Find That, For What Your Soul Is Yearning
How a vast amount of circumstances led me to a great experience
‘Sure, but Carson McMullers is gonna be pissed…,’ he said, smiling.
‘Not if she could hear how we got here,’ I thought to myself. ‘Not if she could hear the story.’
I was raised on Gotland — a Swedish island in the Baltic Sea with a population not larger than fifty-eight thousand. Unlike many other places in the world, Gotland is a safe place. In fact, safe is about all it is. The medieval walls surrounding the island’s only city — Visby — breathe safety. The cobblestone clatter as you walk the entirety of the main road leading through this City of Roses, as it is sometimes called, and if you do that on a winter’s evening, you won’t meet a soul. But never have I felt afraid. Never in Visby have I lost the feeling of being safe.
The problem with feeling safe is that it is almost numbing; you never have to take any risks. When you know that you are safe, you get comfortable with the pure essence of being safe. You never go out on a limb in that you are always acting according to a preconceived view of how you are supposed to act, and what you are supposed to do. You are safe, and that becomes comfortable; it becomes all you need. This safety can then sometimes feel like a prison. There are people in life that are seekers — always looking for something, a purpose, perhaps. For someone that is a seeker, safety can be devastating.
A place that is all but safe, but has so many other qualities, is New Orleans. In New Orleans, you have your hurricanes and your floods, you have your robberies and you have your shootings, but there is also life in a sense that you, according to my knowledge, cannot find in many other places. The bars, the culture, the atmosphere, the history, the cafés, the art, the music, the colors, the people. For a seeker, here is a place where there is stuff to be found.
One of the main reasons I wanted to visit New Orleans had much to do with the motion picture A Love Song for Bobby Long. It had been a favorite of mine ever since I first saw it. The movie portrays a young woman (played by Scarlet Johansson) who comes to New Orleans after her mother has passed, to attend her mother’s funeral, only to find two rather beaten and gravely alcoholic bohemian men living in her mother’s house. She doesn't find the situation too appealing and is determined to head back to Florida, where she was living in a trailer park. As she is about to leave for the bus station, she is presented with a suitcase full of paperbacks that used to belong to her mother, which she, somewhat reluctantly, takes along with her. As she is waiting for the bus, she grabs a book from the suitcase and starts to read. The book pulls her in — she is fully consumed by it. Intentionally, or at least without a care, she misses the bus and keeps on reading, all through the night, until she reaches the final page. When she has finished the book and closes the cover, she takes another look at the front page and you can tell that it is in that moment that she decides not to leave New Orleans after all. The title of this book is The Heart is a Lonely Hunter. The author is Carson McMullers.
After spending about a week in New Orleans, during which I had experienced so much good music, explored streets, bars and nightlife, and felt like the city had embraced me and made me feel as welcome as it is humanly possible to feel welcome anywhere, my traveling companion and I found ourselves having lunch at the Satsuma Café on Dauphine Street, not far from where we were staying. As I was sipping a cup of coffee, it suddenly struck me. I had been thinking about getting a souvenir, some sort of artifact to bring home, to help me remember everything that I had experienced. Since souvenir products usually are pretty silly, I had not had much hope of finding anything that would be actually worth getting. But what if…? What if I could locate a copy of The Heart is a Lonely Hunter? As soon as the thought struck me, I realized that if I were to find a copy of that book, it would be the perfect souvenir. It would be something tangible, with so much personal meaning attached to it, and at the same time so heavily geographically attached to the city. It would have been perfect.
It was still just about lunchtime when we got to discussing how to spend the rest of the day. Before Satsuma, we had been to Euclid Records, where I had picked up a few LPs. We had plans to ride our bikes to the Garden District, but the sun was so warm I was afraid the vinyl records would just melt away if I took them with me. After remembering we had run out of cold brew and milk at the house, something we knew we would need the next day, a decision was made to bike towards the house to drop off the records and stop for some groceries on the way. We left the café and got on our bikes.
The co-op on St. Roch where we had been the day before was right on the way home. As we got there, we realized we had run out of cash and needed to find an ATM. The co-op was located inside a building complex that seemed to host more than one business, so we crossed our fingers that maybe they had an ATM too. We went inside, passed another café and a yoga studio and found an ATM around a corner. After making a withdrawal, I had a quick look around. Over on the other side, across a large room, there seemed to be some vintage clothes for sale; paintings were hanging on a wall along with a bunch of junk. We strolled across the floor into the thrift store. A quick scan of the room and my eyes caught a bookshelf a bit further in. I headed for it, and the very first book spine I saw had its title printed in a beautiful green typeface. My hands trembled as I pulled the paperback out from the shelf. If my heart was a lonely hunter, it had miraculously stumbled across what it was hunting for.
I can barely recall the 30 minutes following my acquiring the book. I do know it cost me no more than two and half dollars. I know I had not yet realised the paperback was the exact same edition as I had seen Miss Johansson read in the movie so many times before, and I guess we must have bought cold brew and milk because that’s what I found myself drinking after that half hour had passed and I was back at the house, frantically smoking a cigarette, trying to explain to our friends at the house just why I was so excited over finding this particular book. I had found it. The perfect souvenir.
It is not only the movie A Love Song for Bobby Long itself that I like; it also has a really good soundtrack. John Travolta actually sings a few songs in it, among them I Really Don’t Want to Know, made famous by, among others, Les Paul and Mary Ford in the fifties, and Elvis Presley in the early seventies. It is actually quite impressive, the version that John Travolta does, and I learned later that he was guided musically by a New Orleans musician named Grayson Capps. Grayson Capps got involved with the movie much because it is based on another novel, Off Magazine Street, which was written by his father, Ronald Everet Capps. Grayson Capps makes quick appearances in the movie, but his greatest contributions are the title track of the movie and the song that plays over the final scene, which also has significance to the plot. That song is called Lorraine’s Song (My Heart Was a Lonely Hunter).
