The story that emerged was very much under the influence of McCarthy’s prose. I wrote it while reading Cormac McCarthy’s penultimate book, The Passenger. Photograph: Slaven Vlašić/Getty Images Stephen King: ‘There is no way to convey the loss I feel’Īmerican author of horror and fantasy novelsĮarly this year, while Cormac McCarthy was still alive, I had an idea for a story called The Dreamers. ![]() Historiographically, it enacted McCarthy’s bleak view of human history: repetition, recursion, the illusion of progress, the endless beats of a death-drum sounded in the dark backward and abysm of time. Morally, it had a similar power to the desert light that McCarthy describes as falling with “strange equality” upon “all phenomena”. That little conjunction paratactically strung together the atrocious and the mundane, the ultra-violent and the kind. ![]() The most important word in McCarthy’s lexicon was perhaps the least conspicuous: “and”. His phrasing could be great page-long peals of thunder (the attack of the Comanches in the fourth chapter of Blood Meridian, say), wire-bright flashes of lightning (“The stars burned with a lidless fixity”), anaphoras that came to act as refrains across whole books (“They rode on” “They walked on”), right down to the tender “OK” which is passed back and forth between father and son in The Road. ![]() He first outgrew, then radically exceeded, the dying falls of Faulkner’s cadences. He listened harder to prose, and thought more about its prosody, than anyone since Melville. His books proclaimed themselves in the mind’s ear, setting it thrumming and rumbling, piercing it with cries. Sadly I couldn’t come up with a cool rhyme for penguin.British writer and fellow of Emmanuel College, CambridgeĪmong the thousand things I could praise in McCarthy’s astonishing body of work – written over 60 years – I want to speak of his prose rhythms. I think Patterson (Hood) felt he could channel his inner Rainbow Family when he wanted to cut it for demos. I mashed up Betty Bay and Kesey, Oregon which for me are about the hippiest lyrics I’ve penned. I’d had the title written down in my notes for songs. And, it was baboons and penguins, animals I didn’t know coexisted. “I woke up one morning in Betty Bay, South Africa to this crazy noise. Sadly I couldn’t come up with a cool rhyme for penguin. I woke up one morning in Betty Bay, South Africa to this crazy noise. We will not go down this road alone… and I will lift your burden up from here.” And this song, and the forthcoming album, deliver all of that to you on a vintage bejeweled platter. Couple that with his deepening connection with Patterson Hood and the rest of the band, and you know you’ve got a serious roots rock song with meaning. ![]() He never shies away from darkness and speaking the hard truths with a power spirituality, as his fans know plus he’s traveled to parts of the world where the ominous hardnesses are and where the light needs to shine. Jerry Joseph has a mystique, a way about him of drawing everyone around him down into the heart of the thing. “Sometimes A Great Notion” is Jerry Joseph on lead vocals and guitar Patterson Hood on backing vocals and guitar and Stephen Drizos on percussion. Side 1 of the album is songs that hadn’t made the list for release on A Beautiful Madness, and Side 2 is live versions of songs from the 2020 album played with the Drive-By Truckers on tour. This album is a companion piece to Jerry’s 2020 release A Beautiful Madness, and again features The Stiff Boys (The Drive-By Truckers) as his band on the album. This song in particular was engineered by Stephen Drizos at The Panther in Portland, Oregon. Tick was produced by Matt Patton engineered by Bronson Tew, Stephen Drizos and David Barbe mixed and mastered by Bronson Tew. Americana Highways is hosting this premiere of Jerry Joseph’s song “Sometimes A Great Notion,” from his forthcoming album Tick.
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