Townes Van Zandt – The Highway Kind
Released on the heels of Sugar Hills reissue of Rear View Mirror, this album isnt the best place to start with Townes, but its a fitting way to end. Mixing live performances of some of Van Zandts bleaker material with studio covers in a similar vein, The Highway Kind is the troubadours equivalent of Neil Youngs Tonights The Night, a musical meditation on lost highways and dark nights of the soul.
Where Guy Clarks version of Dublin Blues has a hint of deadpan humor to it, Van Zandts is shaky and scary, barely together. The legacy of Hank Williams has rarely sounded so poignantly ravaged as on Van Zandts readings of Lost Highway and Lonesome Whistle, while Wreck on the Highway reinforces a similar mood and theme.
As revelatory as such expressions of musical kinship may be, Van Zandts original material remains a singular achievement, from the fatalistic couplet that opens the album Well there aint much that I aint tried/Fast livin, slow suicide to the verse from the title cut that hits as hard, deep and true as any song could:
I dont know too much for true
My heart knows how to pound
My legs know how to love
someone
My voice knows how to sound
Shame that it aint enough
Shame that it is a shame
Follow the circle down
Where would you be?
Between the allegory of hell on earth that is The Hole and the metaphysical bargaining with eternity on No Deal, the selection of material would have been representatively powerful if Van Zandt were still alive to sing it, but has even greater resonance in the wake of his death. The song cycle concludes in the drunken haze of Peter La Farges Ira Hayes, followed by one of Van Zandts incomparably cornball jokes, which here provides an enlightening perspective on the musical darkness that has preceded. Within the cosmic joke of existence, as illuminated through Van Zandts artistry, the setup is that were all in this together; the punchline is that were each so very much alone.