Back when I saw Love Song for the first time, and through that discovered Grayson Capps, I was living on Gotland. I was working in a restaurant and my co-workers and I were playing Grayson Capps’ two first albums all the time. A chef at the restaurant had gotten hold of those two CDs, and he refused to let me borrow them so that I could make copies.
‘I don’t want you to grow tired of these records’, he said. ‘I cannot allow you to take that risk’.
So, I could only listen to them at the times when I was working shifts together with this chef. But man, did we listen. The song-crafting was magnificent. His voice cut right through me. For the chef and I, these records became our thing, our secret, something no one else, in our little world, knew of. He recognized that this movie and these records were special. He knew that, I knew that – not many other people on Gotland did.
The song Lorraine’s Song (My Heart Was a Lonely Hunter), obviously named after the book, is a duet. Grayson Capps sings it with a singer and songwriter called Theresa Andersson. I knew Theresa was from Gotland, just like I was, and that she had moved to New Orleans at around age eighteen, but I had not yet met her. I did meet her a couple of times after that though. The one time that lingers in my memory was at a concert she gave in Stockholm. She had finished her set and came back for an encore and I shouted out ‘Play Lorraine’s Song!’
‘I haven’t played that one in a while…’, she spoke into the microphone. ‘Don’t know if I remember it’, she said. But of course she did. And she played it, and there’s this beautiful ending to the song where she sings ‘Never more shall we part’ over and over again and she stopped playing and sang it a cappella and my friend and I started singing Grayson Capps’ part really loudly and the whole audience then started singing and we sang it all together for what seemed to be an eternity. It was just beautiful.
So, there I was, In New Orleans, on a porch, cigarette in one hand, cup of coffee in the other, flipping through The Heart is a Lonely Hunter, thinking about the vast amount of circumstances that had led me to that moment. I put my headphones on, located Lorraine’s Song on my phone and pressed play.
‘…And she cried ‘cause her gold was gone. She cried ‘cause she was all alone. Now she’s calling to you in the dark, just a hunter with a lonely heart, a lonely heart… Never more shall we part’
It was a moment. It really was.
So I thought, ‘I need to learn to play this song. It’s such a good song, it’s a shame I don’t already know how to play it’. Then, I remembered that Grayson did his own version on his first album. Maybe that version was better suited for me to learn, considering his vocal range. Why not try that instead?
As I began to listen to Grayson’s version, another thought struck me that I had not had before. Before leaving for New Orleans, I had checked Theresa Andersson’s tour schedule to see if she happened to have a show in town while we were there. Since I had seen her play live a few times, I knew that her live shows were always worth attending. Sadly, she did not have any shows scheduled. As I was listening to Grayson Capps in my headphones, I realized that I had not thought to look for if he was playing any shows around the time of our trip… Said and done, in this modern age of information accessibility: I instantly went on his web site to read his tour schedule.
‘April 2nd. Chickie Wah Wah. 2828 Canal St., New Orleans’
Hang on a second. What date is this? April 2nd? It cannot be… It is. Today’s date is April 2nd. Where am I? St. Roch. Chickie Wah Wah? Where is Canal Street?
‘Hey Katie!’, I rushed to my feet. ‘Where’s Canal Street?’
‘That’s a beautiful copy’, he said, ‘What edition is this? 1967! That’s the year I was born!’
‘Do you mind signing it?’, I asked.
‘Sure,’ he said, ‘But Carson McMullers is gonna be pissed…’ He smiled, and then paused briefly, as if contemplating what to write. What date was this? The pen scribbled 4/2/14.
‘Welcome to New Orleans’, he wrote, and handed the book back with a smile.
I am back in Sweden now, writing this. I have finished reading the book. This whole episode, and how so many circumstances can work together to direct someone to a certain place on earth at the exact right time for that someone to have an experience, has left me feeling inspired and, in a way, fulfilled. At the same time, there is an itch in me; I do not feel like less of a seeker. So, what is there to find? I do not know. I have written a lot of songs since I came back; songs have come to me easily. There is one that draws inspiration from this story, the book, the movie and its soundtrack. I call it Find That, For What Your Soul Is Yearning. Maybe, I’ll get the chance sometime to go back to New Orleans, and record it there? Maybe, this story somehow makes its way to Mr. Capps and maybe, after reading it, he will think that it would be fun to sing on that recording with me? Maybe I can get Theresa Andersson to do the same? Maybe that would close the circle? Who knows. I do believe that anything can happen when you let your heart go hunting.
Two weeks after we got back from NOLA, a friend that we had been staying with there posted a photo on my Facebook wall, along with this message:
“Look what’s playing April 24–30, at the new little indie theater in our neighborhood… We've had this flyer hanging up on the fridge since the day after you left.”
”Biff chuckled coldly. He plucked a few chords on his mandolin and started a rollicking cowboy song. His voice was a mellow tenor and he closed his eyes and sang. The room was almost dark. The damp chill penetrated to his bones so that his legs ached with rheumatism.
At last he put away his mandolin and rocked slowly in the darkness. Death. Sometimes he could almost feel it in the room with him. He rocked to and fro in the chair. What did he understand? Nothing. Where was he headed? Nowhere. What did he want? To know. What? A meaning. Why? A riddle.”
- Excerpt from The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter by Carson McCullers
Thanks to Julie Antolick Winters for kindly helping out with proofreading.
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