The life of Jesus plays out between two Marys — his mother Mary of Nazareth and Mary of Magdala, who was there at the cross, and then at his tomb, according to all four New Testament gospel accounts, most prominently in the Gospel of John. These four songs briefly trace the arc of those three lives.

We begin with “Honky-Tonkin’ in Nazareth” (1978, from Chronicles of Babylon, Vol. 2), which has offended some people. Some others thought it was a hoot. I guess both took it to be a sacreligious romp. But it isn’t that to me. The gospels mythologize the birth of Jesus along lines of the miraculous birth of Samuel in Hebrew Scripture, with perhaps a bit of ancient Greek anti-materialism mixed in. Thus, while Isaiah 9 prophesies that a “young woman” will give birth to the Messiah, she becomes a virgin in Matthew and Luke. I was still in my twenties when I wrote this song, remythologizing the story in terms of a country & western story-song, from the Father’s viewpoint. I admit some of the lines of this early song are a bit jokey, but the overall intent is serious. All the gospel stories are potentially parables for our own experience. Indeed, each of us is a virgin to the love of God. And each of us is chosen to bear the Messiah into the world. And from there, “everything turns to irony.”

“Jesus Anarchist!” (2011, from The Political Unconscious) explores the politics of Jesus, which are basically anarchist. His movements and sayings, his parables and comments about the kingdom of heaven all have an indeterminate social and political thrust. We may try to “bottle” it all in what we believe to be appropriate institutional arrangements, but God’s realm is always moving over, under, around, through, and beyond them. Whatever one’s religious or nonreligious affinities, faith must remain open to those movements and ready to move with them. (The Brothers and I probably should have waited until we were fully past a sinus infection before recording this song, but the Spirit moved and there it is.)

“The Good Is a Merciless God” (2021, from Every Doug Agrees) looks at Jesus’ refusal to be called “good” — “Only God is good” — and his story of the Samaritan in Luke. The song challenges our tendency to put “good” in place of God, and to subordinate God to our ideas of the good.

“The Magdalene and the Nazarene” (2011, from Terms and Conditions, rerecorded 2022) is another long story-song. The relationship between Mary the Magdalene and Jesus the Nazarene remains mysterious. They grew up only about fourteen miles from each other in Galilee and could easily have known each other before his ministry began (with “the descending dove”). Luke’s gospel comments that Jesus had cast seven demons out of Mary. That might suggest what we today would call mental illness. But that might simply be the perspective of the male disciples, whose “minds are clouded by semen” (that is, men’s vexed perceptions of women). In any case, what we often label as mental illness often includes perceptions that most of us miss. Mary is the pivotal figure (especially in the Gospel of John) in recognizing the risen Jesus. As such, she is sometimes called “the apostle to the apostles.” Her experience opened the others to the new revelation. This song explores those possibilities, inspired in part by experiences of my own.

Finally, “Event Horizon” (2021, from Every Doug Agrees) again features Mary Magdalene, who takes me to the empty tomb of Jesus. Here we remythologize in astrophysical terms, taking the empty tomb to be an “event horizon,” a term used for the threshold of a black hole, beyond which nothing that happens can be seen from this side. Or at least it cannot be seen from our normal perspective on this side. Mary is the guide who takes me fully through an experience I had only glimpsed earlier. (This relates to a prose piece, “Tomb with a View,” included in my memoir, Life in Gospel-Space, 2020).

I haven’t written many love songs over the years. There are some great ones and a lot more mediocre ones already out there. The ones I have written may not be great, but they’re different.

We begin with “Jungian Love Song” (2009, from Terms and Conditions), which celebrates my love for my wife Caroline. The “dorm” where we lived was not in college but at Pendle Hill, the Quaker adult study center where we met in 1994. Of course, any of my songs, including love songs, is going to be rife with ironic twists and theological perspectives. I’m not against heart-felt expressions of healthy emotion, but it’s not where song-writing takes me. And how many love songs include a line from “O Little Town of Bethlehem”?

