A lot of them had played at the Speakeasy, a Greenwich Village venue on MacDougal Street. Much of what was played was generously sprinkled with “graduates” of the Fast Folk Musical Magazine stable of discoveries.
The voices and names poured out of the speakers: Greg Brown, Shawn Colvin, Cliff Eberhardt, Lucy Kaplansky and … John Gorka. In the early ‘90s, I first became aware of performers in the singer/songwriter field, after discovering WFUV-FM and its “Cityfolk” program. I like those a lot, too, just not as much as the melancholy ones (my bad). John’s dark, comedic sense shines on two other songs on the album, “Mystery to Me” and “Up Until Then.” Here we encounter his trademark sarcasm and laser-sharp perception of human foibles. “Hope comes from the smallest places / little rooms inside the heart / the furniture there bears the traces / of every unsuccessful start / unsuccessful start, it’s like a work of art / the bottom of the heart…” Even the hopeful ending carries with it all the years where the light seemed far off. The emotional terrain was all too familiar when I first heard it and, though life has been good - I’ve been gifted with a loving, solid marriage - the darkness still calls to me. The second is a dark rumination on potential loss called “Furniture.” In a minor key, over a rolling Michael Manring bass line, he sings: “What good am I if I leave you lonely / What good am I, if I’m lonely too / What good is a one and only / if that one and only’s leavin’ you / Am I losin’ you? / Am I losin’ you? / I know you’re lonely too…” A slide guitar keens mournfully as he sings, “He got back the ring with the note she sent / when he tried to make it permanent … and if you live your life with your baggage packed / It seems you leave more often / than you come back… When love’s a storm moving down the line / how can you dream any more of the future time / No sound from the pillow by the window sill / between her and the call of the whippoorwill.” The first is “Bigtime Lonesome.” It describes the pulling apart of a couple in which the woman, unsatisfied with her wandering partner (John, himself?), sends him packing when he proposes. Like all of his songs, every line is cut and polished like a diamond. It says something about me that two of my favorite Gorka songs, occurring back-to-back on the 1994 album Out of the Valley, explore the dark side of John’s psyche. When I sing them, in my head to myself, they roll in, one after another in an almost endless chain, then loop around and start repeating. I learned just one before my vocal chords sent in a letter of resignation: “Love is Our Cross to Bear.” I never got to the other ones that stacked up like cordwood. At around 1996, when I realized that I didn’t have the tools to be a performing songwriter, I figured I might be happy singing Gorka covers for the rest of my life as a music feature at poetry readings. Where do you start? He’s written so many great ones, it overwhelms the mind. How you pick your favorite John Gorka song(s) can say a lot about you. He’s the one who gets it better than everybody else, and delivers it in a voice so rich, it makes Pavarotti weep.
If any of this works for you, then John Gorka is your guy. In the songs I’m talking about, there is a melancholy so pure, so true to the human experience, it brings tears to your eyes with the expression of its stinging light.
We just might share a hunger, a longing for, a really well-written song about the bleaker aspects about what it means to be a human being on planet earth. You can take only so much of happy, perky pop songs that extol the virtues of a blissful coexistence with your lover / spouse / dog / cat / bicycle, or even - dream big - your family. If you’re a devotee of the singer/songwriter genre, I suspect that we may have something in common.