Jon Dee Graham – The Great Battle

In “Big Sweet Life”, the gratitude-infused romp that galvanizes his 1999 album Summerland, Jon Dee Graham erases the line that separates dreams from real life. Instead of waiting for things to happen that never do (something he admits he’s done before), the Austin roots-rocker, ex-punk and former True Believer fashions his dreams out of what’s at hand. In a bracing imaginative leap, he manages, if only temporarily, to see the sum of things hoped for in what’s already there.

“Get a look at that sky,” Graham bids his love over the track’s bounding guitar figure. “It’s like a dream I had one time/Ah, the sky was on fire/Yeah, but that was just a dream/And this is real life/And it’s a big sweet life,” he blurts, his words spilling out as if sprung by the wonder of the moment. With the firmament as his lens or window, Graham looks beyond the mundane or taken-for-granted to see that something more — much more — has been there all along. “Come here you beautiful thing/Come here you beautiful ev’rything,” he beams, ready to throw his arms around not just his sweetheart, but around the entire universe as well.

Here Graham encounters what some, and not just those of a religious bent, would describe as the sacred or holy. Specifically, he uses what psychoanalyst Donald Winnecott calls “transitional” or “potential” space — the space between the world and ourselves — as a threshold to something deeper and more abiding than he ordinarily experiences. He glimpses God in this connective tissue, in these details, or, if you prefer, the eternal in the now.

Graham forges such mystical connections throughout Summerland (“It’s a singular thing,” he exults in “Look Up”) and on much of its sublime successor, Hooray For The Moon. But the trick, he knows, is sustaining and living with this second sight, which perhaps explains why that’s the subtext of his groove-rich new album, The Great Battle.

“It’s as close as your left hand/It’s as far as the promised land/Do you believe it’s right where you stand?/Well, I do,” he begins in sphinx-like fashion on the opening track “Twilight”, alluding to his cherished transitional or sacred space. “In the twilight/In a little question mark/Punctuating up the dark/Hold out your hands as it falls apart/Like I do,” he goes on, talking about that liminal zone between darkness and light where, paradoxically, murk gives way to clarity.

Not that it’s been easy for Graham to achieve this mystical insight — this art, for lack of a better term, of unknowing. “I used to wonder what it was in the middle/I used to wonder what it was in between,” he confesses, spurred by surging guitars in “I Don’t Feel That Way Anymore”. “I was under the false impression/I had to know what everything means.”

This isn’t a facile claim to transcendence or a case of what theologians call cheap grace. It’s hard won. Graham isn’t saying you can somehow will away suffering or strife. He’s come a long way to get where he is, and, as lines such as “Now I’m just a little bit better/I’m a little bit better now” attest, he still has a ways to go. Hence the album’s blues-ravaged cover of the traditional “Lonesome Valley” (“You’ve got to go there by yourself”), and hence its title, which alludes as much to Graham’s inner conflicts as to a world rent by poverty, apathy and aggression.

“It ain’t that the dream is dead, but it ain’t feeling very well,” he laments to the yearning chord progression of “Something To Look Forward To”. “Let’s prop it up in a corner and hope that no one can tell/Suck it up one time, you gonna suck it up twice/Strap it up, baby, and step into the light,” he urges. Here again, the transformation Graham envisions, graced by Patty Griffin’s vocals on the chorus, hinges on realigning oneself vis-a-vis the world, on seeing the world as precious or holy — and treating everything in it accordingly.

Graham isn’t pushing some arcane or quaint approach to living here, but rather an intuitive and necessary one, a spirit of openness and attunement. That’s surely some of what he’s driving at in “E. 11th Street”, with its otherwise peculiar appeal, “Children turn your cell phones on.” It’s unclear who these children are (the latchkey kids who live along the besieged strip of East Austin’s 11th Street, or those who score drugs there?). There’s no doubt, though, that Graham is urging them to stay connected, no matter how tough, or tempting, things might get. He’s beseeching them — and anyone who’s listening, really — to keep hope alive by remaining open to those twilit spaces that give way to the sacred, and thus to new possibilities.

The album’s tensive, pressing music does a wonderful job of conveying the struggle at the heart of Graham’s songs. Likewise, the layered arrangements of most tracks — guitars, bass and drums, fleshed out with Wurlitzers, pump organs, lap steel and such — underscore Graham’s sense of living with ambiguity, and his efforts to do so with grace and self-deprecating good humor. Witness, as a case of the latter, the creaky “Robot Moving”, where, in a gruff warble that’s as much Cookie Monster as Tom Waits, he slurs, “I swore that I’d never use the word ‘irony’ in a song/’course the irony is that I never meant to live this long.”

Sonically, The Great Battle is the sort of unfailing roots-rock record we’ve heard in recent years from Bob Dylan and Lucinda Williams, a familiar-sounding yet inexhaustible offering that seems impervious to contemporary trends. Nowhere does it betray, say, the studio sleight-of-hand of Wilco’s dazzling new album. Yet in lieu of Jeff Tweedy’s persistent narcissism, and of his displays of cleverness for their own sake, Graham, producer Charlie Sexton and the rest of the album’s cast offer us an abundance of humility and grace, a heartening generosity of spirit.

Nowhere is this more evident than in “World So Full”, the record’s crepuscular closing track — a benediction, really, a plea for the courage to see the sacred in the everyday, and to embrace it and the responsibility that doing so entails. “Little stars, hold on tight/To the roof, of this night,” Graham begins. “Don’t turn away/Don’t turn away/From the world so full.”

He could be talking to his kids while tucking them into bed at night, or he could be appealing to the sky itself, a well of inspiration and sacred space he’s turned to in any number of songs. Whatever the case, and likely it’s both and something more besides, Graham is certainly talking to the rest of us, when, after praying, “Open my eyes, and let me see,” he confides/implores:

I know it’s hard

But I know it’s sweet

Complicated

And incomplete

But I am in love

I’m still in love

With the world so full

Don’t turn away

Don’t turn away

From the world so full.