johndarnielle:

The thing is, you know, I get how you might be turned-off enough by the overpowering presence of Christianity in western culture to not wanna listen to gospel. I do. But then after I get that, then I don’t get it again, because then I’m listening to gospel, and, like…I’ve ignored a few asks on how to write songs, because I hardly know what to say, and everybody’s path is different, there’s no rules. But for real? I got where I got to lyrically by listening to songs whose lyrics were as rhetorically seamless as this one, and playing them for myself in the privacy of my room, and writing and rewriting the lyrics in notebooks to look at the phrases and see how they worked (and writing hopelessly pretentious little essays in the same notebooks where I described what I saw in the workings of the phrases) and then asking myself whether it were possible to tell more personal, less cosmically-absolute stories in similar terms. To tell stories of no consequence at all in comparably vast, comparable hermit terms. Naturally I’m not on this level yet, at all, but seriously. “When the bridegroom cometh, will your robes be white?/Are you washed in the blood of the lamb?/Do you rest each moment in the crucified?/Are you washed in the blood of the lamb?” I don’t care if your devotion to Satan is so total that you have his name written in ten-foot-high Helvetica on the side of your house as it is on mine, that right there is how you write a song lyric.

Are You Washed In The Blood Of The Lamb - The Louvin Brothers (by O’Neil Beckford)

John Darnielle blogs about the Louvin Brothers

S AT A N I S R E A L