Townes Van Zandt and His Songs

Before I get ahead of myself, I should explain the name of the blog. For those out there scratching your heads, “Pueblo Waltz” is a song written by late singer-songwriter Townes Van Zandt for his 1978 album Flyin’ Shoes. (If that’s not enough to jog your memory….well, 1. I forgive you and 2. a recording of the song via Youtube is linked below. Please reacquaint yourself!)

Both as a performer and a human being, Van Zandt was a problem. An alcoholic and drug addict with more than his fair share of outrageous anecdotes (e.g. jumping out a third story window, landing on his back, and living to tell the tale), Van Zandt—perhaps more than anyone who comes to mind—is the real-life version of the mythologized drunk-cowboy-singer (a figure brought to life most recently by Jeff Bridges in Crazy Heart).

But the more you learn about Van Zandt, the more Bad Blake (lost by this reference? you should stop reading and go watch Crazy Heart) seems like a real-world-truth turned into Hollywood-melodrama. Sure, Bad Blake had his moments—running off a stage to puke, losing a child in a mall—but did we see Blake shoot up vodka in the film? Not if I remember correctly…but you know who did that in real life?

As I’ve made clear, Van Zandt led a difficult life. However, once we push all his personal problems and failings aside, we are left with the music. This man, flawed and broken by addiction, penned some of the loveliest country songs ever written.

~

Like their writer, the songs are problematic. Granted, they are problematic in ways that may be construed as positive for the admiring listener, but they are still problematic. Quite often it seems as if Van Zandt himself isn’t sure what he’s trying to say. Sometime the lyrics and music even seem at odds with one another.

Sunrise comes and I don’t know why

Living loves and the day does fly.

Soon the moon and baby and I

Will be lying side by side.

(from “Pueblo Waltz”)

The narrator “[doesn’t] know why” the sunrise occurs—but what does that tell us about him? This verse, which opens and closes the song, sounds almost uppity in its assumption: the sun will go down…he will lay down with his sweetheart…the sun will wake him up the next morning…and so on. Reading the verse, it seems rather straightforward.

Now listen to it. The lyrics, set to the pace of a slow, wistful waltz, don’t belie any sort of straightforward sentiment. There is a sense of assurance, but assurance of what? Now listen to the melody and ignore the words. Isn’t it sad?

Every time I listen to this song, I am only further struck by that immense sadness that lingers behind the lyrics. In the third verse, Van Zandt talks of “[leaving] these Texas blues behind.” Not just blues—Texas blues. As if Van Zandt were saying that it’s not even a matter of blues at all, it’s a matter of Texas, a matter of not being with Guy and Susannah (Clark).

But I don’t buy that. It’s not a matter of Texas. It’s a matter of Townes. Van Zandt, it seems to me, will never escape his blues. It’s not a matter of being with Guy and Susannah; it’s a matter of being them. Van Zandt will always wake up in the morning, look at the sunrise, and admit that he doesn’t understand.

~

That sort of starkness is why Van Zandt fascinates me as a songwriter. In Van Zandt’s universe, everything becomes tragic and immutable. The famous characters from his songs—Caroline from “Tecumseh,” Loretta from “Loretta,” the narrator from “Waitin’ Around to Die”—are all trapped in a kind of stasis, resolute against how the world shapes itself around them, caught like stones in a river or insects in amber. I don’t think it would be far from the truth to think that some part of Van Zandt, deep down, might have felt the same way.

When Van Zandt talked about his songs, he treated them as if they were there on their own accord, treating himself as merely some sort of interloper in their existence. In an interview from the PBS movie Austin Pickers, Van Zandt described how the song “Pancho and Lefty”:

[is] one of those songs that is hard to realize that I wrote it. It’s hard to take credit for the writing because it came from out of the blue. It was like it came through me. It’s a real nice song. And I think I finally found out what it’s about. I always wondered what it was about. I kind of always knew it wasn’t about Pancho Villa and then somebody told me Pancho Villa had a buddy whose name in Spanish meant “Lefty.”

Is that the way you talk about your own song? While the coming “out of the blue” wouldn’t be an odd bit to hear from your average singer-songwriter, the notion that one could “finally [find] out what it’s about” seems irrational. The temptation is to grab him by the lapels and give him a good shake; how could that make any sense?

Questions like these invariably lead to the deep, murky waters of literary theory. Given this (imagine us standing on the shores of a Styx-ian river), I don’t want thoughts of Townes to be washed away in the (necessary) canoodling over reader-response theory and formal criticism. Let’s save that conversation for another time and keep Van Zandt in mind for now.

I’m in this cold room all alone.

Maybe I’ll try the telephone,

But it’ll be busy or she won’t be home.

Tomorrow’s another day.

(from “Pueblo Waltz”)