“Aw, Darlin’” (2017, from Man of Irony) is a confession of my emotional inarticulateness. Like many men, I find it difficult to put words to feelings, especially at close range. (Women seem able to go on at length.) I wish I were better at it on a consistent basis. But often all I can utter is something like “Aw, Darlin’.”

“Judy Iscariot” (2014, from The Political Unconscious) is about when love goes awry, when our romantic projections upon each other don’t match reality, when a man or woman “is not exactly what s/he seems.” To quote Forrest Gump, that’s all I have to say about that.

“Draped Across My Mind” (2015, from The Political Unconscious) is about lost love. I wrote and recorded it before I read Freud’s theory of grief and melancholy. He suggested that the image of the lost love-object falls like a shadow upon the psyche, and that the ego is formed in part by lost love-objects. In the last verse, the song shifts from the singular woman to the collective feminine of Jerusalem, as grieved by the Jewish exiles in Babylon (Psalm 138).

This collection of songs focuses on our identities and our differences, viewed within the perspective of our common life. I have listened and learned much from theorists and activists on issues of gendered, racial, sexual and other identities. I have little to add to their important insights. But I believe that as we come to terms with our different identities on a more equal and respectful basis, we shall come to see our common life in new ways. That is true horizon of our many present struggles, I believe. So the songs collected here follow a sequence toward that horizon.

“The Blues of Heaven” (2016, from Man of Irony) needs a little unpacking. I came to love the blues when I was in college, running a coffeehouse we called The Morgue. I was fortunate to get to know one of the early bluesmen, James “Yank” Rachel. I also met the great blues poet, “Sleepy” John Estes a couple times. I felt a transcendence in the blues unlike anything else, and it offered a certain kind of entree to the African American experience. Yank shared with me some of his early experiences playing for house parties and fish fries in rural Tennessee in the 1920s. Twenty years later, an acute illness landed me in the ER for three days and nights. The first night, as I skirted rather close to the other side, I heard the most sublime blues. (Isaiah and Elijah add their witness to this song.)

“Let the Captives Go Free” (2014, from Political Unconscious, rerecorded 2022) is an old-time protest song, in a country-blues vein, inspired by reading Michelle Alexander’s The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness. The song’s bridge was inspired by black liberation theologian James Cone’s The Cross and the Lynching Tree. He suggests how those two spectral images interpret one another: Jesus was lynched, and African Americans have been crucified by American society. And there’s some of Rene Girard’s scapegoat theory of culture in the mix. The last verse is informed by George Fox, who wrote in 1658 that so many innocent Quakers were being imprisoned for their faith at that time because God’s witness was still imprisoned within England’s rulers. Years after writing the song, I read Bob Dylan’s comment that a protest song shouldn’t be preachy or one-dimension. “You have to show people a side of themselves that they don’t know is there.” That’s what this song tries to do.

“Crossroad Blues” (2016, from Man of Irony) reworks a song from the 1930s by the great early bluesman Robert Johnson. The African American theologian Thandeka, in Learning to be White, suggests that even European Americans have to learn how to “pass for white,” according to a WASP-dominated culture. Even as a white Midwesterner with Welsh roots, I experienced something of this when I lived a couple years in New England, still the most WASP region in the fifty US states, even today, in more secularized versions. There was racism there, of course, but I discovered even the anti-racism carried a certain white normativity. I wrote this song while living at a crossroads, with a flashing light that shone through my window at night.

“Grandma Was a Klingon” (1999, from The Best of Chronicles of Babylon) sprang from waking up one morning, feeling the supra-orbital ridge on my forehead, and wondering, “Could I part Klingon?” I like the way science-fiction uses other worlds as an “alienation effect” to look at social questions on this planet. This is a little foray into that realm, to explain why I “feel so alienated.” The tune owes something to the Beatles’ “Don’t Pass Me By.”

