As lightning flashes in the western night sky, master songwriter Butch Hancock and his family tumble into their white pickup and head down an unpaved desert road toward town for a Saturday dinner. The memory of the turbulent summer sunset is still fresh — a rosy Big Bend twilight blown away by sudden wind and faint splatters of rain, followed by the appearance of storm clouds in a swollen mushroom cap, rising and then receding with last light.
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Hancock hunches forward over the steering wheel, paying close attention to the bumpy road as the truck’s headlights cast fractured, bouncy beams across the darkened desert. His wife, Adrienne, sits beside him. The three children on the rear bench seat — Hancock’s 8-year-old son, Rory, and his two teenage stepdaughters, Katy and Helena — call out for their dad to load his new album, “War and Peace,” into the CD player. It’s a recent family ritual, evidently, to play these songs on every drive.
The opening cut is Hancock, singing a cappella, in a voice that’s like a Texas Bob Dylan. The song’s tone suggests a solemn prayer in an old church, or perhaps a shaman’s cry to the desert starlight.
“Come all ye mad and ragin’ fearless friends of war and peace/Come all ye sad self-righteous frightened friends down on your bended knees/All beings on this earth . . . you must not harm them/All weapons you hold deep within your hearts . . . you must disarm them.”
Lyrical overture
Hancock’s children know the words of these songs by heart. So in the cab, the girls begin to sing along — very gently, very delicately — with their father’s recorded voice. All else is quiet in the desert tonight, except the haphazard flash of lightning, the hum of the engine and the squeaky springs of Hancock’s pickup.
“Go find someone who’s hungry, and give them food to eat/Go find someone who’s homeless, and bring them in off of your street/Every man you meet’s your son . . . every woman is your daughter/Go find someone who’s thirsty . . . and give them water.”
These words, sentiments from the song “Give Them Water,” are the lyrical overture to “War and Peace,” one of the most powerful exhortations for peace made by an American musician since George W. Bush’s declared war on terrorism. Although Hancock never mentions the president or Iraq, except through allusion or metaphor, “War and Peace” is unapologetically political. It is by turn reflective and defiant, headstrong and hopeful, witty and provocative.
“If somebody says, `Hey, this is a political album,’ all I can say is, `Oh. You noticed!'” says Hancock, 61, of his first solo release in nine years. He suggests the sentiments on the record echo a larger cry that he has been sensing for quite some time now.
“Everybody’s crying for freedom, all around the planet,” he says. “You can listen to every sound as a cry for that — whether it’s people or the wind, or war machinery, or church singing or anything else. All of it is somehow a cry for freedom, though nine times out of 10 they may not know what they’re crying for. Or it’s a cry that they think is for freedom that takes them in the exact opposite direction.
“Maybe I’m doing the same thing [with this album]. We’ll see.”
Butch Hancock is an iconic figure in Texas music, renowned as a writer, architect, photographer and freethinker, although he isn’t commonly perceived as a “political” artist. Hancock’s forte is wordplay, both as a solo artist and as a member of the eclectic band of Lubbock musicians known as the Flatlanders. He loves abstraction and acrobatics; even his most serious, transcendental music is rich with a sense of play. Hancock wrote his first songs in the cab of a tractor in Lubbock. He’s the kind of guy who’ll rhyme “circumstance” with “workin’ pants.”
Activist spirit
Hancock by no means betrays those roots on “War and Peace.” Yet this new music often evokes the activist spirit of Gandhi, or Guthrie, or Martin Luther King Jr. “If you send someone to kill someone, or to be killed to stop the killing . . . you are also killing,” he sings on the album.
“I’ve never understood why it’s so hard to see that aspect of war — that more killing is more killing,” Hancock says. “I think what allows [people] to do it is that they choose up sides. Our side against somebody else’s side. That’s ridiculous. We’re all on this planet together. Whether we like it or not.” And here, Hancock says, laughing, blue eyes flashing. “And some people don’t like it, evidently.
“When Bush said, `Let’s roll,’ I said at the time, `Man, that’s throwing us back 40 years.’ And I corrected that later to say `400 years.’ Seriously. There was not one voice I heard in the religious world [after the terrorist attacks] saying, `Wait. Jesus said forgive.'”
Hancock insists he didn’t set out to write an entire album of war and peace music. It all began three years ago with a single song, “The Damage Done,” its closing lines written in response to Sept. 11, 2001: “One day in hell, two towers fell/What’s lost can never be won/by war on war adding terror to the damage done.” He contributed that tune to “13 Ways to Live,” an album on which 13 Texas artists ranging from Patty Griffin to Ian Moore to Eliza Gilkyson performed songs inspired by the situation in the Middle East.
That was supposed to be it. Yet Hancock felt compelled to keep writing. He had six or seven songs finished by 2004. In the spring of this year, he began laying down the first tracks for a full-scale “war and peace” album in his home studio at Terlingua.
“Every day, even while I was recording the songs, I kept thinking, `I hope I don’t have to put all this on an album. I hope it all becomes moot,'” says Hancock. “I was hoping that [the president] and his friends in Washington would have a huge change of heart and an opening of their eyes. But I don’t think it’s going to happen.”