The mass murder at Columbine High School has haunted most of America over the past ten days. I’ve found it influencing each class I’ve taught and every review I’ve written. One very concrete thing it prompted me to do was pull out a cd I’d put off listening to and play it over and over again. I don’t want to hear much else right now.

The album is called Between Heaven and Earth, and it is by a singer-songwriter who has been critically-acclaimed for two decades though I never knew of her before. Her name is Cindy Bullens, and the album is one she wouldn’t have made at all if she’d had any real choice. As it is, the album gave her a way to fight through the cruelest of losses.

Three years ago, Bullens’ 11-year-old daughter, Jesse Bullens-Crewe, died of cancer. “I felt my own life end,” Bullens writes in the liner notes of her album, continuing, “I couldn’t imagine that I could ever again be a productive human being.” But months later, she found herself fiddling with the guitar and writing a song, virtually spontaneously. She writes, “I was at once energized and horrified. I was energized by the making of music which is so much a part of me and horrified by the realization that I had just written a song about the death of my own child.”

In the end, she wrote a whole album’s worth of songs about dealing with Jesse’s death. When I started to play the album in mid-March, I stopped after a song or two and put off listening to it. I had a stack of cds to get through (as I still do), and I would listen to that album when I got other writing out of the way.

Part of the pain I felt and anticipated feeling listening to that album was that of my friend Dave Marsh, who sent it to me. Dave lost his daughter, Kristen Ann Carr, to cancer in 1993, when she was just 21. Though I never knew Kristen, I loved her father for years before this happened, and I watched this agonizing story unfold from a distance with that helplessness that comes with knowing you can’t even begin to do anything that will ease the pain.

But Columbine sent me back to Bullens’ album. Maybe it was the way a father hugging his daughter after the tragedy made me want to hug my own daughter. It’s the same feeling I had when I first opened Bullens’ album and saw a sad yet dignified portrait of mother holding daughter (I would guess after a round of chemo). They both look straight into the camera. They are both so beautifully solid in that ugly, unjust quicksand.

As I said, I haven’t been able to take the album off. It is a torturously moving album because of its stark reality, both in subject matter and in vision, but it is also a great rock album, period. Bullens’ direct, two-fisted songwriting reminds me a little of Warren Zevon, but I don’t know that he’s ever had so much to say as she has in each song here, and his voice certainly never managed to soar like hers can. While Lucinda Williams brings a gorgeous backing vocal to “The End of Wishful Thinking,” and Bonnie Raitt and Beth Nielsen Chapman lift the closing refrains of “I Gotta Believe in Something,” the real power of this album is a constant strength and clarity, whether it’s moving with the acoustic delicacy of “Water on the Moon” or the brash rock of “Boxing with God.”

And it is an album as full of wide-ranging emotions as any rock album. It is an album about hope, beauty, faith, loss, misery, vision, struggle, death and resurrection. In many ways, it is not that different from any rock album that has a hard focus. More albums than not tend to address all of life by sticking with the theme of lost relationships from beginning to end. The stakes are higher on Bullens' album, definitely, and that may be why everything here feels more honest than most songs written about love. Ultimately, it is one of the most triumphant, universal records I have ever heard.

Again, it makes me think of my daughter . . . and the hard fact that, no matter how attentive I try to be to what she’s going through, she is living her own life, much of which I will never know. I know this, in part, because I was blessed with loving parents who, despite all of their own struggles, always let me know that I was accepted, always showed an interest in my life . . .

And yet, from the time I was fourteen until I was sixteen, I very nearly destroyed myself. My stoner friends and I would raid our parents’ medicine cabinets and take anything and everything on the chance of getting high (outside of medicine cabinets, the old formula for Liquid Paper Thinner and motion sickness tablets were favorites). Not being high became a real threat to having a good time on any given evening; it brought on panic; it left me feeling empty.

But my parents never knew this was happening. They became alarmed when I started seriously dating the girl who would help me get out of this rut. I remember yelling at my father during some argument about the intensity of my relationship, “You never even knew when I was in real trouble!”

The world finds a million ways to drive wedges between parents and children, and, to some extent it should. But our love of independence in this country has not come with an equally weighted commitment to one another. As we are pulled away from our family, we are indoctrinated in the ways of a callous society. I can still see the kids that got tormented daily and sometimes beat up on the playground in elementary school, and I can hear the condescending way my third grade teacher would call on the students she didn’t like. In high school, I had a gym locker next to a gentle giant of a kid who was towel-whipped and humiliated almost every day because he wouldn’t fight back. It seemed predetermined when he died in a construction accident within a couple of years of our being out of school.

The connection here is that we don’t value life in this society, not really; society itself doesn't value individual lives. At the first rung of socialization, the quality of our lives is under attack. Most kids inherently resent school because it doesn’t make us want to learn. It doesn’t challenge us to think, to question or to dream; it merely asks us to memorize, accept and conform. In the end, it convinces many of us that we are inadequate and unworthy.

By the time we grow up, we accept the basic premise that some people are simply not cut out for this world. We don't think those thoughts so directly, but what else could we be thinking when we don’t grapple with what it means that 36 million Americans are below the poverty line, twice that many are barely above it, and 43 million Americans don’t have healthcare coverage.

I received another record this week that I’ve begun to alternate with the Bullens album. It is a single called “Just Health,” by Ernie Perez and Rock-A-Mole. It is a theme song for the Labor Party’s “Just Healthcare” campaign, a campaign for “a ‘Committee of One Million’ to call for a national solution” to provide just, universal healthcare. The song emphasizes the key principles of the campaign by laying excerpts of speeches over a funky bass groove and gentle jazz guitar, lifting the intensity with soulful vocals and gospel-like refrains. It is catchy, and it is terribly moving because it states so plainly the need for a new morality in our society, a morality that values love over power.

It’s a morality we understand in our hearts, and we hear it in our music all the time, but it’s missing in “the real world” we are taught to accept, a place where mass murder has become all too common.

To order Cindy Bullens album, check out her website at http://www.cindybullens.com/. To check out the Labor Party's Just Healthcare campaign, see http://www.igc.apc.org/lpa/.

--Danny Alexander
danny@thezone.org