Townes Van Zandt was born and bred in Texas and didn’t find much commercial success in his lifetime, despite the fact that Willie Nelson and Merle Haggard named their 1983 album of duets, Pancho and Lefty, after one of Van Zandt’s famously enigmatic songs. The duo’s single of “Pancho and Lefty” went to number one that year and should have helped Van Zandt land better gigs and a record deal, but it was not to be.

Van Zandt was born rich, a fact he did his best to conceal. Seeing Elvis Presley on the Ed Sullivan Show got him interested in playing guitar, and he started playing folk songs in Houston coffee houses in his early 20s. In 1965, meeting Mickey Newbury and Guy Clark, both young struggling songwriters at the time, inspired Van Zandt to stop playing traditional blues and folk songs and start writing his own material. Even his first efforts, like “Waitin’ Around to Die”, impressed people with their strong melodies and grim poetry. Despite his genius (certified by IQ tests when he was in grammar school) and his poetic gifts, Van Zandt was a difficult person. He tried to kill himself when he was in college by falling out a window: “I wanted to see what it would feel like to fall two stories,” he said later. After the fall, he was hospitalized, diagnosed with bi-polar disorder, and given insulin shock therapy, which destroyed his long-term memories. For the rest of his life, he refused to take the medication that would have stabilized him and instead self-medicated with the drugs and alcohol that destroyed his body and eventually killed him.

When Van Zandt was low, he was very low, but when he was high, he turned out some amazing songs. He wasn’t prolific, but left behind 10 studio albums that continue to fuel his legend. In a scene from the Margaret Brown directed biopic, Be Here to Love Me, someone asks Van Zandt why his songs are so sad. He pauses, then quips, “They’re not all sad. Some of ’em are hopeless.” In that same film, he says, “My goal is to write songs so mysterious, nobody will ever know what they mean, not even me.” In his best songs, he did address the great mystery, capturing those wild, unfathomable moments of heartache and bliss that confound reason and lead us to truths we may understand intuitively, but seldom express in words.

“To Live Is to Fly” is included in the first edition of For the Sake of the Song, Van Zandt’s first songbook. In a short note provided in that book, he writes, “It’s impossible to have a favorite song, but if I were forced at knifepoint to choose one it would be ‘To Live Is to Fly.’” The song’s haunting, minor-key melody is one of his best, and the lyrics could be the story of his life, told in cryptic couplets of aching beauty.

The lyric features lines that could be from a typical love song:

Won’t say I love you, babe.
Won’t say I need you, babe.
But I’m gonna get you, babe,
and I will not do you wrong.

Then, in a sudden turn, he waxes existential. “Living’s mostly wasting time,” he sings. The first time I heard the line, it stopped me in my tracks. It continues to resonate, making it harder to believe the lies I tell myself when things get hard and I tune out reality. He follows up with a wry plea: “And I waste my share of mine / But it never feels too good / So let’s don’t take too long.” This leads to a chorus with a baffling line: “Well, you’re soft as glass and I’m a gentle man.” The first few dozen times I heard the song, I was sure he was singing, “you’re soft as grass,” but it slowly sunk in. What the hell does “soft as glass” mean? Your psyche is so brittle you might shatter at any moment? Is he singing to a bottle of booze? It’s one of the oddest images in any Van Zandt song, and then he closes with another near cliché: “We got the sky to talk about / And the world to lie upon.”

The second verse opens with one of his most quoted lines: “Days up and down they come / Like rain on a conga drum / Forget most, remember some / But don’t turn none away.” When he sings, “forget most, remember some,” it adds resonance to the “living’s mostly wasting time” line, underscoring the fickle way our neural pathways capture and process memory. If we did recall everything, our brains would be swamped by useless information, but the stories that we do remember become the narrative of our lives. And no matter how hard or easy the experience, it’s impossible to turn them away, as much as we’d sometimes like to. Van Zandt gets to that quandary with the next four lines:

Everything is not enough,
And nothing is too much to bear.
Where you’ve been is good and gone,
All you keep’s the getting there.

“Everything is not enough” is the credo of the hedonist and the junkie. William Blake once wrote: “The path of excess leads to the palace of wisdom,” but more often it leads to madness and an early grave. Van Zandt sings the line in his usual detached way, half ironic and half deadly serious. When I first heard the line, “nothing is too much to bear,” I took it as an expression of strength and fortitude, a determination to see whatever life has to offer, no matter how harsh. Recently, I realized that it could also be read as “nothing IS TOO MUCH TO BEAR,” an expression of the moments in life when the seeming meaninglessness of existence becomes overwhelming.

Then to the second chorus: “Well, to live’s to fly, ahh, low and high / So shake the dust off of your wings / And the sleep out of your eyes.” I have heard that line as “all alone and high,” as well as “low and high.” No matter how close I listen, I can’t be sure what he’s saying, but “shake the dust off of your wings, and the sleep out of your eyes,” is a beautiful benediction.

The third verse isn’t as heavy as the first two; it’s a straightforward rendition of the life of a traveling musician. “It’s goodbye to all my friends / It’s time to leave again” (the gig’s over and I gotta go). “Here’s to all the poetry / And the pickin’ down the line” (when I play this dump again). “I’ll miss the system here / The bottom’s low and the treble’s clear / But it don’t pay to think too much / On things you leave behind.” Another existential zinger, and one wonders why he chooses to say “the things you leave behind,” rather than “the folks you leave behind.”

The last verse is another painful cry:

We all got holes to fill,
And them holes are all that’s real.
Some fall on you like a storm,
Sometimes you dig your own.

The image of holes falling like a hard rain is wonderfully surrealistic and chilling, but the kicker is “sometimes you dig your own.” We all know we create most of our own problems, but it’s something we’d like to forget. Van Zandt won’t let us, and then closes with another telling insight that keeps us from wiggling off the hook. “The choice is yours to make / And time is yours to take / Some dive into the sea / Some toil upon the stone.” Diving into the sea doesn’t really imply swimming as much as drowning, and toiling upon the stone suggests Matthew 13:5, the parable of seed falling on stony ground and withering. But unlike many Van Zandt songs, “To Live Is to Fly” closes on a reassuring note, repeating the song’s heartfelt blessing: “So shake the dust off of your wings / And the tears out of your eye.” I don’t know where Townes is right now, he passed on New Year’s Day 1997, but I hope he’s sailing through space, flying low and high, his wings spotless and his eyes full of stars.

Listen: “To Live Is to Fly” [at youtube.com]

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