Though I enjoy film I despise actually going to the cinema, the filthy floors, that person constantly opening up a bag of gummy bears in my left ear, coughing, sneezing, whispering...it is all too much for me to bear. The other night I ended my seven year sabbatical from the theater and dove into Crazy Heart, I came out pleasantly satisfied.
Knowing that Jeff Bridges was the star and T-Bone Burnett was in charge of the music I should not have been surprised. T-Bone Burnett is one of those shadowy figures people not in the know have no idea of but those in it revere with the gravitas he deserves. The founder of DMZ Records has left his print on movies such as The Big Lebowski, Oh Brother Where Art Thou?, Cold Mountain, and The Ladykillers. He has produced and worked with Steve Earle, Robert Plant, K.D. Lang, Tony Bennett, Elvis Costello, Roy Orbison, Counting Crows and Warren Zevon. The iconoclastic zeitgeist of modern music adds to his resume with this song and the entire soundtrack of a movie based loosely on the lives of Waylon Jennings, Kris Kristofferson and Merle Haggard.
The country and western music of Kris, Merle, Waylon, Willie and Johnny is a prosopopoeia of American blood running through the veins of the continent; culture capillaries invigorating a land founded on freedom and personal image creation. In the standard hypocrisy constantly displayed by the common NY/LA hipsters, where rap hip hop and pop is king and others genres are relics of a tired past such music is so often dismissed as the religion of a pious inbred congregation. With these beliefs they only illustrate the close-mindedness of self proclaimed prophets. If instead they actually drove through the fly-over states such offenders would grasp the essence of the openness and freedom that exists along the highways that connect the most beloved of the congregation, land and lives in which the inhabitants walk daily with a rope long enough to hang themselves with on a constant basis.
In their simplicity and terse construction all country deals with the most human of emotions; the elation of being on the ragged wild, loss, death and the self realization of fucking up and having no one to blame but yourself. Mistakes are not written off to parents and situations, both literal and figurative hangovers are embraced with Epictetus stoicism. From that crucible of self reliance the shrinks couch is supplanted by metal strings and thin wood bodies, the psyche is cleansed with four line verses, pedal steel guitars and a great refrain hook.
Jeff Bridges as Bad Blake embodies all these ideals in both their beauty and outright misery. The cliche of a country singer is somehow born anew in this film while still retaining the cliches that made it as such. This song is exactly the same, on the surface it could be written by a seven year old, but the more you hear it and let it run through the synapses of your own personal interstate you realize only through the experience of an old washed up man could such lines be born. If like me you despise the movies, suck it up and check this one out; then buy the soundtrack. Better yet buy the soundtrack and skip the movie, head out on the road with no destination and put the circulation of this land back in motion once again, it is long overdue for an Angioplasty.