“Frigidaire” (1997, from Chronicles of Babylon) came toward the end of a hot, dank Philadelphia summer, when I felt captive to air conditioning. It made me wonder what goes on inside a refrigerator while the door is closed. It somehow relates to the conversation about multiculturalism in those days. It seemed to me that the conversation unfolded mostly in the air-conditioned comfort of the academically educated middle-classes. That subliminal cultural captivity can make such conversations edgy at times. We’re “afraid to go out there.” (“Frigidaire” was an American appliance brand-name of another era.)

Or is it a parlor instead of a refrigerator? “The Parlor of No Return” (2013, from A Musical Personality Disorder) came to me as I reflected on my itinerent life as a Quaker minister. Whether I was among evangelical Christians or liberal humanists, it seemed I was part of a polite parlor conversation, shaded a bit differently in each case, but always with “more good manners to learn.” This is not just a Quaker phenomenon but broadly true of middle-class America, while “in the street Lazarus tells a different tale.” You may recognize a brief echo from John Lennon’s “Working Class Hero” (1970) near the end.

As I suggested in the introduction to this collection, I hope that as we come to terms better with our different identities, we will begin to see our common life and common good more clearly. This commonality is surely rooted in the earth itself and in renewing our connection with the earth and its species. Reading literature about the commons has inspired some of my more recent songs. “Common as Dirt” (2018, from Moments of Truth) came to me that Indiana summer, when instead of turning on the air conditioner, I just walked around my apartment naked. The song draws upon the story of Eden to uncover the naked truth about all of us.

“All Life Is Human Life” (2019, also from Moments of Truth) is a further meditation on our earthly commonality. Like “Adam,” “human” means from the earth. That definition implies not just our own species. Some other species join in on this song. The song’s down-home style just seemed right, somehow.

Finally, I live in hope that all of us will live into our common reality, before we damage ourselves and our planet any further. “The Common Is Coming On” (2020, from A Musical Personality Disorder) concludes this set on a cheerful note. It was written in February that year, just before the pandemic descended upon us — more evidence of our common life-and-death.

I have long had an interest in systemic approaches to social issues. Economics offer some helpful perspectives on some of the dilemmas of our modern world. Economic life also impinges upon our spiritual lives more than we often imagine. Here are some songs that have occurred over the years.

We begin with “Cheeseburger Deluxe” (1980, from The Best of Chronicles of Babylon, rerecorded here in 2023), an early song that ponders my love of cheeseburgers within the context of an increasingly addictive consumer society. The song spun off from listening to Bob Dylan’s “Like a Rolling Stone,” from Highway 61 Revisited (1965). But while Dylan’s great song presciently describes the end of one world, as it was taking place in the 1960s, my song anticipates another world closing in on us in the 1980s, a commodity-driven existence within a globalizing economy. The “Joe’s” mentioned in the song was the Greek diner near where I worked in New York at that time. They served a really juicy burger!

“Mall Story” (1990, from The Best of Chronicles of Babylon) is another early song, inspired by wading through too many commercial breaks during the NBA playoffs that year. I kept noticing how they utilized various romantic images and story-lines to sell things like cars and tires. This little satire developed from there. Television ads still portray “the converging credit-lines of love” today.

I once read a remark by Robert Greenleaf, business consultant and author of the popular book, Servant Leadership (1977), that “the corporation is chattel.” It puzzled me. But later, the US Supreme Court affirmed that corporations are legal “persons” and free to skew the political process by contributing huge amounts of money to political campaigns. But it occurred to me that corporate personhood can cut both ways. “Liberate the Corporation Now!” (2016, from Man of Irony) explores the implications.

