Months before, when I bought the tickets, I was concerned about the dates and how I would feel. The first was for T Bone Burnett at a local listening room in my Dallas neighborhood called the Kessler Theater, and the second the next night for Leon Bridges and Charley Crockett at Dickie’s Arena, where they hold the annual Fort Worth Stock Show and Rodeo. The two dates fell on a Thursday and Friday, the week after the election. Would I be elated, my trust in the American electorate renewed? Or—well, we all know how it turned out.
Both shows advertised the artists’ local connection. Burnett and Bridges were raised in Fort Worth; Crockett lived as a youth and started playing music in Dallas. All three had achieved success across the nation and overseas, and now they were “coming home.” But America had failed a test of character, of faith, and the atmosphere at home was heavy with dark portent. Would the artists acknowledge the situation? Could they?
For a moment I wondered if I’d even be able to attend, but I did go, pushing through the gloom. Everything I saw and heard was full of commentary. But all the while I couldn’t tell whether I was projecting this commentary on events, or whether what I saw and felt was really there.
On Thursday, just before the show started, an announcement came over the system requesting that all phones be turned off and put away. Then T Bone Burnett came out on stage to speak at length in explanation. The smartphone, he said, has made people too reliant on their eyes, and they’ve neglected their ability to listen. Burnett is seventy-six years old, but this wasn’t simply some old-guy rant about how much better things used to be. It was a fully digested and interdisciplinary discussion delivered with supporting citations that included Jacques Ellul’s The Technological Society and Ian McGilchrist’s The Master and His Emissary. According to McGilchrist, Burnett explained, before there was language, people communicated by singing. Empathy and understanding were conveyed largely by tone. Now people communicate via hand-held machines that they stare at, with the result that their more profoundly evolved social sensitivities have shriveled. The phone ban was to promote more and better listening. An audience member called out to ask whether they might be allowed to take a single photograph. Burnett smiled and declined the request.
Who the heck is T Bone Burnett, a reader may be asking, and where does he get the cojones to make such a demand? It’s a fair question. For decades now, Burnett has worked mostly behind the scenes in the industry, not as a performing artist but as a producer and soundtrack coordinator for television and film. He has overseen many legendary recordings, notably the O Brother Where Art Thou soundtrack. Burnett can be considered a founding father of Americana, a music genre created in the late-1990s to market a vibrant but diffuse roots music revival. Now Burnett was touring his own record, the first in a long time, and for most in the room he was a beloved figure whose ruminations carried weight.
To sit for a concert and never once glimpse the light of a phone was novel, to say the least. But I resisted his call for better listening. In the immediacy of the moment, it sounded like the old admonition that Democrats need to listen to MAGA America and hear where they’re coming from. No, no, no, I thought. We heard them loud and clear, and it was frightening. “From here on out,” Burnett later said, “all I want to do is create.” In this I heard my own desire to isolate, to devote myself to private interests—to turn off, not only my phone but anything that might convey further news of our collective disaster. I heard in Burnett’s words other words I’d heard during the past week or thought in my own mind. “I don’t want to protest, I don’t want to march, I just want to wait it out, and maybe it won’t touch me.” “Life has always been absurd.” These sentiments are understandable—easier for certain demographic groups—but understandable.
No doubt, Mr. Burnett, I was listening. But in the context of events, maybe I was hearing more than was being said. Or maybe what I needed to hear could only be communicated in code. I was certain, for instance, that at Dickie’s the next night, Charley Crockett would open with one of his new songs, “America.” It isn’t one of his best songs, but it’s so on the nose that it would have been perverse not to foreground it, just out of sheer obviousness.
America / how are ya?
I hope you’re feeling fine
America, I love ya
But I fear you sometimes
The last line resonated. It was how I’d been feeling all year. If you paid any attention at all to the rhetoric of the winning campaign, how could you not but feel afraid? Yet if the vote count had come out the other way, wouldn’t the MAGAs be feeling fear, too? For four years they’ve been fed visions of murderous immigrants, trans women haunting restrooms, gender surgeries performed at public schools, delivered babies promptly executed, and on and on and on. The very point of that demonizing rhetoric was to generate fear and to mobilize it politically.
Crockett plays a blues-country-soul-folk mixture so perfectly blended that generic labels fail to describe it. And yet he’s had to market himself as “country” to reach a wider audience and not just appeal to the fanatics on the fringe, such as myself. To reach that wider audience, he’s had to be careful what sort of politics he signals. At the same time, as an artist, he has to speak from the heart. I like to think his heart is with the social-justice camp. This impression is not wholly a product of wishful thinking but based on a podcast interview he did back in 2018 at the start of his upward trajectory. In the interview, he praised Texas’s demographic diversity and aligned himself with the Willie Nelsons and Barbara Jordans of our state. Now that he’s selling out theaters and auditoriums across the country, he can’t do that anymore, not if he doesn’t want to be Dixie-Chicked by what must now be a substantial portion of his fan base.
