The Private Canon: The Broken Heartbeat of "The Field"

I'm not sure how I stumbled onto Minneapolis singer/songwriter Mason Jennings—it was about 15 years ago, in the days when I was using Limewire (not without some shame) as one way to find music online. Was I looking for something by his namesake Waylon, perhaps? In any case, the lovely, expansive, utterly guileless neo-folk "Ballad for My One True Love" became a favorite, and I soon made up for that illegal download with a purchase of his fine 2000 album Birds Flying Away. Though earnest to a fault—the second track breaks the news that there's something called "United States Global Empire," and others feature po-faced tributes to the Black Panthers and Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.—he had an engagingly loose-limbed sound not altogether far from M. Ward's neighborhood, with a wiry, supply baritenor in the vein of Andrew Bird.

I confess I didn't give a lot of thought to him again until, looking for a birthday idea my wife might give me exactly 10 years ago, I saw that he was coming to play at New York's City Winery. He gave a strong live set, and it turns out that his song catalogue wasn't all earnest or sloganeering; there was also some wry humor and real tenderness on offer.

One song, though, knocked me over, and to this day moves me powerfully. "The Field" is on its surface a straightforward protest song in a simple verse-chorus form, the lament of a parent who lost his son in an overseas war. It starts off sounding a bit like a breakup song but doesn't take long to get right down to the wrenching point:

Every step I take takes me farther from you
Every move I make reminds me that I'll always love you
Since you were a child we've built our lives around you
Now how am I supposed to live in this world we made without you?

The vocals are low-key, lightly reverbed, but the guitar has a coiled intensity, hacking out spindly power chords—B, E, and F#—in metronomic eighth notes. The band comes in on the chorus, locking us into a forward motion as the melody ascends over a rumbling E chord and takes us, as if on wings or via a crane camera shot, to the title location. The image of a field faintly evokes a burial ground, but I think it's probably just the place our narrator goes to think—and where his dead son probably once played.

Sometimes late at night, I go to the field
Is that where you are? Are you a shooting star?
Can you say my name? Darling, can you hear me?
Tell me, where's your heart, now that it stopped beating?
It's right here, it's right here, it's right here

That heart line gets me every time, and I don't think it's just because of the lyric. The song's throbbing pulse has a telltale quiver in the accompaniment that feels to me like a kind of heart murmur. Look at the passing F# that pops up like a wrinkle in the carpet under the first four lines above:

The same twist comes up again in the chorus's final line, when the narrator seems to catch himself by surprise with his quick answer to the unanswerable question of where his dead son's heart could possibly be—a surprise conveyed by a sudden measure of 2 amid the 4. And what chords underpin this revelation?

It's a simple idea, hammered gently but intently by the triple repetition: As I long as I feel my own heart beating, I carry you with me.

That would be enough, but the song goes a bit further. You might even say that its heart breaks, and gives way to fury, to rage. The song's pulse, indeed the whole song, comes to a dead stop on the quietly delivered line:

And you will always be my little one

The throbbing eighth notes are replaced by elegant arpeggios, and the scope broadens, or at least heightens, as our narrator goes to the top for a word with the manager:

If I was the President, if I was that man
I would walk out with those kids out across the sand
If I was the President, if I was that brave
I would take a shovel, then dig each child their grave
If I was the President and my world turned black
I would want no victory, I'd just want you back

Again, repetition pounds this tragic wish in as hard as coffin nails, as four times as he sings, "I don't want no victory, I just want you back," amid mounting, extra-lyrical howls of pain. The throbbing guitar returns to drive it home. It's all a bit much and exactly right—it feels true. When the chorus rolls back in, I find myself holding back tears. I have lost no loved ones to war, but I have lost loved ones, and I feel my own life passing, and this unnamed narrator's grief has somehow grown large enough to contain mine, and mine his.

I'm not sure that art exists to soothe our feelings so much as to make us really feel them, to name them, to give them a shape. As Michael Friedman once put it: The song makes a space. Or a field we can visit late at night.