The Innocence Mission

Item: Befriended
Author: Jeffrey Overstreet

Befriended

(2003)

Reviewed by Jeffrey Overstreet

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Label Badman Recording Co.The Phantom Tollbooth2003

dream pop folk indie pop

Befriended is the latest in the Innocence Mission's series of albums that dwell in a holy sort of hush, focusing on fragile matters of the heart, spiritual longing, and intimate memories.

That does not mean they have become predictable. Don and Karen Peris offer a clearly-defined style, yes, but within those parameters, you will never encounter the same display of light and beauty twice. They have found their voice, and they raise it with more and more confidence. Karen Peris's vocals could have easily made a mark on the Top 40, singing saccharine pop ditties. Instead, she dares to lead us into beautiful and fragile emotional territory, giving voice to delicate and personal poetry. She shows us deep reservoirs of sadness, lingering questions, and when she sings of hope and redemption, you can hear the smile in her voice.

Don Peris's pristine production here achieves the finest mix the band has ever enjoyed, giving Karen's voice unprecedented clarity, sparsely arranging his creatively choreographed guitars and drums to accent the vocals without overpowering them. Mike Bitts makes a welcome return as their bassist.

Befriended finds them exploring a complex weave of themes and echoing a host of musical and poetic influences from Paul Simon to John Denver to Gerard Manley Hopkins. The lyrics of the songs cross-reference each other heavily, bringing up recurring images and phrases: "beautiful changes," "Flower forth, Branch of Easter," friendship described in terms of sunlight, and blessings that come in the clouds. As these threads appear time and time again, the album coheres into a unified expression: a poem in ten parts.

The album gives us a measure of the painful distance between lovers and friends when separated. It opens with a friendly family of Don harmonizing guitars, cast against a backdrop of distantly glimmering keyboard tones. Karen is trying to climb out of the doldrums, calling to her faraway love.

Did you leave the darkness without me?
You're always miles ahead...
And you're standing in tomorrow
On the runway

Perhaps the song is a prayer to the savior, the "sun," whose grace can redeem a dark day and "replace the small disgraces." There is the sense that the one who has departed is still very much alive and likely to return. The refrain is bittersweet and beautiful.

In "I Never Knew You From the Sun," she again suggests that the one who has departed could be Christ with a subtle reference to an earlier song--Umbrella's "Every Hour Here"--in which Christ was suggested by the "ticket half" she keeps in her pocket and often forgets about:

Deep into my sleeves
Deep in my sleeves
Pockets dark where I always reach
You are there...

For every confession of longing and loss, there are affirmations and reminders of heavenly realities. On Birds of My Neighborhood, it was the possibility of seeing a day we had not seen before. Here it is a "Beautiful Change." Finding comfort even though "the snow is here," the song works as this album's "Bright as Yellow":

Flower forth in sun
Branch of Easter,
I want to be here
When he needs me...

Faith is a central thread again, the source of hope and strength in a snowbound world. But for Karen and Don, family remains the stuff of storytelling. We get flickers of scenes, like a stranger's home movies, in which deep affection and a sense of loss are palpable.

"When Mac was Swimming" is another heartening snapshot from family life, like the story of the girl with sparklers in "July". This one gives us a picture of a boy playing in the pool, oblivious to the fact that his family is preparing a birthday party for him. It suggests the sense of greater things going on around us for our benefit. "Nobody knows how they are loved," sings Karen, her voice coming to us clear across quiet guitar and piano, like birdsong over quiet water. "Don't worry my darling / the sun is coming up."

"One for Sorrow, Two for Joy" laments a different sort familial separation, the kind in which a lack of faith distances sister from brother. "Everything is going to be much better in the spring," she assures her faltering sibling, and you wonder if she trying to encourage herself as well. Just as she does for us and for herself so frequently, she directs our attention to nature, to the signposts of God: "What is coming down from the north road / What is coming up from the ground?" In offering this song, she reminds us that the faithful bear the burdens of those who do not embrace the hope offered them.

Alongside the strong bonds of believer and Savior, brother and sister, exists the bond of marriage, another thread throughout these songs. Don and Karen occasionally sing together to great effect on this record. Don's voice has gained confidence, having put a solo record behind him. He collaborates and sings with her in the exquisite "Martha Avenue Love Song," one of the denser, more complex songs, and one of its most gorgeous highlights. Karen looks to the skies at "five o'clock in winter / when the pink and green arrive," which stands to her as a reminder of her friend to whom she must be faithful.

Now we're blown around
and I can't let you down
My sun and my sweetest sound...

Don's voice echoes the same words in a shimmering echo, as if the two lovers are singing the song to each other from a great distance, or perhaps both addressing their heavenly guide. Glistening notes from his guitar ring like bells or signals on the air.

As on most of their records, the seasons are a language of metaphor, giving poignancy to such simple sentiments as "Oh I had a friend I loved..."

Snow is on the ground
This is not my landscape now
Where I find myself without you
I never knew you from the sun...

In fact, the use of spring, winter, snow, growth, and trees are heavy enough that it's hard not to think of Chauncey, the inadvertent philosopher-gardener played by Peter Sellers in Being There, smiling and advising troubled investors "In the spring, there will be new growth."

But such rich metaphors are hardly new territory--they are echoed in a Gerard Manley Hopkins piece, "No Storms Come" (adapted from the poem "Heaven-Haven"), a beautiful (and rare) performance of Karen with only a piano. This song was the centerpiece of 2000's Christ is My Hope, a special Internet-exclusive album the band still offers as a fundraiser for the poor. If you enjoy this track, there is much more where that came from. It is a testament to Karen's grace and skill that her own lyrics stand up so well alongside such tried and tested beauty as Hopkins' poetry.

Sentiments like the call for reunion in "Sweep Down Early," a brilliant song of joyful anticipation, and "Look For Me As You Go By," a euphoric duet Don and Karen sing at its conclusion, bravely coax us to place our hope for fulfillment in God's hands rather than in temporary, insufficient, immediate answers. "Sweep Down Early" puts our minds on the day when "every burden shall be lifted / every stone upon your back slide into the sea."

Some artists are travelers and wanderers, exploring new territories, enlarging our sense of the world and its possibilities. The Innocence Mission have a different role. Like a chapel in the woods, they have found their place, their style, their voice. We can go there the way we might retreat at different times of the year to our favorite spot on the ocean or a lake, finding familiar wonders and blessings that change like the seasons. These simple, natural patterns were given to us as a language for faith. And Don and Karen Peris are fine interpreters indeed.