No matter how much he’s come to represent the best of distinctively American art, Johnny Cash remains one of the most unusual icons of the 20th Century. The almost unanimous acceptance The Man In Black received while framing his narratives in the shadow of Absolute Truth was especially remarkable in an era defined by post-modern ambiguities and shades of moral gray. His message was decidedly archaic, one where truth existed outside of irony or compromise, where the battle lines between right and wrong were scratched in the pages of human history, and where he was incapable of indicting the sin of the world without admitting he was the worst offender. In that, he has a kindred spirit in David Eugene Edwards.
“I’m just singing from first-hand experience of how wretched people are. And I don’t need to go any further than myself,” says Edwards of his body of work, formed first as the lead vocalist and main songwriter behind Appalachian goth-folk outfit 16 Horsepower and now the center of his solo project, the more experimental Woven Hand. “I don’t have to point my finger at anybody else, because there is no need.” In so doing, Edwards, like Cash, creates a world rendered in stark black and white, peopled with characters that murder and steal and frantically try to stay one step ahead of the judgment they know is trailing them. As with Cash, Edwards uses his personal frailties and deep Christian faith to make unsettling comments on the human condition that are designed for a purpose startlingly out of step with the majority of contemporary entertainment: Edwards aims to make his listener uncomfortable.
“I mean, usually most of the songs are directed at me,” he explains on a cold October morning. Edwards speaks with a soft, unthreatening voice. It’s difficult to imagine it’s the same one that has barked and wailed so frighteningly over the last 12 years of fire-and-brimstone anthems and morosely mercurial melodies. Often, Edwards seems shy when asked to explain his creative process, eliciting a series of long pauses and uneasy one-word answers, speaking like a man wary of having his words used against him. “Hopefully, that discomfort is directed at me,” he warms up. “But we live in a world where whatever is good for you is good for you, and whatever is good for me is good for me. As long as you don’t hurt me, then everything is fine. But I disagree … I want people to know that just because we all do things that we all accept as normal, that doesn’t make it OK.” Consider the Birds, his sophomore Woven Hand release, is a grand statement of that intent.
It’s a song cycle centered on the depravity of man, and Edwards has created a swirling, impenetrably dark sonic backdrop for his most direct statements as a lyricist. “That’s definitely a focus,” he laughs when asked about the harsh tone of the album. “With some of them I’ll use scripture but not quote it directly, but for how it affects me or a certain situation—the implications. For this, I used a lot more direct scripture just to get a point across how it is written.” Less melodically direct and more starkly rendered than Woven Hand’s 2003’s self-titled debut, Edwards has settled into the empty spaces he has created in his arrangements, haunting them with unsettlingly quiet intensity. Unlike the galloping Pentecostal groans of 16 Horsepower—a band that has stretched its creative canvas across nearly all strains of American folk music, even making recent inroads into Eastern European traditions—Woven Hand is all Edwards, a pure distillation of his ethos as an artist. And though he has never hesitated to dip his tongue in the dark streams of his soul, he seems to illustrate his personal failings with even more devastating precision when working alone.
“What I try to do with my music is to say that it’s never enough, and it never will be enough,” he says in a moment of candor. “It doesn’t matter what you do—how good you are. It doesn’t matter what you’ve done—how bad you are. Salvation is of the Lord, and we think it is of us, if we behave a certain way or eat the right food—basically that God is not sovereign. If there is a God, which I think that a lot of people are ready and willing to admit whether they are Christian or not, it really doesn’t matter. It’s of no consequence if there is a God, because it’s all up to them anyway. Whatever means they choose, meditating or going to the psychologist, they use whatever faith they have as another tool, just like if they were taking a medicine. Basically, my job is to tell people that they are hopeless. Hopeless without Christ.”
Those are obviously polarizing words, the sort that rarely turn up in contemporary art without immediately branding their author as a non-inclusive radical nominated for margins of the reasonable world. “I was touring with Daniel Smith [of Danielson Famile/Br. Danielson fame] and Sufjan Stevens and after we would play he’d say, ‘I just can’t believe what you get away with,’” Edwards laughs. “And sometimes I agree. I can’t believe I get away with it either. I know it’s up to the Lord, but it could very well change.” Seeing that Edwards does push so boldly into conceptual territory that is unfashionable in the circles he travels, the question arises as to whether his audience actually grasps what he’s saying.
“I think they do, but I think a lot of people just look at it as if they were looking at a painting. They can appreciate it but they don’t necessarily agree. They find it interesting—like going to the circus. It’s cute, until it’s an affront to you personally. I mean, I’m surprised that anybody …,” he says, cutting himself off mid-thought. “Well, I’m not surprised, because I know that the Lord is in control of everything,” he continues, centering himself again on his worldview. “Because I know that the reason I’m selling the records that I do and touring the way I am is because of Him. Why else would people come and listen if people weren’t directing them to do so?”
Still, as his message is an uncomfortable fit for those who don’t share his faith, and his music is anathema to the comparably sterile contemporary Christian music establishment, he now assumes an unusual place in the modern musical pantheon. Rubbing elbows with artists who don’t share his view but have come to similar conclusions on the ethical deficits that define man’s condition, Edwards holds tightly to his idea of the uncomfortable truth. “They can see it. All men can see it,” Edwards says of the ugliness that colors man’s character and leaves him in need of redemption. “Whether they want to spend any time looking at it or not is another story. And I’ve always been drawn to those kinds of people, whether they were Christians or not, like Joy Division, Nick Cave, Tom Waits. There’s not a lot of hope there, but there is truth.”
Often, that truth goes no farther than a shared admission that humans inflict a profound amount of misery on each other. Still, Edward’s unflinching faith in the existence of meaning beyond earthly suffering places the truth he’s advocating in a tradition of deeply human contrarians like Cash, men who stood against the prevailing winds of their time, clinging to a hope tested in the crucible of faith, not because they wanted to but because they found they had no choice.
“I feel the responsibility to speak truth, and speak it in love, even though sometimes it’s scary,” he laughs before turning deadly serious. “To evil, truth is harsh. To self, to be selfless is harsh. It’s unnatural and it’s distasteful. Otherwise, it would be easy. But it’s not.”