“The Wreck of the Economy” (2005, from The Political Unconscious) works with the ship-wreck theme, popular in traditional folksongs. You will notice some echoes of the sinking of the Titanic in this song. Only here it’s the global economy. It came to me in 2005, ahead of the financial collapse of 2007-08. But it didn’t take clairvoyance or a PhD in economics to see it coming. The “irrational exuberance” of the markets and the hubris of Wall Street’s self-proclaimed “masters of the universe” had exceeded all bounds. The ghosts of Karl Marx and Adam Smith make cameo appearances as the song goes on. The year 2023 isn’t necessarily a prediction. But I heard that number in a waking moment at the time I was working on the song, so I put it in at the end.

Speaking of going underwater, “Higher Ground” (2007, from Terms and Conditions) can’t decide whether it’s about the hole in the ozone layer or the national debt. In any case, it takes off from an old revival hymn by that title to ponder how personal salvation (religious or secular) has “become our besetting sin.”

I was living in Richmond, Indiana when the Great Recession set in by 2008, and small rust-belt towns were hit harder than some other places. A wave of business closures swept over the town, prompting “All Along the Strip-Mall” (2012, from Terms and Conditions, rerecorded here in 2023). The title was inspired by Bob Dylan’s “All Along the Watchtower” (1967), but here the watchtower is laid on its side.

“Prostitution by Other Means” (2017, from Man of Irony) wraps up this cautionary set. One day, I thought, if politics is war by other means, what is employment? It all just flowed from there. Later that year, I decided it was time to retire.

“How Much Does It Mean?” (2023, from Doug-Burger Deluxe) ponders the progressive monetization of all things, putting a quantitative value on unique qualities and meanings, putting “dollars to sense.”

I am a Christian theist. It’s not a personal choice for me, but the result of direct, life-changing experiences of Christ and the living God. It would be false for me to try to be anything else. But I am also aware that Christian history and tradition carry baggage that has been harmful for many. Meanwhile, as I have listened for divine intuitions and studied the Bible over the years, I find a rich interplay between masculine and feminine images and energies of God. I have also come to terms with my own experiences and biblical expressions of God’s absence.

The songs in this collection have come to me over the years, out of my own personal experience, study, and dialogue with others whose experience is different from mine. God-Goddess-Godless is a living dialectic that keeps faith alive, at least for me. To settle into one position against the others would become static, dualistic. One definition of irony is “undecidability.” The ironic bent in my songwriting attempts to keep all terms in play.

We begin with “Oh, Shekinah, Baby!” (2020, from the Musical Personality Disorder CD on this site). Shekinah in the Hebrew Bible is the feminine word/name for God’s Presence or Light. My own Quaker tradition doesn’t use that term, but has much to say about following the Light’s leadings. The song’s title is clearly playful, but the song itself is a serious, if ellipitical expression of my experience.

Masculine gendered words, names, and images of God predominate in the Bible and in Christian tradition. This is much bemoaned today, but masculine images and energies are vital, in a living interplay with feminine ones. “Hi-Yo Yahweh” (December 2016, from Man of Irony) started very early in my song-writing, in 1978. But it finally came together nearly 40 years later. Again, the title is playful: the God of ancient, patriarchal Israel meets the Lone Ranger. But the song is a serious meditation on God holding a plumbline among the nations, assessing their truth and justice. This song was written in the weeks following the election of Donald Trump as President of the United States.

“Paloma” (2016, from Man of Irony) or “dove,” is a biblical image for the Holy Spirit, another way of speaking of divine presence. Both Ruah in the Hebrew Bible and Pneuma in Christian Scripture are the feminine-gendered words/names for Spirit. But again, “I’m a witness”: I sing from experience. In the bridge, is that scat or singing in tongues??

“Sophia, Sophia” (2017, from Man of Irony) plays with one more feminine image/energy. Hochma in the Hebrew Bible and Sophia in Christian Scripture are the feminine-gendered words/names for divine Wisdom. In Proverbs 8, she is there with the Lord creating the universe. In Luke 7, she is verified by all her children, not just some. Musically, this song started out from the blues standard, “Corinna, Corinna,” and took off from there as a playful expression of my experience. She’s still “a mystery to me.”

