Arthur Russell’s “Love Comes Back”

Addy Malinowski

…writes Allen Ginsburg of Arthur Russell in “The Charnel Ground,”^[1] his poem about the apartment building they shared together at 437 East 12^th Street, New York sometime during or after the cellist, minimalist, disco producer, and folk songwriter is, as Ginsburg tells us, dying of AIDs. Russell passed away in New York City on April 4, 1992, the year before I was born. His death at the beginning of the early ‘90s leaves today’s listeners wondering what the artist might have made, composed, or dreamt of in a decade shaped by increasing neoliberalization, rising rents, foreign intervention, and the gentrification of downtown New York City neighborhoods in which Russell lived and wrote, and where his queer aesthetic was forged. The 1990’s were a decade musically dominated by grunge, radio rock, and corporatized top-40 Hits. However, Russell’s work, evidenced in tracks such as his final composition “Love Comes Back,”^[2] simultaneously resists the above reductions to genre, while perceiving in advance and sonically foreshadowing the decades to come. In 2024, his compositions still ring ahead of their time.

“I want to have Casio keyboards on sailboats. Have you ever been on a sailboat? It’s so quiet, all you hear is wind and sea,” Russell stated in a 1986 interview.^[3] Russell evokes a utopian aesthetic here by placing the romantic figure of the sea into sonic space and time…what are the sounds of the sea? His love for the ocean -- the Pacific and later the Atlantic, and his love for Maine where he would vacation with family and listen to tape after tape of his own demos and mixes -- comes repeatedly into his reflections on his own process on making inventive sounds with electronic Casiotone keyboards, which rose to prominence in the early ‘80s (according to Tom Lee, Russell’s partner, he used a Casio MT-30, first released in 1981).^[4] With Casio keyboards on sailboats, Russell queers his utopian image: He moves from the Iowa corn of a folky track such as “Close My Eyes” to the downtown New York City dancefloor, such as The Gallery, or David Mancuso’s Loft, where parties would run all night, filled with balloons and streamers, the never-ending gay birthday party.^[5] With “Love Comes Back,” Russell’s variegated sonic output heartbreakingly comes to an end in 1991, a demo shaped and recorded in his home studio on East 12^th Street in the East Village, written as a farewell to his partner Tom Lee. It is what Ernie Brooks, Russell’s longtime collaborator referred to as “Arthur’s best song,” as stated in Tim Lawrence’s definitive biography of Russell, Hold On To Your Dreams.^[6] Russell’s slow drum machine track and Casio keyboard, which sounds virtually underwater, float the track to its melancholic conclusion. It is the finality of conclusion, however, which Russell resists as he repeats key phrases, “Want you to know that / Love is Back / Being sad is not a crime” as the track fades out to Russell’s reprise, “Skiing down / Lying down / Best of all worlds I see / Still afraid to move / Where do you go?”^[7]

Figure 1. From “Growing Echo: The Story of a Lost Genius Named Arthur Russell”^[8]

Skiing down where? Skiing down into the Bardo of the Tibetan Book of the Dead, one of Russell’s favorite texts throughout his life, which serves as a meditation on the space between life and death that the mind inhabits when the body has begun to deteriorate.^[9] Where does one go when one dies? Russell’s answer is an intermediate, liminal space. Russell’s lyrics, his poem, are carried away on a sailboat into the sea of the Bardo by his Casio keyboard and drum machine as a last echoing lullaby to a lover, his partner Tom Lee. It now exists for us in 2023 in an ocean of tape-static and fuzz, heard over my headphones here in Brooklyn, 32 years after his passing. We are reminded by Russell that being sad is not a crime, echoed over and again through his tender, loving-kindness reprise: The meaning of sonic grace.

Most of Russell’s oeuvre was born out of the psychogeographic interconnections of the pastoral Iowa corn, coastal Pacific New Age spiritualism, and New York’s 1970s and ‘80s gay downtown nightlife and dance scene. In some ways, “Love Comes Back” feels like a return to the early country-folk songwriting of mid-1970s Russell, but instead of deploying traditionally acoustic instruments, Russell centers a fully electronic rhythm section, all composed and produced by his own hand in his sixth-floor apartment. This compositional choice tracks for Russell, who in 1986 was working on his experimental cello ambient record, World of Echo, the only full-length LP released during his lifetime.^[10] After finishing the LP, he stated that ultimately, “Songs without beats” would eventually constitute the “most vivid rhythmic reality.”^[11] Though we never truly get to hear what Russell imagined when he made these comments, a track like “Loves Comes Back” moves in the direction of heralding this reality, arriving to one’s ears in 2023 as an ethereal poetics from a displaced time, in which alternative visions of the future might have been realized (which have now all-but been encroached upon and enclosed). The song also inaugurates a tender intimacy and space where “Into the company of love / It all returns,”^[12] as the poet Robert Creeley put it in 1962.

