The Ordering of Things, Vol. 2: The Creek Drank the Cradle
A brief and embarrassing genealogy of my musical tastes; a paean to the greatest album of 2002, 2022, and every year in between.
This is a continuation of The Ordering of Things, my list of favorite things of 2022. Next in the series: Volume III: Simple Human. As always, thanks for reading.
3. The Creek Drank the Cradle
The first time I listened to Sam Beam’s 2002 debut as Iron & Wine, I was 15 years old, streaming whatever twenty-second samples were available on the album’s Amazon page over a dial-up internet connection. It was a lucky find: up until that point, my taste in music had been mostly whatever my friends were listening to. The fact that—historically speaking—I had very few friends can perhaps shed light on the eclectic genealogy of my collection.
I attended a private Christian school in Portland, Oregon, until my family moved to Washington state in the fifth grade. The first and only CD in my collection from that period was Jesus Freak, the alt-rock opus of Christian darlings DC Talk. I didn’t own my own CD player, but my dad (very generously) allowed me to use his Walkman and headphones more or less whenever I wanted, though he must have known he was sentencing the machine to its eventual ignoble death.
When my parents fled the city for the greener pastures of country living in 1999, it meant transplanting me into my first-ever public school classroom. There was a certain amount of inevitable culture shock. My classmates uttered words like “fuck,” “dick,” or “ass” that—to a boy who had not been allowed to watch The Simpsons due to its ostensible inappropriateness—were utterly beyond the pale, or—in cases like “cunt” and “faggot”—were merely alien, a tongue too foreign to be perceived as obscene.
I got off to a rough start with my new peers, quickly discovering that any social clout that had been associated with Jesus Freak among my Christian associates was, in this fresh and godless wilderness, at best nullified and at worst, a fatal liability.1 Eventually, I befriended a boy whose family attended our (new) church. He introduced me to The Red Hot Chili Peppers’ Californication and David Gray’s White Ladder. Shamelessly, I assimilated his tastes as the new foundation for my own. By the end of middle school, I had leveraged my milquetoast musical origin into something bordering on “cool,” adding punk (Pennywise) and obscure ska (The Hippos) to my collection. Then—motivated entirely by a crush on a friend’s younger sister—my appetites converged, chameleon-like, toward hers: Third Eye Blind’s eponymous debut and Blue; (What’s the Story) Morning Glory? by Oasis.
I was a junior when I finally found my “thing” and shook off the last vestiges of my naïve, Christian upbringing. That “thing” was experimenting with drugs—namely, opioids. Vicodin, Percocet, Tylenol 3; Darvocet and Dilaudid. Oxy: -codone,
-morphone, -contin. My musical tastes evolved to better suit my new hobbies. Embarrassingly, I had a flair for the dramatic, gravitating toward the slow, the quiet, or the tragic. By this time, it was possible to burn CD-Rs, lossless mixtapes. My mixes featured Bright Eyes, Sigur Ros, and The Notwist. Coldplay’s A Rush of Blood to the Head.
In the pre-Spotify, world, I discovered new music by following internet rabbit holes whose labyrinthine algorithms were precursors to services like Pandora. Amazon, on an album’s store page, would allow you to stream snippets from selected tracks; they also provided two or three “listeners also bought” or “sounds like” suggestions. One evening—probably high on Vicodin, but I don’t remember for sure—I picked out a few unfamiliar albums to add to my collection. I ordered The Decemberists’ Castaways and Cutouts and Norfolk and Western’s Dusk in Cold Parlors. One of the latter’s “also bought” suggestions led me to Iron and Wine’s The Creek Drank the Cradle, and nothing would ever be the same again.
I listened to a sample and was astonished by it. I had never heard music that tickled my brain in the way that The Creek Drank the Cradle did, like the come-up from Vicodin or Percocet, where—before you even felt high—the taste of metabolizing acetaminophen in your throat and sinuses would coincide with the first wave of euphoria. I had never heard the hissing of magnetic tape before, and its presence across The Creek Drank the Cradle lent to its effortless intimacy. It felt like pressing an ear to Beam’s closed bedroom door, and I found myself holding my breath, lest I make a sound and interrupt the spell.
The recordings, intended originally as demos, were produced with just four tracks: two guitar—rhythm and slide—and two vocal tracks. Sam’s barely-whispered harmonies felt like a recovered memory from a previous life: revelatory.
I don’t know if The Creek Drank the Cradle was the first piece of art that I identified as expressing a part of me, of my authentic self, but it is the first piece of art I encountered that expressed a part of me that has persisted over the ensuing decades. Other albums from my youth I might listen to once every couple of years, but I revisit them as I would a high school yearbook, for nostalgia’s sake. The Creek Drank the Cradle
is different. Because I never stopped loving it—I never grew out of it—listening now conjures no particular year or stage of life. Like all good relationships, mine with this album is greater than the sum of its parts. Over the decades, I’ve recursively incorporated more of myself into the album, and it into me. It’s a part of me, like a tattoo, a self-reinforcing complex of memories and emotions. I’m not sure how else to describe it; it’s ineffable; I love it.