The title of “Goddess Wants Me for a Moonbeam” (1991, from Every Doug Agrees) takes off from a song I remember singing in Sunday School, “Jesus Wants Me for a Sunbeam.” This is a rather strange song. Ostensibly, it’s about the breakup of the Trinity, when the Holy Spirit gets fed up with the patriarchal Father and the captivity of the Son on Christian TV. She goes out on her own as a “godless goddess, for goodness sake.” I’m a “codependent son,” torn by these developments, still believing that “God is One.” Actually, the song was occasioned by the breakup of my first marriage that year, so the theological reflection is driven by an acute, existential pain.

“My God” (1988, from The Best pf Chronicles of Babylon) takes off from the Temptations’ “My Girl” (1965) and predates the “My God” sung by Whoopi Goldberg and the nuns in Sister Act (1992). It lampoons the tendency in religious seeking in those times to merge with consumer culture. That is, mixing and matching what religious ideas and practices one likes, to create a God that “fits me like a glove.” The song suggests a comfortable, middle-class setting: “Why should I kneel and pray? I’ve got money, I can pay.” The “personal God” was the last stop for some on the way to no God at all.

“I Don’t Really Exist” (2003, from The Best of Chronicles of Babylon) came to me while I was teaching at the Woodbrooke Quaker Study Centre in Birmingham, England. I encountered more nontheist Friends there than I had met in the US. I found much to admire in many of them, especially ethically. So I kept listening and learning. In this song, I extend as far as I can in that direction. Later, I discovered Kierkegaard’s pithy remark, “God does not exist; God is eternal.”

“Nietzsche in Heaven” (2007, from Terms and Conditions) imagines the surprise poor Friedrich might experience finding himself in heaven and meeting the God he had declared dead. The Lord greets him warmly (“Now it’s you that’s dead, can I call you Fred?”) and invites him to settle wherever he wants. Heaven is for everyone. But that’s just the problem for Friedrich, who had disdained Judaism and Christianity as resentful “slave religion.” He favored of the subtle insights of the ancient noble Greek and Roman philosophers. This song was inspired in part by a dream I had in my late teens, with me much like Nietzsche.

“The Good Is a Merciless God” (2021, from Every Doug Agrees) reflects on the way we tend to judge God according to our ideas of the good — and often find God wanting. But our ideas are not the measure of all things, least of all divine mysteries. Everyone thinks they’re doing gppd, by some reasoning. Some will even kill in defense of the good. Good versus good is a bloody history.

Like some people I talk to, I have doubts about where continuous technological disruptions are taking us. Many seem to be primed for whatever comes next. But I have long been convinced of Jacques Ellul’s critique that technological means have a way of imposing their own unforeseen ends upon those who utilize them. Nothing is just a tool. Techno-capitalism is an especially potent interplay of two kinds of means: financial assets and technical know-how. Many good things generate from that interplay. But in my lifetime we have tended increasingly to equate progress with technological innovation. Especially with the digital revolution, much “progress” amounts to speed, efficiency, and proliferation — not necessarily to the benefit of all people or the planet. Here are some songs that muse on this dilemma.

We begin with a song about a relatively low-tech tool, the gun. It’s been around for centuries, but it seems to have taken over the minds of so many in America and beyond, despite the terrible toll on human life and happiness guns take. “The Gun” (2018) comes from the Moments of Truth CD included on this site.

The instantaneous global Now of the internet seems to be swallowing up our sense of history. Not just the past but even future, except for near-term questions like what’s next? how can I avoid it? or make the most of it? “Real Time” (2021) from The Last of the Brothers Doug? takes a deep dive into the “continuous reptilian reflex.”

The internet used to be called the Information Highway. But by now, informational technologies have so enclosed us we hardly think about it anymore. We just Google our next question. But there are bigger questions that are not simply a matter of information. The accumulation of facts, statistics, data, forestalls questions of value, morality, meaning, the life of the Spirit. At a certain point, information becomes “Miss Information,” the goddess who always beckons us on (2020, from Every Doug Agrees).

