reddit) is that the narrator has murdered his wife because she now knows the truth about his criminal past. But I struggle to square this with the stanza previous, which clearly suggests that his wife was, if anything, sexually aroused by his criminal past.
And the fact that the narrator carved her cross and coffin himself, and buried her deep enough to touch the water table line - what I mean is, these are clearly acts of love, of mourning. They do not feel like the acts of a man who capriciously murdered his wife.
I am just going to leave that mystery unanswered. Maybe I can ask Jason Isbell one day. What I’m dead-certain of, however, is the meaning of the chorus, which leads and closes the song (albeit with altered lyrics, but that’s a discussion for another day):
There's a man who walks beside me; he is who I used to be
And I wonder if she sees him and confuses him with me
And I wonder who she's pinin' for on nights I'm not around
Could it be the man who did the things I'm living down?
This, like so much of Jason Isbell’s songwriting, is about sobriety. Here, in particular, it expresses a deep and abiding fear that there is something (or some thing) that was lost when he stopped drinking and drugging.
Isbell imagines a sort of vivid, materialized double consciousness that brings his anxieties to life. The addict that he used to be - is that the version of him that his wife (who is not sober) secretly longs for at night?
This is an intense, near-visionary expression of inner doubt. There’s nothing quite like it: the master songwriter, expressing a jealous anxiety in which the other man is himself. And like all jealous anxiety, on some level it is a fantasy. By asking if his wife pines for his past self, the addict allows himself to displace his cravings, to blame his intense desire to return to substance abuse on the erotic needs of his partner.