James Recommends: “Green and Blue” By Lucie Thorne
You’re at your wits end, you’ve hit a wall, you’ve fallen hard and you don’t know how you’re possibly going to survive this one. It’s bad, it’s real bad. Then you hear a song that’s like the hand of a friend placed on your shoulder at your darkest hour, “get up off the floor”, it says, “you’ve got work to do, miles yet to go.”
I’m talking soul repair work. Thirty days and nights in the wilderness. Thirst of the heart tangled up in burning barns and wrong turns. There are certain singers who lay into us like no other. Their power lies in the fact that they’ve lived it too, been there, done that, you can hear it in the crackling wood of their voice.
“I’ve got this ache that’s hard to place, I’ve got these little sparks hidden in the dark…I’ve got this feeling in my blood, I’ve got the shifting sands and reshaped lands of a valley after flood,” Lucie Thorne rumble/sings in Green and Blue, like a dark storm rising and laying you low, it’s the mark hit twice. Her sound is her story. If you’re gonna sing it, sing it true. Sing it right off the bone. The best ones are always the one’s we don’t see coming. They swoop in out of the dark and illuminate our hard fall for what it must be transformed into, surviving.
There isn’t a hint of falsity or contrivance in Thorne’s song. While performing Green and Blue live there is the sleight ghost of presence of Malcolm Holcombe, the only other singer I can think of that embodies the aching soul of the song like Thorne. In her body movements and facial strains, one feels a kind of fire being stoked, the heat from the flame is palpable. Her face; choregraphed like freight train hoppers dashing into milkweed. It’s where the song leads and you can’t deny where it wants to take you, you fall into a fall, you don’t fight it.
Landing on our ass or our hands, but never on our feet. A good song tells you what you need to hear (not what you want to hear) to make it through the next hour. Maybe you’re detoxing and everything’s coming back to you all at once, all the shit you’ve been trying to keep out for years, and you don’t know where to put it. Lucie Thorne does. Listen, this is the song, and it has so much to tell you, that hand of a friend on your shoulder in your darkest hour.
