Her Song Remains Remindin' Me

I've made abundantly clear my allegiance to harmony as the primary musical value above all. And even when I respond to a particularly rich melody, it's most often with reference to its harmonic profile, its appoggiaturas, its soul-cracking contrary motion. But some songs carve out such distinctive melodies, it's like I can see or even feel their shapes, as if they were aural sculptures. Consider this perfectly elegant and quite underrated Beatles tune (if they can truly be said to have any underrated songs):

Yes, a lot of its appeal has to do with the contrary motion of melody (up) and chords (mostly down), and the crunchy harmonies that result. But the line traced by those eight notes is so unbreakably strong in my mind, it has a kind of free-standing structural integrity.

Another melody whose shape tickles my ear as much as its beguiling harmony is the Dirty Projectors' "See What She Seeing":

Those three downward leaps—G# to C#, C# to #F, D to #F, on the lyrics "morning's," "over," and "lower"—seem to carve out their own geometry (the rest of the melody is similarly masterful in form, and as I mentioned here, bears comparison to McCartney's work).

This is all preamble to my take on a song I'm newly obsessed with, by an artist I'm freshly besotted with, thanks to a friend's introduction: "Jesus Was a Cross Maker" by Judee Sill, from her unrelentingly stunning 1971 debut album. (My friend actually keyed me into "The Kiss," another deathless Sill tune). I'd heard it before, in a fine but unremarkable Warren Zevon cover that didn't make a big impression on me. Sill's original is justly iconic (though I've also come to cherish demo and live versions I've heard), with its multi-track vocals etching its odd, distinctive melody into the gleaming slate of its gospel-piano chords.

Each verse opens with a prayerful preamble, in a teasingly imbalanced phrasing that almost comes to a hypnotic halt on the word "low":

And then we're off, into a remarkable run of melody characterized by a relentless alternation between C and G, with some taps on a D and a final stretch up to A:

This persistent tic stands out partly because of these two notes' dissonance over the F chord ("his sweet song"), the Gm/Bb chord ("enticing"), even the yearny smudge of the G over the Am (on the "some" in "something"). Then, after a two-measure turnaround ("But when I turned he was gone"), the melody returns to that riveting C-G chime, with a very satisfying bump up to A on "mind":

The melody closes with a repetition of that last phrase:

It's a perfect 16-bar melody in what has almost overnight become one of my favorite songs ever. Here's the whole form:

It simply repeats that form four times (the last time lingering extra long on the first "low"), before fading out on a repetition of the last two measures and the title line. (Side note: Something about that turn sounded familiar, and indeed it turns out that "oh" trill popping out over a minor vi chord into a II7 chord was the basis of a similar figure in "What's So Funny 'Bout Peace, Love, and Understanding.") And though Graham Nash's production of the album cut and single is first-rate, one reason I love the demo version is that it does what the song form cries out to do: It repeats the "sweet silver angels" intro as the closer. It feels exactly right:

I haven't even touched the song's evocative lyrics, because what is there to say that Judee doesn't say better in this gobsmacking intro to a live rendition?

I wanted to write a song about this principle: the lower down you go to gain your momentum from, the higher up it'll propel you. But I couldn't think of a way to say that poetically, and I happened to stumble across this real obscure theological fact, and that is that Jesus was a cross maker. That really got me; when I heard that I knew I had to write a song about it. At the same time I was having a real unhappy romance with this guy who was a bandit and a heartbreaker. So one morning I woke up and realized that "he's a bandit and a heartbreaker" rhymes with "but Jesus was a cross maker." And I knew that even that wretched bastard was not beyond redemption.

Obviously that "theological fact" is actually the startling conceit of Nicholas Kazantzakis's The Last Temptation of Christ. But what I love about what Sill does with that borderline blasphemous notion is that she somehow renders it even more Christian; she uses it as an image of grace, of the forgiveable humanity of us all, by situating the figure of Jesus at the bottom along with us, or even below the average run of venality, all the more to marvel at his transcendence.

The "wretched bastard," by the way, was apparently J.D. Souther. Imagine having this beautiful, soul-scouring song written about you. One of the keys to the song's greatness, I think, is that you can feel both its intimate origins as a lover's lament and its piercing, almost cosmic universality. And I'd argue that a large part of that power derives from the sharp angles of its melody, cutting through the air with a clarifying fire. It's gently enticing, but there's something wrong.