Today we at Twangville have the pleasure of bringing you a song premier. The song is “Parker’s Back” from North Carolina based Singer-Songwriter Colin Cutler. Fans of Flannery O’Connor might recognize the title, and that is no coincidence. It is from his upcoming album “Tarwater”, which will be released on November 3rd. For those who are not familiar with O’Connor, she was at the forefront of the Southern Gothic authors (no offense to William Faulkner). She was Catholic and often explored human spiritual struggles. There was often a dark comedy in her work. Her stories were filled with violence and depravity, which she used as lens to see into the human spirit. The characters she created were often unsympathetic and full of darkness. “Tarwater” is a concept album of sorts in that every song takes its subject matter from a Flannery O’Connor short story. As a fan of O’Connor’s I was immediately intrigued. After listening to the album, I was even more impressed by the songs themselves. Lyrically Cutler captures the Southern Gothic tone of O’Connor. Even more so, the music spans the breadth of Americana and Roots music. It is a great listen and one you will come back to again and again. “Parker’s Back” is a perfect example of the power of this project.
I asked Cutler what his connection with the story was and he sent me the quote below:
“I grew up in a church that was part of the “Word of Faith” branch of Pentecostalism. If you were sick or poor, you were expected to speak the word of God over the situation until it lined up with his will, which was for you to be healthy and prosperous. If you weren’t, it was explained away as speaking the wrong things, or you didn’t have enough faith. What I eventually realized is that, in that environment, you can never have enough faith, and oftentimes, that faith is a mask never to have to face and explore one’s own identity. It’s also a boundary and lens between the person and the world that puts the world under a lens instead of seeing the self as simply a part of the world.
The song (and the story) is about a man looking back over his life–he ran away from home when his mom tried to get him to a church revival–he covers himself in tattoos and joins the Navy to try to find an identity in a uniform (I joined the Army)–then he gets married. The whole time, he hides his name and just goes by his initials. Neither he nor his wife much like each other–he’s trying to fit her into the box of “good housewife,” but she’s a lot more interested in praying than cooking. He finally gets a tattoo of God–in the story, it’s a Byzantine ikon of Christ that he thinks will please her–and when he shows her, “you beat him when you saw him, till it burst my brittle heart/His eyes were like a burning light, you’d rather love me in the dark.” And that’s the point at which he returns to what he ran away from–his name”.
With that in mind, listen to the song below:
About the author: Chip and his family live in Birmingham, AL. Roll Tide!