It’s sad and fatalistic. And, knowing that he died aged 52 (and looking a lot older still), there’s something chilling about it.

But then again, that’s Townes and that’s his music. It is often sad and fatalistic and, with the benefit of hindsight, chilling. I don’t think he would have wanted it any other way. His life, like his music, was all about the journey:

“Where you’ve been is good and gone; all you keep is the getting’ there.” — To Live Is To Fly

Finding great American singer-songwriters from Townes’ era is like shooting fish in a barrel. Something about that time and that place — the strange alchemy of art — combined in a creative explosion that gave us a glut of canonical figures: Bob Dylan, Leonard Cohen, Neil Young.

Townes — it sometimes seems almost wilfully — sat outside of this pantheon. He never toured the world or had posters of himself stare down from teenage walls. He hasn’t had academics sit around on Newsnight to pick the bones out of his work. To put it bluntly, he was not a success.

It’s probably why he means so much to those of us who have been caught in his spell. It’s not about the cultural cachet of knowing something different; it’s because our connection with him feels so much more personal, more direct. That’s how it seems to me, anyway.

The comparison with Dylan is a hard one not to make. With Dylan, everyone seems to have their own interpretation of the man and his music, and everyone their own relationship with him. Meeting a Dylan fan can be tortuous as you struggle to discover if they get Dylan like you get Dylan, if they like the same Dylan you like. He is a cultural edifice, large enough in our collective consciousness for a million different ideas to exist in his orbit.

When I meet a Townes fan, it’s as if we’re co-conspirators. “Oh, you know about Townes, do you?” “Of course.” And that’s it. There’s the nod of recognition. To know him is to get him because we only really know him through his music. He wasn’t the voice of anyone’s generation, his songs are not sung at protest marches, he didn’t appear in magazines or become a movie star.

Most of what we know of him is through his songs.

And what songs they are. Simple, yet infused with the kind of effortless poetry that washes over you at first, before you realise just how powerful it is.

In a single line — in just a few words — Townes captures beauty, truth, melancholy, and above all, longing. Longing for a girl, for a life, for the road, for the bottle, for freedom, for the past. For something.

“There’s lots of things along the road I’d surely like to see; I’d like to lean into the wind and tell myself I’m free” — I’ll Be There in the Morning

That tension is always there too. That tension between contentment — the easy life into which this well off Texan was born — and the hard slog of the road, where he needed to be to hone his craft as an outlaw songwriter.

Why She’s Acting This Way isn’t always considered one of Townes’ most popular songs, but then few are. To me, it’s the one that shows him at the height of his powers. A ballad to a departing lover, it is bitter and angry and tender and achingly sad. It was not my favourite song when I first made acquaintance with Townes’ music, but it is one to which I keep returning, getting more from its ambiguous imagery with each listen.

“Like silence she stands; like laughter she falls
From a castle of sand; like a memory she calls”

Those opening lines set the scene: this is a song about lost love. Perhaps for the best, perhaps not. Just as in life, the emotional centre of the song — of all of Townes’ best work — is hard to make out. There is regret, relief, sadness and bitterness.

Before hearing this, did I realise that silence stands and laughter falls? I can’t be sure. Like the best poets, Townes tells us something we already know. He just puts it better than we ever could.

“Once again turn away if you’re sure that it’s done
Tell your prophets to pray, tell your bandits to run
Take your eyelids of stone they won’t do you no harm
Take your cross made of bones take your your fly-paper arms”

Eyelids of stone. Fly-paper arms. Six words, yet they paint as big a picture as 600 could. What else do you have to know about the song’s subject after this? The images are anything but obvious but the effect cannot be doubted.

This is what Townes does best: he doesn’t need to explain why things didn’t work out with this girl; just hear to how he describes her in those few words.

And yet. And yet…

“And when everything’s placed in your coffin to go
Throw a scarf ‘round your face ‘cause the subway gets cold”

Nothing is ever that cut and dry. There may be anger and resentment, but there is affection too. Townes’ songs, at their peak, are a struggle between competing emotions. Love and hate, freedom and aloneness, compassion and anger.

“Pack up your sunflower smile and your bandanna blues
Take your worthless denials they’re all you’ve got left to lose
Take your Tinkerbell lies and your weary desires
Take the tears in your eyes take your cup full of fire
Give your lover a call if your legs start to fail
And he’ll come break your fall with a bed full of nails”

Again and again, the song weaves it’s way between the oblique (‘your cup full of fire’) and the prosaic (‘your weary desires’). Townes may be an honest, simple southern wordsmith, but his lyrics are shot through with the fantastical metaphorical wizadry of the hippy imagination. In my mind, it’s the tension between the itinerant wanderer’s competing desires to stay grounded and to be allowed to fly free.

“And you’ve made it quite plain that we’re just wastin’ time
And you say that it seems strange that I’m staying behind
But don’t you worry ‘bout me I can make it alone
‘Cause I got no place to be and I ain’t far from home”

My heart aches when I hear these closing rhymes. Townes is a man both lost and found at the same time. He has no place to be because there is no one waiting for him. He ain’t far from home, but maybe he doesn’t really have one.

Townes felt he needed to drift to make music as honest as his. As he sings in another song, he’s got “the sky to talk about and the world to lie upon” and perhaps that’s all he ever wanted.

But the aloneness is always there. And it is sad. Beautifully sad.

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