I will admit, unashamedly, that I love the music of my parents. I think they raised me well, introducing me early on to great songwriters like Bob Dylan, EmmyLou Harris, and Mark Knophler for example. They introduced me to these big names, as well as to the plethora of singer-songwriters of the nineties and these songs and sounds have been both nostalgic and delightfully familiar to me over the past few years. No artist however, exemplifies this nostalgia and lyricism like Richard Shindell.
This past Thursday, I had the chance to see one of my favorite musicians and one of the best songwriters working today live. Seeing Shindell perform in a small cafe on the outskirts of Washington D.C felt like quite a long time coming. Missing seeing him the last time he was touring was the most disappointing event the pandemic took away from me, so when my parents surprised me on Christmas morning with tickets to see him, I was over the moon.
I like songs that tell stories. Nothing engages me in a piece of music like a good narrative and an interesting character or two. Shindell is an expert at embodying the pathos and complexities of the characters he writes. In the over three decades he’s been making music, he’s sung the perspective of a Civil War widow in “Reunion Hill”, a New York taxi driver post 9/11 in “The Last Fare of the Day”, plenty of soldiers, and a Argentine stowaway trying to immigrate to Miami in “Che Guevara T Shirt.” Even in songs not written in the first person, Shindell still sings of topics not necessarily commonplace.
“Are You Happy Now,”, maybe his most popular work, is about a couple breaking up on Halloween night. With lyrics like “I was amazed to think that you would take the candy with you too,” the lyrics may be a little gimmicky but are still clever and catchy. In the final verse, the narrator suffers the consequences of letting “a cowboy shiver on the porch, Cinderella [checking] her watch” when he awakes to find his yard trashed by angry candyless children. He reflects wistfully about the good times with one of my favorite near rhymes ever:
“Streams of paper fill the tree
That hovered over you and me
Shaving cream covers the car
That we picked up in Baltimore”
Perhaps my favorite song by him is “Transit” a song that does double duty, starting off with a story about a New Jersey highway traffic jam that spans the whole state, from “somewhere near Patterson””all the way to the Delaware Water Gap” (“Transit” is incidentally my favorite song to mention the good ol’ Delaware Water Gap). In verse two, we learn that the cause of the jam is a nun changing a tire on the church van. After the next few verses crescendo towards Pennsylvania describing the true melting pot that is the New Jersey Turnpike, Shindell scales back to the nun, Sister Maria, who was on her way to lead a choir of prisoners at the state penitentiary. The chaos of the turnpike is contrasted expertly with the “Car thieves and crack dealers, mobsters and murderers, Husbands and sons, fathers and brothers” of the choir and the forgiveness and sincerity of Sister Maria. I can’t do this song justice in a paragraph and can only implore you to listen to it yourself.
I know his albums completely at this point and haveam yet to find a song I dislike. Shindell moved a few years ago to Argentina and doesn’t tour very frequently anymore. Hearing him live last week (and meeting him after the show) was a truly special moment.