Don Henley's Cass County: A Review

I am not the biggest fan The Eagles ever had. There were a couple songs I wouldn't turn off, but mostly I could never forgive the horrible joke that ends "Take it to the Limit." As they're running through the final chorus, Randy Meisner bawls out "take iiiiiiit to the limit, one more time," and then the chorus repeats. And then it repeats again. And again. Until one more time turns into ten more times. That's the kind of joke that merits a lifetime of punishment and trip across the Styx!

But every once in a while, the Eagles would astound me, with a melody phrase or a guitar line that seemed like it was two hundred years old. And now that Don Henley's first solo album since I was a teenager has come out, I know why.

This 16-track
album (on the Deluxe edition) hearkens back to the time before being country before country was cool was cool. While Nashville's moneyed darlings are trying as hard as they can to turn country music into everything else, Henley has released an album complete with guitar waltzes like "Bramble Rose" and "Too Far Gone," whining pedal steel, and Mearl Haggard's woeful caterwaul. The piano solo on "Too Much Pride" is worth the price of admission all on its own!

The subject matter is right on the money for this kind of music. A high school friend decides you're the one who got away and tries to screw up both of your lives ("That Old Flame"). A woman trembles at the reality of a shrinking future as the "fine for now" job turns into her life story ("Waiting Tables"). Notable everywhere is the stoic resignation to disappointment that marked a whole musical era and which now exists in brilliant relics like Lindi Ortega and Robert Ellis, and practically nowhere else.

But Henley is not Ortega or Ellis. Cass County may be an album about his East Texas homeland, but it is still a Don Henley album. A small army of country's yesteryear elites can be heard on this album – Dolly Parton, Martina McBride, and Haggard – along with newcomer Miranda Lambert. But his guests haunt the shadows and set the scene, like stray moments where the radio signal in East Texas actually comes in. The voice of this album is Henley's, and it is the same smooth and raspy instrument that immortalized "Boys of Summer" and "End of the Innocence" in the Top 40 canon. And "Take a Picture of This," which will surely be the album's first single, would fit just as easily among those as it does on this album.

Henley tiptoes through these songs with the respect and caution of a grown child in the house of his sleeping parents, that strange mixture of familiar and guest.

It is the recognition that leaving home has costs, even when you had to do it, that makes this album not a 70's country album but a creation of 21st century mobility.

That's a suitcase. Yeah, that's a ticket from a plane. There's no one here to talk to; no reason to remain. 

         ("Take a Picture of This")

My mother's three children live in three different states. And going home will always be a time of reckoning with choices I am glad to have made even as I remain more aware than anyone of what it has cost me.

Henley achieves his highest synthesis of now and then with "Praying for Rain," which from its first note – a pedal steel descending arpeggio – recalls a venerable tradition of rural people talking about the weather, the kind of life or death matter that is the proper subject matter of pleasantries. But the old tradition is struggling to make sense of new realities:

Something's different, something's changed, and I don't know why.Even the old folks can't recall when it's ever been this hot and dry.Dust devils whirling on the first day of July. It's a hundred degrees at 10 am: not a cloud up in the sky.

The second verse begins with a line found in a hundred songs that sound just like this one, but by the second chorus, it is clear that Henley is doing something I am certain I've never heard before:

I ain't no wise man. But I ain't no fool.And I believe that Mother Nature is taking us to school.Maybe we just took too much and put too little back.It isn't knowledge, it's humility we lack.                

Is this the first song in music history with both a steel guitar and a meditation on climate change? Probably it is. Even if not, it is surely the first that did it without being a trite political shill. Henley holds in view the mystery that the world is and suggests that our ignorance might not be so dangerous if we remembered how little we know. On this planet, we are a strange mix of familiar and guest, and we could stand, perhpas, to tiptoe a little more.

There is a deep awareness on Cass County that sometimes home crushes us, and sometimes it heals us; and sometimes we have to leave it, and sometimes leaving it causes a regret we never get free of. The distorted-electric defiance of the album's last track notwithstanding ("I like where I am now,"), this album settles into pain and owns it. The genius of old country music is the ability to live in and suffer with paradoxes like this.

Cass County stamps a welcome update on that deep tradition with a clever and soft hand.

Hospitality and the Benedict Option

Perceived breakdowns in the relationship of Christian conviction to the civic spirit of the age have compelled a number of Christians to reconsider a more sectarian prerogative. In an edgy 2009 piece entitled "Becoming Barbarians," Rod Dreher invited Christian conservatives to consider a "Benedict Option":

"that is, pioneering forms of dropping out of a barbaric mainstream culture that has grown hostile to our fundamental values." 

In the wake of the Obergefell v. Hodges, Dreher's commendation has become a hot topic of discussion. There is simply a sense among many Christian conservatives that a world becoming increasingly inhospitable to their values might be best served by their withdrawal from the institutions that dole out political capital and the habitation of a truly countercultural way of life, one that will provide a joyful witness in the face of society's grim and growing anhedonia. 

But the recent fallout from terrorist attacks in Paris compels me to reflect on the possibility that barbaric proposals are no respectors of persons, politically speaking. Both sides of the proverbial aisle can dehumanize.

On this note, I call attention to St. Benedict's Rule:

Let all guests who arrive be received like Christ, for he is going to say, "I came as a guest, and you received me." And to all let honor be shown, especially to the domestics of the faith and pilgrims (Ch. 53). 

All guests who visit the Abbey are to be received "with all charitable service." Benedict continues:

Let the Abbot give the guests water for their hands; and let both Abbot and community wash the feet of all guests. After the washing of the feet let them say this verse: "We have received Your mercy, O God, in the midst of Your temple."

Benedict commands the Abbot – not the monks but their leader who stands in the place of Christ – to focus especially on the guest. He is to make sure guests have water. He is even to go forego his fast, under most circumstances, in order not only to provide a feast for guests but to make sure they are not made to feel awkward by eating alone.

It must be admitted that Benedict clearly has in mind that most guests will be Christians, as is clear based on his command that the Abbot pray with them and adore Christ along with them. But his explicit intensification of the command to receive all guests like Christ ("especially to the domestics," as above) makes clear that others are in consideration and to be treated like Christ whoever they are.

Syrian Madonna and Child

In Benedict's world as in ours, it was not inconceivable that strange guests would pose real danger to the brothers. Any knock on the door could portend a threat. And yet it is just for that reason that Benedict commands this ethic of hospitality as a radical imitatio Christi. No threat releases a Monk from the obligation to answer the door.

According to Benedict, this is the face of Christ, this the distressed face of his Blessed Mother. What calculation of risk, based--it must be admitted--on a calculation of fear alone, would justify not answering the knock on our door.

Give us grace, oh Lord: that we would see your servant Benedict's words as more than an option!