Horse Solider! Horse Solider! is bleak, and worse then bleak, it is often unfashionable. The songs on the album all touch on a certain kind of historicism, the West, war, honour, violence, and masculinity. Each of these generally are on an agenda that Lund keeps returns to, not out of nostalgia, but out of some Cassandra instinct towards memory. The west he mentions is a west of guilt and dangerous landscape. When he talks about honour, it is in a way of preventing sudden death, and when he talks about violence it seems almost accidental.
The difference in this album is apparently horses. It does have a handful of excellent songs about the topic including the title track, an epic tale of equine history from the Hussars to the Mounties, sort of a cowboy reworking of Sympathy for the Devil. There are also two versions I Want to be in The Calvary (one with fifes and drums, one a low slung dirge) and a mournful ballad called “My Saddle Horse Has Died”. (He has done horse songs before, at least one an album including She Won't Come to Me which I think is my favourite ode to the unique qualities of riding, or at least second, after Dylan's “All The Tired Horses”)
The concept that ties the album together though, is not horseflesh, or the West, or general issues of masculinity. It is something more difficult. In a series of tight and mournful narratives, he points out the dark ironies of men's history from the general (“Horse Solider”) to the very specific (a song called “Brother Brigham, Brother Young”). This song is an epistolary from a 19th century saint to the 19th century LDS prophet. It is one of the few works in any media that groks Mormon argot. The line “my fourth wife has some colour, Brother Young” says an enormous amount about Utah and Race, efficiently. This efficiency seems to come from his life growing up in Southern Alberta, where everyone has a Mormon cousin. The difficult thing about it is that it manages to make the violence of the lord seem not only righteous but also necessary. It is a holy rave up, and has an immediate hook.
100 years later, he writes about the tale of Reagan era contra’s in Student Visa. From the details about selling cocaine to pay for the war, to the line about “it ain't no fun in killing folk, and I don't want to do no more”, makes a ballad of great personal caring. The moral ambiguity destroys the previous high water mark of this conflict, Kris Kristofferson’s The Eagle and The Bear, and in an oblique way, makes an argument against ideological intervention in other nation states, whether it is communism or fundamental Islam.
Both of these songs, and in less detail, the rest of Horse Solider takes moments that have been incredibly controversial (i.e. LDS history or the Contras), and contain them into tragic narratives, as an attempt to negotiate the real human costs, to remind people of what happens when cataclysmic things happen to the every day. He refutes the standard right and left ideologies. There is nothing congratulatory or nobel about the violence that surrounds questions of commitments and honour.
As per usual, I have mostly talked about the writing in this album, but more importantly, none of this work would function if the music work failed to work. Unlike Dylan (who had to have a soul choir sing “All The Tired Horses”) or Kris Kristofferson, Lund can sing, from the talking blues to western swing, from singer songwriter ballads, to Holy Roller hymns - he has a rich and diverse voice that he knows how to use. He also uses traditionalist instruments, with out it seeming precious. You can see this especially in the use of fifes and drum of “Calvary”; it pulses onwards, regimented, quick, and inelegant, not quite rough. I find people singing the chorus lustily, without hearing verses about amputation in the cold. That he reprised this song in a much slower version, with no fife or drum, suggests that he knows how much instrumentation can reveal or hide.
His ability, then, to make retrograde values, history, and complicated ethics/morals into well-constructed commercial music is something that is enormously difficult. That he manages to do it seems to be filled with some kind of dark magic. Maybe something Masonic learned from all of that Mormon history. Though this is supposed to be his “difficult album” and it does seem more ambitious then it was, but he cannot give up his masterful, choruses featuring ear worms of the golden age, if there was or is a golden age.
