The Humility of Pain

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The Humility of Pain

Studio album by Jandek

Released

2002

Recorded

Unknown

Genre

Outsider music

Length

41:44

Label

Corwood Industries

Producer

Corwood Industries

Jandek chronology

I Threw You Away
(2002)

The Humility of Pain
(2002)

The Place
(2003)

The Humility of Pain is the 33rd album by Jandek, and the second of two released in 2002. It is Corwood Industries release #0771, and continues the themes and styles of the previous album.

1 Overview
2 Track listing
3 Album cover
4 External links

[edit] Overview

Picking up where the last disc left off, The Humility of Pain continues the stark, dissonant art blues that is typical of Jandek's "modern phase." Again sung in a moaning tone (there is less of the chaotic wailing on this album), the album splits the songs into shorter sections, with the longest song here being shorter than the shortest song on I Threw You Away. The album begins with more sage advice, with "the humility of pain" being something of an Eastern philosophical ideal. "I know you know the humility of pain/but I must tell you to understand/the personalities of your fellows/as long as you keep your life/you got to know where to go/and where to stay away from." Behind these vocals, his uniquely tuned guitar spits out minimal, blues-ish starts and stutters. This is a template for the album that follows.

Musically this is even more minimal than the album prior - rarely does the pace pick up and there is no harmonica to provide an occasional distraction. And yet, the album seems less unsettling than the one before it, and seems to continue a "story-line" of sorts that started with the last album and continues here. "I've gone and stopped everything," he says in "I Stepped Out of It" (echoing the prior album's "The World Stops"), before noting that "everyone in this room/saw money coming to them" but that "the more things you buy/the higher the cost of them." That song finishes with "There is health in every pure thought," and that deeply religious, anti-consumerist ideal is reflected throughout this album.

And it is all leading somewhere - "Right now I have a quest/to destroy what I did/I wanna see the future/I’ll go through that door." What he wants to see behind that door is "somebody to share my life," and adds that, once together, he wants the couple to "make the clock disappear" and "jump into eternity." This is something quite different from the laments for love on previous albums. There's a mystical quality here not present on the early albums, where God existed but seemed to have gone on by, and all the musician could do is pray for a forgiveness that didn't seem available. Now no mention is made of a specific "God," and instead it appears that the vocalist wants to find a true love and then vanish into the ether, which seems to happen at the end, when the vocalist says he would "die for your friend" and then live again, before grabbing the "other" and jumping down the rabbit hole: "You thought you had energy before/you won’t know where you are." Where are they? That seems to be continued on the following album, The Place, which almost entirely exists on another plane of being.