The 12 Best Mark Heard Songs
Twenty years ago today, Mark Heard’s heart finally gave out, robbing the world of one its best—if little-known—songwriters. Six weeks earlier, he’d had a heart attack on stage; he finished the set, but it would be his last performance.
Few people heard his music because, for most of his career, Mark Heard plied his trade in the world of Contemporary Christian Music, a genre not particularly perceptive to a street poet lamenting both the consumer culture at large and the sanitized ghetto of CCM he found himself part of. But his final three albums for Fingerprint Records transcended that genre and contained some of the greatest lyrics I’ve ever encountered. The first time I heard these songs, I pored over every line—he managed to make the most basic human struggles sound beautiful, sad and hopeful.
In 2003, Paste’s Tim Regan-Porter wrote: “The release of a trilogy of records in the early ’90s on Fingerprint Records, a tiny label created specifically for Heard, heralded the arrival of an artist at his peak—a challenger for the title of poet laureate of American music—joining the pantheon that includes Dylan, Cohen, Guthrie and Townes Van Zandt. Arguably, no artist has crafted three consecutive albums with both the lyrical radiance and the musical vibrancy to rival Dry Bones Dance, Second Hand and Satellite Sky.”
Since his death, artists like Buddy & Julie Miller, Pierce Pettis and Bruce Cockburn have carried his torch, covering his songs and singing his praises to anyone who’ll listen. Heard won an Americana Music Award for Best Song posthumously when Buddy Miller covered “Worry Too Much” on Universal United House of Prayer.
Today we celebrate one of our favorites with The 12 Best Mark Heard songs, all coming from that final trio of records. We’ll let Mark’s lyrics do the talking.
12. “A Broken Man” (Satellite Sky)
Sun comes up
Like a yellow bus
Tracking over oceans of dust
One day’s miracle is another day’s rut
But day keeps breaking like it always does
I’m not a loner
No sack-cloth and ashes
Just a heart on a tether with a vagabond mind
But this will be a broken man
Come shivering out of his wintertime
11. “Dry Bones Dance” (Dry Bones Dance)
Everyone surrenders to the brave new scarecrows
And waits for them to hand us cigarettes and blindfolds
All lined up for the firing squad
Paper fills the cracks of the Wailing Wall
Every now and then I seem to dream these dreams
Where the dead ones live and the hurt ones heal
Touching that miraculous circumstance
Where the blind ones see and the dry bones dance
10. “Big Wheels Roll” (Satellite Sky)
He says “Damn the cool-headed and the setters of goals
who can feel no evil, no heat, no cold
And who wouldn’t know passion if it swallowed them whole
For whom true love is a left-brain risk
For whom the giving of life is a needless myth
Who cover their graves with monoliths
Cool heads prevail, and we’ll become extinct
Mutants too unfit to wish”
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