The perpetual drive toward the new and the next produces an “Aspirational Culture,” the pervasive affects of promise, ambition, hype, advertising, and political manipulation. Besides our own personal aspirations, we may easily become mesmerized by media bombardment. Borrowing from Isaiah 6, this song’s refrain utilizes paradoxical intention , encouraging us not to see or hear what’s actually coming. (2021, from The Last of the Brothers Doug?) In this recording, a voice emerges somewhere between Leonard Cohen and “The Monster Mash.”

Memes “go viral.” “Me-Me, Me Be a Meme” (2020, from Every Doug Agrees) adopts the personality of this “virus desirous” and the toll it takes upon actual thinking. Undeniably “cute” or “clever,” memes “seem to mean, mean to seem,” putting the “mind in a kink.” They short-circuit the larger-scale reflection and invention that humanity and the earth so desperately need.

These concerns are not new for me and some others. As I followed the stampede into cyberspace in the mid-1990s, I sensed the gnostic, anti-material potential of this noosphere. Even as we busily interconnect to work for peace and justice, and save the earth, the internet draws us further away from the earth, its species, and our neighbors. “My Love Dwells in Cyberspace” (1998, from Chronicles of Babylon, Vol. 1, but not included in The Best of Chronicles of Babylon on this site) is the satire of a man for whom “beyond the surf, something beckoned.”

“Runaway Train” (2023, from Death Warmed Over) expresses misgivings about artificial intelligence (“prosthetic brains”) and where it is taking us. The misgivings of the lyrics are ironically counterpoised by the relaxed musical tone of the song, suggesting the lacadaisical way we are harboring these doubts (“lah-di-dah”). After finishing the song, it began to remind me of “Riders on the Storm” (1970) by the Doors, a similar tension mixing foreboding words and a cool-jazz tone.

The pandemic has given us all a workout of one kind or another. I managed to stay healthy, and so did my muse. This has been the most prolific song-writing and recording period in my life. Four songs are directly about the pandemic experience itself.

First, a little fun with pandemic precautions. I’ve been fully vaccinated, boosted, masked and distanced. But I also notice how our political polarization has driven us into competing orthodoxies. Orthodoxies may be true, but it’s healthy to play a little with them, to keep them from becoming legalisms. I’ve always liked those old dance-craze songs, like “The Twist” and “Locomotion.” This song follows in that tradition. “Do the Social Distance,” was written and recorded in the first months of the pandemic, April 2020.

The same month, I also wrote this song, “COVID 19, What Does It Mean?” It encapsulates an essay I wrote at that time by the same title. The subtitle is “A Virus Goes Allegorical.” It is included in my book Into the Common: A Journal in Eighteen Essays (2021). Allegory is a way of exploring different levels of meaning of a text or phenomenon. This song explores the medical, economic, political, and environmental levels of the pandemic. It ends with the poor little pangolin, now an endangered species in Asia, hunted for its scales, which have doubtful health benefits for humans. Scientists have been speculated that covid traveled from bats to pangolins and to humans via a Chinese meat market.

A year later in March 2021, two more pandemic songs hatched. The first muses on the way many of us have found our usual reference points disordered by the pandemic. Time has become especially fluid — especially for a retiree like myself. The lyric to “Pandemic Haze” is a minor rewrite of Jimi Hendrix’s “Purple Haze.” Psychedelia meets (temporary, I hope) dementia.

The other song that month reflects on the second round of stimulus checks issued by the federal government, to alleviate the pandemic’s financial stresses. Where I live in subsidized housing for seniors, the checks made a difference and were a frequent topic of conversation among us. This is the first song I’ve ever written with the words “prevenient grace.”

At the time of this writing (February 2022) I hope there will be no more pandemic songs to write. Maybe I can start writing endemic songs.

