The word Hallelujah has meant so many things in our lives. When we were religious it was thankfulness with a direction and that direction was always upwards. Now that we’re not religious it’s thankfulness with no direction, which is also thankfulness to everything. But more often than not, a Hallelujah is a sigh of relief, a chance to look up and say I’m okay. All will be well. Even just for a time.
Now, a High Hell Hallelujah is a little different. A High Hell Hallelujah is much like a good goddamn in the sense that it’s thankfulness mixed with irritability as in “You finally took out the trash, high hell hallelujah.” The expression might sound a little snarky, and it often will start there as you say the high hell, but by the time you get to the hallelujah you are just so overcome with thankfulness that none of your irritation actually matters. Try it out the next time your partner finally hangs up that painting they said they’d hang up weeks ago or your teenager comes home late on a Friday night. Or when your insurance forms get approved and you can schedule your dental surgery or when you’re lost but now are found. Things happen and a High Hell Hallelujah is our way of saying “It’s ok now. I was mad but now I’m thankful.”
If you’ve been with us for a while, you might remember our album Howling Back At The Wounded Dog. That was an album about saying goodbye, not just to our dog, Butter, but to our best friend at the time, who we’d broken up with. Friend break ups are weird and rarely talked about, but they hurt as much or more as romantic break ups or as familial estrangements. Especially if it was a friendship that came as easily and lasted as long as ours did, because you think that your friendships will always be there. This one stung. We were mad. He was too. Our mutual friends all took sides, while simultaneously saying “isn’t there a way you can work it out?” There wasn’t.
And then 2020 happened. We holed up. We moved from one safe place to the next safe place. We drank a lot and were happily avoiding the tumult that existed seemingly everywhere around us. We brewed our own hard kombucha and cider and joined a wine club while arguing with people online about politics. We were mad, we were aimless, we were waiting for the world to begin again. And we were actively not thinking about our friend.
We were in Asheville when this song began. It was early spring 2021, and there were hints of green starting to remind us of what we’d missed through the winter and we’d go outside and savor the first warm days. It was on one of those days, sitting out on a back porch with a guitar and a non-alcoholic beer that the lyric “We got older since it’s been over and I don’t want you to know I got sober” came into our head. And I say “our head” because I can’t actually remember who wrote that lyric. I (Scott) can remember sitting out there trying to write this song alone but it was probably Mallory who actually wrote that because around that time she had woken up from a dead sleep and said “I need to forgive our friend.” All that time we were actively not thinking about our friend and the pain of that estrangement, we were working on a way of acceptance. We quit drinking in that time and started writing more and were dealing with a lot of things head on, but in the case of our estranged friend, we could never accept that. Instead a clear path forward. Forgiveness.
Forgiveness is not just for the person you’re forgiving. It’s also for you. It’s the mind’s way of saying “you can let that go now. You’ve carried that long enough.” But it takes a lot of work to get to that place. Sometimes you have to quit drinking and wake up sober and clear eyed on a spring day to do it. But when you do and in those times where a relationship can be mended, you realize that the friendship was always worth more than the thing you were arguing over.
And so we made plans to go to Nashville and get together. We planned to go for a walk in Shelby Bottoms, a place where we all had gone on many walks together. We were nervous and excited.
We pulled up and our friend yelled from across the parking lot “Are you vaccinated?”
“Yes!” we said.
“Do you want to hug?” he asked.
High Hell Hallelujah.
We got older since it’s been over
And I don’t want you to know I got sober
Cause you’d blame my drinking for my crooked thinking
And not the straight shot way that I loved you.
It wasn’t my wall, it’s wasn’t my call
I’m on to push to shove, not one to nudge a brick to fall
I’d blame my drinking for my steady sinking
But it’s the tear down way that I loved you.
No one gives a High Hell Hallelujah
No one gives a good Goddamn about it now
Just three cheers for who left you,
For the deck that’s stacked against you
For the wrecker of the day we don’t remember anyhow
Three cheers, goddamn, High Hell Hallelujah
I’ve been letting in the slow forgetting
Push my anger to sunrise and misremembering.
I’d blame my drinking for forgetful thinking
But it’s the close out way that I love you.
No one gives a High Hell Hallelujah
No one gives a good Goddamn about it now
Just three cheers for who left you,
For the deck that’s stacked against you
For the wrecker of the day we don’t remember anyhow
Three cheers, goddamn, High Hell Hallelujah
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