Jules Shear: "Too Soon Gone"

Not sure what got me listening to this song so much the last week or so. It might be because I was listening to Lucinda Williams' "Sweet Old World," a song written upon the suicide of her brother. And that got me thinking about other songs about suicide and loss, prominent among them Jules Shear's "Too Soon Gone" (co-written with Stan Szelest). The song is usually described as a tribute to Richard Manuel, the expressive, enigmatic singer of the Band whose drug-blasted life ended when he hung himself in a Florida motel room during a 1986 tour.

But really the song is less about Manuel and his death than about how the writers feel about it, about how they can and cannot make sense of it. And isn't this the way it goes? When someone dies the meaning of their life becomes what we the survivors determine it to be, and each of it sees it a different a way. We'll emphasize those aspects of the departed's life that resonate with what we have come to value in our own lives, in part because of what the departed loved one might have taught us, but also because of the values we project into them.

"Too Soon Gone" doesn't actually draw any lessons from Manuel's life, nor does it impute meaning. It takes place before any of that can even happen. The song is saying, I actually don't know what to think about Richard's life and death except to say he is too soon gone.

If it was the topic of suicide songs that brought me to "Too Soon Gone," it is the great craft of the song that kept me returning. Look, the first verse alone is worth the price of admission. If you are a songwriter you might say to yourself, Well, at least I wrote that.

The opening line sets the stage perfectly; it's evocative while employing a neat reversal of perspective.

Last night the constellations
Watched me walk at half past twelve

Then it jump cuts to a fairly astounding simile that is a perfect encapsulation of life's subjectivity.

With some people you don't see the whole picture all at once
Like you fill in the gaps in the stars all by yourself

Damn.

The whole song is worthy of of analysis, but I also really like the part that goes: But every leaf that grows / In the language that it knows.  All life is spoken in languages, and the best distillations of this reality are expressed in masterful songs like this, where melody and word become one. Listen up.