Review of The Wineskins: Shut Me Up Sundance. Songs for Now and Then

W. Keith Moore is a friend of mine on Facebook. I don’t remember how we connected, but I do remember coming to appreciate his posts about training horses, working in gardens, and writing poems – all things I love to do, also. So it’s no surprise to me that the band he plays in, The Wineskins, also makes some great music I can appreciate.

The Wineskins’ album, Shut Me Up Sundance, sounds like summer time music to me. Maybe that’s because they’re down in Oxford, Mississippi that some theme evocative of the long slow mellow days of summer runs through their songs, even songs that mention snow, and rain, and November. Or maybe it’s because something in the unhurried tempo summons one back to the memory of a time when things were less rushed and hectic. For me, this means the 1970s, but it could be any remembered childhood with the sun in the grass.

Their song lyrics are more for the middle or later years, though – dealing with depression, the longing for home, feelings of unworthiness.

God’s not what we think,

No, she’s a mystery,

He is the strongest drink

In all of history.

Beneath the normal sky

Real love goes floating by

Good people only lie

When they have to.

That line there – good people only lie when they have to – is one of those rueful recognitions of middle age, or whenever it is that one learns that being a good person doesn’t always mean following the rules one is given. And as I get a sense for the Southern ethos in this music, this theme resonates, since “being good” in so many times and places has specifically meant breaking the rules.

 Don’t think God’s at home is another line, in the song “Ouija,” that reminds me of that feeling of being lost and homeless. Other songs on the album touch on violence, the life of the worker, suicide, preachers preaching brimstone. You get a sense of the same kind of religious existentialism of red clay and back roads, that one finds in the great Southern writers. And it’s not without beauty or hope, either, even if it’s the kind of hope that finds grace to face forward through the magic of looking backward:

She loved horses and rain. Walking barefoot through the sunflower field. She called me her friend.

I was in love, what else could I feel…

Another reviewer wrote about this song that it reminded her of her youth in the 1960s. It reminded me of the 1980s, when I lived surrounded by horses, but maybe anyone could listen to it and be reminded of that elusive “back then.”

And then, this line:

 …A horse will never lie to you.

This is a truth any decent trainer knows. And so in the quiet melody and the hint of bittersweet, in the questioning of God, teachers, and preachers, it’s nice to know that there are these currents of truth running through creation.

My immediate impulse after listening to Shut Me Up Sundance was to go ride my horse, seek a little truth for the day, in the midst of these crazed and uncertain times when people daily are proven to fail us.

If music takes you places, I’d say that out to a horse, or a field of sunflowers, or simply to a memory of love, is as good a place as any to be taken.

So, check them out.

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