Joe Bunting

Chris Bathgate

Chris Bathgate is a very impressive artist. His style is eclectic folk with a brash amount of rock and a healthy serving mellow indie. For the sake of our conversation (and remember, every post is a conversation) go buy the song “Creak, Cure, Dawn” from Amazon (or iTunes) HERE.

While you’re there, you will want to pick up the song “Yes, I’m Cold” too. It’s the reason I fell in love with his music in the first place.

“Creak, Cure, Dawn” begins:

Cain came and he weighed my name against the sun
With cold coalescent moon for each deed I’ve done

What a crazy image! Cain, who according to Genesis committed the world’s first murder when he killed his brother Abel, is here is playing judge against our boy Chris. Cain must be huge because he’s got a giant scale with the sun on one side and a lot of little moons on the other. I’m not sure what “each deed I’ve done,” means here, whether it’s each good deed (like a boyscout) or each bad deed (like each sin committed). It changes what Cain is judging and who he is.

On a side note, it would take about 63 million moons to fill up the sun. Maybe Chris realized this, maybe he didn’t. If he didn’t, he might have put the moon in because he associated the sun and the moon together. Quick! What’s the opposite of the sun. The MOON!

In reality of course, they’re not opposites. If the sun is a beach ball, the moon is a speck of dust. Maybe he did know this and wanted to show the impossibility of measuring up. Either way, it’s a cool image: the ginormous Cain with his scale, measuring a jar of freezing moon specks against a burning sun.

These days, it’s not very common to hear a song with a reference to the Old Testament, which is dumb because a lot of people know the stories. The song “Hallelujah” by Leonard Cohen (covered by Jeff Buckley, Rufus Wainwright, and Imogen Heap, among others) takes advantage of that and is loaded with references, but it’s over 20 years old. Cain is an interesting person to have as a judge. Normally you wouldn’t think to put a murderer in that role, but I suppose it depends on what he is judging. I’m not sure what that could be, and while I have a lot of ideas, they’re too much for this little post.

I’m an English major and so could probably write a 4 page paper on those two lines, but I’ll spare you (for now). I just wanted to give you a taste. Go listen to Chris’ album. You won’t be disappointed.

This entry was posted on Thursday, May 22nd, 2008 at 9:10 am and is filed under Joe Bunting the Curator. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.