All the World Is Lonely Now. Marty Robbins. 1957. Columbia.

 Loneliness, our experience tells us, is inevitable. If we aren’t currently enduring it, then it’s there, waiting to poison us, in some unavoidable future. I listen repeatedly to Marty Robbins sing about it not because he has any relevant secrets to share about ridding oneself of it, but to remind me of the mechanisms of our internal worlds, their disruptions and the many ways we resolve to ornament and mitigate them with emotion and imagination. All the World Is Lonely Now is like a Joseph Cornell or Jess postcard mailed to us from the ephemeral locale of shared associations; in this case, the lonesome white cowboy of the post atomic age, his big acoustic guitar tuned to a key of abandonment. Robbins strips the Roy Acuff original of its squeezebox and fiddle accompanied carnival atmospherics and evokes a desert landscape of torment and loss, populated by one. In our time, the American stranger has come to signify any one of our most enduring mythological figures who operate in solitude. The serial killer, the sexy trick, the misunderstood celebrity genius, enacting his latest drama on Instagram. Rock and roll, and its associated genres, was the exemplary public shelter for the lonesome American stranger. It was where we learned to recognize him by any of the now familiar signs: she was looking out on the morning rain. He was wiping his hands as he walked from the grave. And so forth. Walk into a barroom today and you can still find him, pleading with another stranger not to play A-11, or ready to sit with you and share that drink he’s been waiting on you to buy him. If uncertainty prevents you from taking that first, fatal step towards company with the stranger—whom Neil Young referred to as the Loner—look for guidance in the playlist, the car radio, the great gnostic oracle of the American jukebox. Your future has already been foretold. On limited, collectors’ edition colored vinyl.


Feb 22 022

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