| Format: | 7" |
| Availability: | PRE-ORDER |
Mickey Newbury’s An American Trilogy was one of the most talked-about and lauded reissues of 2011 - a long-overdue affirmation for a songwriter and performer who has for years enjoyed cult acclaim but belongs in the ranks of the American greats.
Keeping the love alive, Drag City present a split single that pairs Mickey Newbury’s recording of ‘Heaven Help the Child’ - the title track of the most refined and under-appreciated album in Newbury’s trilogy - with a new version of the song by Bill Callahan that invokes the stately, elegiac spirit of the original while reworking its intricacies for his own unique voice and style.
Callahan has made no secret of his admiration for Mickey Newbury, even name-checking him (alongside George Jones, Kris Kristofferson and Johnny Cash, as part of a roll call of the most American of contemporary songwriter performers) in the song ‘America’, off his acclaimed 2011 album, Apocalypse.
“There’s something psychedelic and transcendent about Mickey’s best work,” says Callahan, “and when he gets into the realms of songs like ‘Heaven Help The Child’, where he spans generations and flies over time while still maintaining a singular mind, he’s imparting a truly epic knowledge and vision. The song always reminded me of the movie ‘Once Upon a Time in America’.”
A wildly ambitious, cross-generational odyssey, written in 1971 against the backdrop of the waning days of the Vietnam War, ‘Heaven Help The Child’ is the closest Newbury ever came to writing a pure protest song - albeit one that, in true Newbury style, breaks the mould and emotes heartfelt paeans, seeking solutions rather than mere dissent.
Allusive, elusive and emotionally direct, the song conflates myth and memoir until the two are inseparable and interchangeable. A reference in the lyrics to Fitzgerald and Hemingway draws on the idea that, for Newbury and his peers, Nashville of the 1970s was like Paris in the 1920s, a meeting place for writers in exile; outsiders working within the mainstream of culture, whose artistic concerns were too epic and personal to be constrained by it.
“The point I was trying to make in that song,” said Newbury, “is that every generation thinks that its problems are unique where its problems really are as old as man. There are no new problems; there are only new faces having them.”
Mickey Newbury often referred to ‘Heaven Help The Child’ as his ‘second Trilogy’, the first being An American Trilogy, the song with which he is most closely associated yet, paradoxically, did not write. But ‘Heaven Help The Child’ is Newbury through and through: the work of a master songwriter at the height of his powers.