This is what made “America” such a perfect opener.* It acknowledged the moment; it was honest. It exemplified how well he’s crafted a working-class persona while walking a political fine line. Yet for me, on this particular night, after that particular week, Crockett’s tightrope trick read as too even-handed.
And then there’s the more troubling chorus:
America, forgive me / I’m only a man
Forgive you for what, your vote? A very large percentage of men voted with their gender over any concern that the women and girls in their lives had lost rights over their bodies that they’d fought for and won half a century ago. Even if not read so specifically about the Dobbs decision, the conceit is an old one in the country and western songwriting tradition: To play the victim in romantic relations, to pretend all the power is held by the woman so that when things go wrong, she can be blamed. In this case, the woman is America. Forgive me, the singer pleads, for being so powerless and so wronged. It rings false, this posture of humility, coming from a male within a retrenched patriarchy.
Still, Crockett was only the opening act. This was Leon Bridges’ night. I last saw him years ago in Dallas, after his first album of sweet, throwback soul had taken off. He was winding up a national tour. The songs benefitted from the road wear; the band had made them their own. Bridges bounded from one side of the stage to the other. This time, I expected more of the same. He had, after all, sold out a 14K-seat arena in his hometown. But throughout, Bridges struck me as subdued. He opened with the first song on the new record: “(This is What it Sounds Like) When a Man Cries.” Again: relevant. Again: more gender games. Yet this time the “you” in the song seemed more sharply aimed at those who were celebrating our tears:
Why I gotta see them things that hurt my heart?
Feel my world split in two
I know you hurt so bad / You gotta hurt me
Hate what the world has done to you
Was I right to read this as a message to the MAGAs—their grievance politics, their left-behind economic status, their vote for revenge, to burn it all down, out of spite? Sure enough, a line from the second verse seems to make exactly this point:
Say you wanna start a fire to see how it feels
To see who we are when they burn?
Toward the end of the show, Mayor Mattie Parker came onto the stage to offer Bridges the proverbial key to the city. From this day forward, she proclaimed, November 15th would be known in Fort Worth as Leon Bridges Day. Parker is a Niki Haley Republican, which can be seen as either a principled position or a politically savvy one in the only Texas city that votes purple rather than solid blue. As she stood beside him, I couldn’t help flashing on the scene from—yes, Oh Brother, Where Art Thou?—when the rotund governor climbs onto the stage to horn in on the love a large audience is bestowing upon The Soggy Bottom Boys, who have just performed their surprise hit, “Man of Constant Sorrow.” The governor is running behind in his bid for re-election and recognizes an opportunity in the gob-smacked crowd.
I thought I saw discomfort in Leon’s face as the mayor hugged him close for photographers. Given that his actual face was two floor sections distant from where I was standing and that the face I saw discomfort in was projected upon a pair of giant screens flanking the stage, it’s possible that my own discomfort was likewise projected. It is a design flaw in the human construct that we saturate the incoming data with our inner storms. The distortion of reality that results can only be counter-balanced by a constant, Puritan self-surveillance of the sort that threatens to suck all the joy out of life.
This time, though, I’m going to stand by my gut feeling that the drama was real and that Bridges and I were in a similar head space. Toward the end of his set, he played another new song: “God Loves Everyone.” Again, for anyone bruised by what had occurred the previous week and frightened by an ascending authoritarianism, the lyrics fit the moment well.
God loves the birds and the bees / God loves the stoners and freaks
And the girls on the street / Just the same as you and me
Old men and the young and the strange / School kid looking out at the rain
Cops on the beat and the crooks in the cage / Just the same
Merely a coincidence, you say? A coincidence, and not a case that the man on stage had chosen this song as commentary, as balm for the hurting? Merely a coincidence, you say, because it was a song recorded months ago, for an album the setlist was designed to promote, its title on t-shirts and pullovers for sale at the merch tables out front? No, I say, not merely a coincidence. The election results did not arrive out of nowhere. We’ve known this politics of division, punching down, and hate since the beginning, and this current version for more than a decade.
Driving home I remembered something else T Bone Burnett said the night before: The promise of America is realized in American music. Listen, he said, to the music of Indigenous Americans. It keens like the music of the Scots Irish. Its rhythmic movement plots with that of the Mississippi blues. And the pedal steel guitar, that representative sound in country music—it came from Hawaii. Burnett’s claim is neither new nor original, but it’s probably not articulated enough. American music is where the boundaries break down, and we listen to each other. I don’t mean the American music business, which is just as rife with institutional bias as anything else in this nation, but the music itself: e pluribus unum. Feeling as raw as I was, Burnett’s riff brought a tear to my eye. Maybe all is not lost. While we gird ourselves again to defend our best ideas, they are there when we need them, safe in songs.
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* It turned out Crockett didn’t open with the song. He closed with it.
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