See Amanda Petrusich for background on the performance, which, noting that Smith’s stumbles helped break through the setting to common human ground, I called “seering” in a tweet, though I meant “searing,” though fear I meant seering, not least in the verse that Petrusich quotes:
Oh, what did you see, my blue-eyed son?
Oh, what did you see, my darling young one?
I saw a newborn baby with wild wolves all around it
I saw a highway of diamonds with nobody on it
I saw a black branch with blood that kept drippin’
I saw a room full of men with their hammers a-bleedin’
I saw a white ladder all covered with water
I saw ten thousand talkers whose tongues were all broken
I saw guns and sharp swords in the hands of young children
And it’s a hard, and it’s a hard, it’s a hard, it’s a hard
And it’s a hard rain’s a-gonna fall
(H/t to @beebigelow for tweeting out the ‘tube.)