“Yonder Stands the Quaker” was written in 1997 while I was serving as a Friend in Residence at the Woodbrooke Quaker study center in Birmingham England.  It looks at Friends from an outside perspective, with a mixture of admiration and amusement.  That’s probably me profiled in the first verse.

“That of Odd in Everyone” (2014) is not explicitly about Quakers, but it plays with the familiar Quaker conviction that there is “that of God in everyone.”  The uniqueness of a human personality participates in the oneness of God.  “Oddliness and godliness can intertwine.”  As we become more ourselves, less driven by emulation and competition, we become more like God, more filled with compassion for others.  More like Jesus, “a real oddity.”

“Eighty-Weighty Friend” was written in 1993, around the time of a country & western hit by Billy Ray Cyrus, “Achy-Breaky Heart.”  I wrote and performed the song for the eightieth birthday of my friend Barbara Graves, valiant Friend, a coordinator of Quaker relief work in Germany for the American Friends Service Committee after World War II, and matriarch of the Strawberry Creek Friends Meeting in Berkeley, California.  I was pastor of the Berkeley Friends Church at the time.  She was to be celebrated by the AFSC and local Friends and she asked me to write something that would keep things from getting too “reverential.”  I used the song as an opportunity to reflect on the role of eldership in the Religious Society of Friends, which is a gerontocracy of sorts.  With such radical reliance upon the Spirit’s guidance, Friends rely on elders with the life experience to recognize the many ways we can deceive ourselves.  Younger Friends may have this gift, and older Friends may still be foolish, but age and experience usually offer useful perspective. 

“Making Quakers from Scratch” (1989) was written for the occasion of a baby shower at Pendle Hill, the Quaker study center near Philadelphia. Robyn Richmond and Lloyd Guindon were expecting their second child (Julian) and Gay and Tom Nicholson were expecting their first child (Nathan). I started writing with the line, “Oh, no, I assure you, we don’t proselytize,” and the rest just took off from there.

“A Process in the Wind” (1997) was the product of participating in too many Quaker business meetings that wafted off into imponderability. We exalt “Quaker process” but a process is a means that sometimes becomes an end in itself. Perhaps it is symptomatic of our times, where technologies impose their own ends upon our lives. As the bridge suggests, Friends used to believe in progress, but now it’s process, “we do good by doing it well.” The song combines those old light-bulb jokes with Bob Dylan’s early classic.

“Back in the RSofF” (1995) takes off from the Beatles tune, adopting the persona of a guy who has found his way back to Quakers, after feeling oppressed as a child by his parents taking him to meeting. Now he swims happily in the alphabet soup of Quaker acronyms — and takes his kids to meeting.

“The Blue Bonnet Inn” (2013) was performed to a raucous crowd during Pendle Hill’s last Log Night in June 2014.  It imagines what a Quaker gentlemen’s club might be like.  It is surely the first song of its kind.  In any case, everything in the song from lap-dancing elders to lounging overseers seems to suggest squalid sensuality but ends up with prim spirituality.  Musical inspiration for the song was taken from Dylan’s “Ballad of a Thin Man,” from Highway 61 Revisited.  But while Dylan’s song was probably inspired by his experiences at Andy Warhol’s Factory, mine is set in the Quaker demimonde.

“Pendle Hill Revisited” was written in 1998 during one of my stints at Pendle Hill.  The title was inspired by Evelyn Waugh‘s novel, Brideshead Revisited, in which the main character is enchanted by an English noble family and their great house.  I have always been enchanted by Pendle Hill and its community, which has kept me coming back.  The main character in the song is named Bill, only because it rhymes with Hill.  The song’s chord structure is taken from Bob Dylan’s “Highway 61 Revisited.”  In my song, Bill keeps finding a way to stay on or return to Pendle Hill.  The world passes away, and even Bill passes away, but as in the Eagles’ “Hotel California,” “you can check out, but you can never leave.”

Noah’s Anarchy (A Fable for the Nineties) was re-recorded and appears on Moments of Truth