Big Country Blues — Depression and Creativity
Not long ago, the friendly algorithms at Youtube, which know more about my peculiar tastes than I may have cared to reveal, recommended that I view a particular video. In it, the Be Good Tanyas, a Canadian folk trio, perform a song in which the narrator describes being abandoned by his mother and swindled by his girlfriend before going to jail for robbery. It concludes with the lines:
Now I’m out of prison. I got me a friend at last.
He don’t steal or cheat or drink or lie.
His name’s Codeine. He’s the nicest thing I’ve seen.
Together we’re gonna wait around and die.
Who could have written such a lyric? A quick check revealed a name that I’d occasionally run across in conjunction with the adjective “legendary” and the phrase “songwriter’s songwriter.” It was (more…)