Joshua Powell’s ‘Alyosha’: Stories for a Sunless Season, Free for CaPC Members

Kentucky snow
and my bones are fairly shaken
in the winter and its waking
on the land I’m cultivating
and I watch a detonation of crows

Out of the dogwood
where the leaves all quit attempting
and the witchhazel is empty
just like everything is dead exempting me,
out in the cold

Winter always awakens a certain instinct within me—a determination to shut myself inside and huddle around the fire with others, to share warmth and songs and stories. When the sun disappears, so do I—not for good, but to regroup and look within myself to see if I can remember what it means to be human and alive.

And there he lay
like the devil was a cropper
on my family’s farming proper
tiny bones and head of copper
in the loam
shivering to death,

He wasn’t moving,
and I knew the antidote
pity rose up in my throat,
and so I put him in my coat
to get him warm
and carry him back home

When the sun disappears for three months, the thundering anthems of summer suddenly all feel like lies, and it’s time for intimate sounds—shimmering acoustics and quiet storytelling. Songs of hope and sorrow—songs that remind us that we’re walking a thin line between life and death every day of our lives. That eventually the night will swallow the day.

Or will it?

Well why should I oversimplify?
It’s good to be alive,
so logically, all living things are good
if not misunderstood
and I will not play God,
arbitrating, arrogantly designating who should live

To that end, this month Christ and Pop Culture is pleased to be offering Alyosha, the new album from folk-pop band Joshua Powell and the Great Train Robbery—available free to CaPC members. It’s an album that sounds like winter: intimate chords, dreamy vocals, and stories about silver cords about to break.

Well then it happened—
I bet you already guessed
when I called the cursed blessed
he sank his fangs into my chest
and through my shirt
and put his venom in the veins.

As I was dying,
I thought it rather fitting
that my heart produced the pity
and that’s the spot the snake bit me
and I know
nature doesn’t want changed

Sonically, Alyosha leaps between an acoustic country stomp to lushly produced experimental balladry; its lyrics wander restlessly from retellings of tales from Genesis to stories of lust and vengeance to crisp, frosty rural landscapes. All of it is united by a common theme of how profoundly thin the line is between night and day, good and evil, and life and death.

In other words, it sounds like winter.

Well I shouldn’t compromise—
I didn’t realize
the demon at my doorstep
but with one slash of Sheol’s knife,
he cut down the tree of life
and stacked the wood
for kindling and the laughter
that I’m sure will follow after this life.

Ultimately, Alyosha is an invitation to sit with Powell beside the fire and listen to his stories—to get lost in complex sonic textures and heartbreaking stories and pray that the sun will one day rise again. Because even when night seems its darkest, there is hope.