It was good fortune, then, to have as my favorite album of all time one that could be legitimately described as lullaby-like. For the first few weeks after Graham was born, we listened to no music; we watched no television. If Graham and Hannah were asleep, I would read quietly to myself, usually essays or short stories, eschewing longer texts that required a baseline cognitive engagement to which I was unprepared to commit. As we grew more acquainted with Graham, however, and his unique difficulties—in this case with sleep—at some point I turned off the white noise machine and put on The Creek Drank the Cradle. Sure enough, the entire album lent itself to rocking a crying baby in one’s arms; rhythm and cadence shift, song to song, but never abruptly, never gratingly. I can’t say for certain that he loved it, but he would fall asleep to it, usually by the end of the fifth track. This made me unreasonably happy, feeling like a much-needed win.
Becoming a parent is (I think by necessity) one of life’s bigger tiny deaths. These can be and are experienced elsewhere across a life, but never with so much force as during the parental metamorphosis. Ego death is difficult: since we are accustomed to interfacing with the world exclusively via the egoistic perspective, threats to its perpetuity and fidelity are experienced as existential. Moreover, this is not always maladaptive. The (illusory) sense of having a center of self that persists across time and space was selected for during human evolution precisely because it increased our reproductive fitness. But—and I would hardly be the first person to say so—the ego gets in its own way. We experience this throughout our development; I see it, nascent, in Graham.
For the first few months of his life, Graham’s needs and wants were relatively undifferentiated: he needed to eat, sleep, and have his diaper changed. Even these broad categories—metabolic and hygienic—could be subsumed into a single requirement: his need for Hannah, his mother, who fed him from her body and regulated his nervous system as an extension of her own. (Graham would occasionally drift in and out of consciousness while I held him, but before Hannah started to pump and I could feed Graham bottles of expressed breast milk, my biggest contribution was to change his diaper.)
As he learns now, though, to crawl and stand, to reach and grasp—to exert his will upon his environment—he is encountering the true calamity of the human condition, of which all tragedy is merely derivative: finitude. When confronted with his own impotence, his first reaction is, quite literally, to scream. This is unpleasant for us, no doubt, but certainly not to the degree it must be for Graham. Hannah and I have had decades to come to grips with our fundamental powerlessness, to broker a tenuous peace with a universe that has imposed its blatantly contemptuous constraints on our agency. The wound, however, for our son is still fresh, so I do not begrudge him his screams. Soon enough, he will develop a rudimentary theory of mind—the innate understanding, manifesting concomitant with self-awareness, that other people have private mental lives, replete with privileged thoughts and feelings that are forever behind the veil of individual consciousness—and, if he anything like his father, find that this state of affairs significantly complicates the business of being human.
Interestingly, the impediments that Graham finds most egregious are always instances of his being stymied in an activity wherein he has previously encountered no friction. Today, he tried to open a book—something he has accomplished frequently and skillfully in his short life—but fumbled it once, two, three times and then shrieked with frustration. Of course, I could see the problem: he was sitting, and the book lay just beyond his effective reach. Nevertheless, I sympathized. Since becoming a father, I have been rudely reacquainted with my own limitations, some perennial, but many belonging to a fresh crop of uniquely selfish failings.
Like the toddler pounding the floor with her feet after being told to put her toys away because it’s time for bed, I have given into the impulse of tantrum. Even to couch my behavior in terms of metaphor is disingenuous. I am that toddler, throwing the selfsame tantrum as I despair over the impossible responsibility of my new role and (shamefully) grieve the freedom that a year ago I took utterly for granted, so quotidian that it seemed almost worthless. That’s the rub, though: the currency of my preparental life was an autonomy rendered worthless within an inflationary economy of absolute freedom.
Proscription and depravation circumscribe the realm of possible value; this I realized one evening while rocking Graham from sobs to slumber, lamenting—not so much my sudden lack of autonomy—but just how staggeringly unappreciative I’d been of it when it was all I had, had been the water to my fish. Graham was especially colicky that evening; we had made it almost to the album’s excellent closing track, “Muddy Hymnals,” and still he cried.
As the tape hissed and Beam whispered, it was, suddenly, not me rocking Graham. It was the Father, the archetype, a token reading from an eternal script, fungible amongst the interchangeable millions who had come before, would come after. We delivered the same lines, sulked at the same beats.
Look: the scene calls for a glimmer of recognition: a terrible but too-vague premonition that time’s ever-flowing creek will inevitably swallow my baby in his cradle. A dim awareness that one day, I will beg God to accept my counterfeit liberty—to brand me a slave for all eternity—just to have this back for one. more. moment.
Thoughts? Questions or concerns? Is The Creek Drank the Cradle your favorite album, too? Leave a comment or send me an email at benji.mahaffey@gmail.com.
The title track of Jesus Freak depicts its narrator affirming his faith in Christ and professing not to care about being labeled, by secular society, as a “Jesus freak.” Unsurprisingly, the humiliation I suffered due to my association with the song was borne no easier by my faith. Eventually—like Peter on the eve of the crucifixion—I would disavow my allegiance to DC Talk. This, of course, is the antithesis of the “Jesus Freak” message. Today, I can see the humor in my secular turn; at the time, I did not appreciate the irony.