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- Sunday Music: "The Forks Of Cypress" By Patterson Hood (ft. Waxahatchee)
Sunday Music: "The Forks Of Cypress" By Patterson Hood (ft. Waxahatchee)
Matt Zeigler
April 13, 2025
How hard was that lesson to learn? The choice of the path you took? The left behind choice of the path you opted against? No, not quite Robert Frost, but only because we’re adding - how hard is it to acknowledge that you couldn’t have learned it alone?
Patterson Hood, all the way back to his time in the alt-rock/country legends the Drive By Truckers days, he hits a haunted nostalgia in my gut nearly every time he starts to sing.
Waxahatchee, the indie folk project of Katie Crutchfield, I’m now realizing, does kind of the same thing.
Together, they make for a hell of a duet.
Emphasis on the hell. It’s nightmarish and beautiful. It’s got lines like, “Even when it's storming there's sunlight in your hair.”
But for whatever the mystery inside of the song is, there’s a compliment of their voices together that hits deeper than the best of what Robert Plant and Allison Kraus were ever scratching at. It’s lush and it’s sparse. It’s melodic and it’s harmonic. It’s flat and it’s layered.
These words are more Chaucer than anything, right? Read this passage below. What’s the pentameter he’s messing with or messing up or stumbling through here? What’s up with these word choices and why don’t I notice them until I write them down?!
No one had better ask me and I would never tell
Something so forbidden, I'll carry it to hell
And burn it down there with me with lips that speak profane
Of a love that burned as hot as my secret shame
Falls that lead to winters into springs and summers green
The one that shook me most fertilized the ground, serene
Hazel eyes and blood, beckoning to speak thy name
My secret shame that haunts me in my dream
Sometimes you just want to bask in a performance. This is one of those times. It connects you to something deeply human in our shared experiences.
How hard are these lessons to learn? As hard as they had to be. And as heavy as we carry them, when we do and when we do not seem to have any choice or option. Onwards and beyond the next fork. Onwards and into our futures.
Even if you have nothing you’re taking to hell with you. Even if you have no secret shame. but, I’m guessing we all have some versions of it. Here’s to Hood letting some of it out. Here’s to remembering what great art can do.
His new album, Exploding Trees and Airplane Screams, has some incredible moments. Find the whole thing, but also, do try this song and see if you can hear what I hear: