It’s taken me nearly two decades to finally recognize the
beauty of this album. I always had reasons, often fumbling music-crit
rationalizations (about the unused well of emotion he refused to tap into
because of his formalist embrace of artifice, say; or some intellectual rotgut
about the inverted catch-22 of the self-applied beautiful-loser trope as a
defense mechanism that undermined its force; or etc.). What it came down to, I now think, now that I
finally consider this one of the finest post-Byrds records, is simply that I
found Parsons distasteful, a smirking trust-fund folkie jerk with an idiotic
self-mythologizing death wish.
Well, he was. And he got it. And it has nothing to do with the
power of this album. Was it the 40th spin of “Kiss the Children”? A
solitary midnight stroll to the strains of “The New Soft Shoe”? I have no idea,
but suddenly, recently, it hit me: this is freaking great. It really is. How I
never heard it until now baffles me, but there it is: a conversion narrative GP
himself might appreciate, all wasted years and then redemption. And when you play “A Song for You,” I finally
concede, there ain’t a smirk to be heard in all that plaintive longing. Tragic, the whole damn thing.
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