Russell’s home studio at the 12^th Street apartment, known colloquially as “Poet’s Building,” was where Ginsberg and his partner Peter Orlovsky, along with Television’s Richard Hell, amongst others, resided in the decade or two before the gentrification of the East Village and Lower Eastside reached their apex, brought on by the deaths of so many culture workers, artists, and residents living in rent-controlled apartments during the AIDS Crisis. “Love Comes Back” registers not only what Russell learned from that residential and communal situation, but also distills into a deceptively simple track the pastoral of the corn, the sailboat out at sea, and the New York dancefloor, all of which are brought into sensibility here via slow-motion drum machine and rollicking keys as they ski down into a place of “first permission”^[13] (a la the poet Robert Duncan).

From the end of the composer’s life at the beginning of the 1990’s, the material conditions of Russell’s sonic innovations -- cheap rent, cheap food, studio space, etc. -- would be eclipsed by gentrification and New Democrat cosmopolitanism, under which queerness would become no longer an oppositional category, but a marketable one. In “Love Comes Back,” Russell and his love “meet in the moonlight” (as opposed to the morning dew of “Close My Eyes”), in the twilight of one’s life, illuminated by the night sky. The night sky serves as another romantic figure reappropriated by Russell as a stand-in for the domestic, tender space shared by gay partners in which deep sadness becomes a permissible affect -- it’s not a crime to be sad -- meant to console a grieving partner at the time of one’s death: “It’s okay to feel this way,” Russell sings. He goes on: “There’s a lot of words I know / But still afraid to leave / where do you go? / Is where I go already.”^[14] Here, at the end of his life, Russell laments that even words ultimately fail to protect the self, yet Russell’s language, his unique aesthetic choices, and his fuzzy lullaby remain with us 31 years later and counting, reminding us that love is, after all, here to stay.

Bibliography

1. Arthur Russell. Love is Overtaking Me. Audika, 2008.
3. Arthur Russell. World of Echo. Audika. 1986.
4. Carlson, Jen. “An Interview With Tom Lee, Partner of the Late Arthur Russell.” Gothamist, WNYC. Published December 5, 2008; modified August 17, 2016. https://gothamist.com/arts-entertainment/an-interview-with-tom-lee-partner-of-the-late-arthur-russell
5. Creeley, Robert. For Love. Scribner’s, 1962.
6. Duncan, Robert. The Opening of the Field. New Directions, 1960.
7. Ginsberg, Allen. “The Charnel Ground” The American Poetry Review 23, no. 3 (1994): 5.
8. Lawrence, Tim. Hold on to Your Dreams: Arthur Russell and the Downtown Music Scene, 1973-1992. Duke University Press, 2009.
9. Owen, Frank. “Arthur Russell: ‘Comedy is the highest form of art’ -- a rare interview from 1987.” The Guardian. 2014. https://www.theguardian.com/music/2014/oct/22/arthur-russell-comedy-is-the-highest-form-of-art-a-rare-interview-from-1987
11. Tibetan Book of the Dead. First Complete Translation. Edited by Graham Coleman and Thupten Jintpa, Translated by Gyurme Dorje. New York: Penguin Classics, 2007.
12. Wray, Daniel Dylan. “Growing Echo: The Story of a Lost Genius Named Arthur Russell,” Loud and Quiet, November 17, 2014. https://www.loudandquiet.com/interview/arthur-russell/

Notes

1. Allen Ginsberg, “The Charnel Ground.” The American Poetry Review 23, no. 3 (1994): 5.

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2. Arthur Russell, “Love Comes Back,” Track 21 on Love is Overtaking Me, Audika, 2008.

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3. Frank Owen, “Arthur Russell: ‘Comedy Is the Highest Form of Art’ -- a Rare interview from 1987.” The Guardian, October 22, 2014. https://www.theguardian.com/music/2014/oct/22/arthur-russell-comedy-is-the-highest-form-of-art-a-rare-interview-from-1987

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4. Jen Carlson, “An Interview With Tom Lee, Partner of the Late Arthur Russell.” Gothamist, WNYC. Published December 5, 2008; modified August 17, 2016. https://gothamist.com/arts-entertainment/an-interview-with-tom-lee-partner-of-the-late-arthur-russell

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5. Arthur Russell, “Close My Eyes,” Track 1 on Love is Overtaking Me, Audika, 2008.

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6. Tim Lawrence, Hold on to Your Dreams: Arthur Russell and the Downtown Music Scene, 1973-1992 (Duke University Press, 2009), 327.

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7. Arthur Russell, “Love Comes Back,” Track 21 on Love is Overtaking Me, Audika, 2008.

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8. Daniel Dylan Wray, “Growing Echo: The Story of a Lost Genius Named Arthur Russell.” Loud and Quiet. November 17, 2014. https://www.loudandquiet.com/interview/arthur-russell/

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9. Tibetan Book of the Dead. First Complete Translation, ed. Graham Coleman and Thupten Jintpa, trans. Gyurme Dorje (New York: Penguin Classics, 2007).

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10. Arthur Russell, World of Echo, Audika, 1986.

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11. Tim Lawrence, Hold on to Your Dreams: Arthur Russell and the Downtown Music Scene, 1973-1992, (Duke University Press, 2009), 278.

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12. Robert Creeley, “For Love” in For Love, (Scribner’s, 1962).

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13. Robert Duncan, “Often I am Permitted to Return to a Meadow” in The Opening of the Field, (New Directions, 1960).

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14. Arthur Russell, “Love Comes Back,” Track 21 on Love is Overtaking Me, Audika, 2008.

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