From: ajw@cbnews.cb.att.com (andrew.j.whitman)
Subject: Review:  Mark Heard - Satellite Sky
Organization: AT&T
Date: Fri, 2 Oct 1992 15:12:36 GMT

Mark Heard made music for CCM labels for sixteen years.  He made 
good music - plaintive, melodic folk, solid rock 'n roll, and,
increasingly, music that borrowed from Cajun and Norteno sources,
full of joyous fiddles and accordions and exotic rhythms.  He
played a mean guitar, tried his hand at the Hammond organ and 
harmonica, picked a fine mandolin, and sang with passion and
intensity.  

So I suppose I should say that and get it out of the way before I
note that his music really doesn't matter that much.  Because Mark
Heard always wanted to be a poet.  He struggled for ten albums to
find words and metaphors to communicate the Christian life, words
that would convey the joy and the heartache, the victories and 
the world-weariness, the importance of the mundane and tedious,
the reality of the voice that was always just out of earshot, 
the vision that was always just beyond the horizon.  On "Satellite
Sky" he got it exactly right.  Then he died.

So let me note that "Satellite Sky" sounds about as good as the last
few Mark Heard albums, which is good enough.  Michael Been from The
Call plays bass.  Fergus Marsh from Bruce Cockburn's band plays 
some nice Chapman stick.  David Miner from T-Bone Burnett's band
shows up for a guest appearance.  And Sam Phillips adds some 
nice backup vocals.  The production is horrid - some of the murkiest
recorded sound I've ever heard.  Most of the songs drag on too
long.  Mark's guitar work, along with the guitar work of Buddy Miller
and Jack Sherman, is serviceable but nothing more. 

And it's still the best Christian album I've ever bought.  Maybe it's
because I'm rapidly approaching middle age, because a lot of the 
things I thought were black and white keep blurring into grey, because
my kids are growing up and I'm growing older but not very much
wiser, and because the same old struggles are still there - to
have faith, to follow a God I don't see, to shed my old, selfish skin
and lose myself in love.  It's not a very victorious kind of life.
And maybe it's because I suspect that the abundant life that Jesus
talked about has nothing to do with happiness or joy or prosperity,
but may have a lot to do with the struggle and the tension, of
seeing with the eyes of faith that often don't seem to see anything
at all.  

"Like bees in a bottle we are flying at fate/Beating our wings against
the walls of this place/Unaware that the struggle is the blood of the
proof/In choosing to believe the unbelievable truth," Mark Heard sings
on "The Orphans of God."  I'd sell my gold-framed "Footprints" poster
to be able to write a verse that good.  

Mark Heard's last year was a year of sorrow.  Two of his close friends
died.  His father died.  And in the title track, he searches his 
memory to recall a time when he was young, when his father was young,
and strong, and laughing, and they could look up at the stars in the
night sky and imagine that they were satellites.  The future seemed
like a dream then; the possibilities seemed limitless.  Now the
dreams are circumscribed.  Heard feels "hollow before my time,"
and he looks at a world disintegrating, a world where dreams fuel
nothing but hopeless illusions, and wonders what kind of vision can 
provide the spark for his children:  "Before I could fashion my
poverty/Before I distrusted the night/I must've known something/I
must've known something," he sings.  It's a harrowing moment on a
harrowing album, a moment of such raw, naked honesty that it feels
like an intrusion into deepest prayer.  

Listening to this album it's hard to escape the feeling that Mark
Heard knew he was going to die, and lyrics like "I want to feel
a big bang rattle my bones" take on a tragic context.  Heard
crammed it all into this album, as if he knew, as if he understood
that this was the farewell speech:  "What's happened to me/I'm
walking in the bones of a mortal/The message is brief but I'm talking
like there's no tomorrow."  And indeed he does talk, spilling out
his guts, scrawling his poetry of world-weariness and sorrow and
hope and faith.  There's not a dishonest note on the whole album,
and Heard cuts through the pious crap and sentimental schmaltz
with a sense of disdain and urgency.  And what's left is just a man,
living his life, loving his God and his family, asking lots of
questions and offering the only answer that makes sense of the
senseless.  

I can't ask for more than that in any album.  "Satellite Sky" is
brilliant, disturbing, beautiful, and tragic.  You've not only
done good, Mark, but you've done truth.  I can't imagine that 
there will be a better Christian album released this year.

Andy Whitman
AT&T Bell Laboratories, Columbus, Ohio
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