Each Friday I pick a song–new, old, borrowed, blue–that’s been on my mind and in my ears, and write a short post about it.

This week, “John Allyn Smith Sails” by Okkervil River:

The song narrates the suicide of one of my favorite poets, John Berryman.  The detailed story (the song is basically a ballad) gets narrated across two different melodies.  The first builds from voice and acoustic guitar through a gradual accumulation of additional instruments until the full band plus strings accompany the jump from that Minneapolis bridge, and after a note from the violin lasting a couple bars, the melody of the Beach Boys version of “Sloop John B” takes over, and builds to a climactic finish that mixes original lyrics, lines from the folk song and some phrases borrowed from Berryman’s poetry.  The whole song presents a powerful and emotional combination of words and music, and the cultural cross-polination of rock, folk and poetry creates a further set of powerful resonances, too.

Here’s a bonus: John Berryman talking about his greatest work, The Dream Songs, and reciting my favorite of his poems, Dream Song 14: