Description
On the 100th anniversary of Edgar Lee Masters Spoon River Anthology, Merge is reissuing the epic it inspired: Richard Buckners The Hill.
The Hill started in 1996 in an old garage that had been converted to The Ranch Olancha Motel, a dusty place near the mouth of Death Valley, between Lone Pine and Dunmovin, California. Buckner, who was en route to Tucson, Arizona, to record what would become Devotion & Doubt, stayed a week in a room with no phone, no television, carrying his guitar, a four-track recorder, and a copy of Masters Spoon River Anthology. He tinkered with a few of the books poems, put them on a cassette, and forgot about it until an acquaintance discovered it in his truck four years later. Beset with writers block and looking for a distraction, Buckner would find in the tape the spur he needed.
Recorded in Edmonton, Alberta, and Tucson, The Hill converts Spoon River poems to music. Youd wonder why a poet in his own right would feel the need to sample anothers work. But Masters book of poetry tells much the same story Buckner is accustomed to, the kind of story that makes him distinct among storytellers.
Each page of Spoon River Anthology reads as a final, postmortem dictum of a different deceased residentmore than 250 of them now passedin the fictional Midwestern town of Spoon River. The epitaphs are important for Buckner because, in death, these people strip the breathing city of its dishonesty. Each one, from Reuben Pantier to Elizabeth Childers to Oscar Hummel, is no longer concerned with whispers and pointed fingers that are often the consequence of a life laid bare for all to see. Theyre unleashing themselves, without fallacy or attachment.
Buckner chooses 18 of these confessions, each given a unique rendering. Backed by Calexicos Joey Burns and John Convertino and surveyed with Buckners unflagging vocal desperation, Spoon Rivers residents come back to life. Like so much of his career, Buckner disappeared into Spoon River and returns to us with its story.
The Hill (Reissue) by Richard Buckner
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