Song of the Week: I'll Find A Way (To Carry It All)
The Blind Boys of Alabama featuring Shara Nova
In an effort to write more consistently, I’m flirting with a new regular (crosses fingers) weekly post about a single song I love. Seems easy enough. Like some children thrive in structure, I suppose it just helps to have a framework (see also: 90 Songs That Explain My 90s, Four Favorite Things, etc) to work within. We’ll see if I last more than two weeks…
I have a few Spotify playlists that I toggle between on the occasion that I feel like listening to music but don’t have a specific artist or album or song or even genre in mind. I’ll pull the playlists up (often as I get ready in the morning, when I’m still too hazy to think much) and hit shuffle. Once I hit shuffle, I am constitutionally incapable of doing anything—getting in the shower, brushing my teeth, moving on with my life in any real way besides holding my phone and looking at the songs randomly playing—until my ears hear a song that hits the elusive spot. I don’t mind the randomness after that. But the first song absolutely must hit the spot. I would venture to guess that, on a typical day, I skip a good 11-12 songs (and, on an atypical day, more than 20 songs) before landing on one that matches whatever my fickle inner DJ happens to be arbitrarily feeling in that moment. It’s just skip-skip-skip-skip until some song does the proverbial trick. Some mornings it takes awhile.
On any given day, there are a handful of songs1 that—in the specific mood or not—I won’t skip if they come on, that I’m just as delighted to hear for the 300th time as I was the first. It could be that they stand the test of time or it could be that they’re still new enough to my ears that I haven’t overplayed them yet. Whatever the underlying psychology, they are songs that I never skip.
It appears the Spotify algorithm knows this about me too, as—any time I throw my Favorite Songs playlist on random and keep skipping song after song after song until the random feature lands on something I feel like listening to—the algorithm will realize2 that I’m being picky and (eventually and consistently) serve up a few songs, in an attempt to get me to settle on something, that it has learned are unskippables3
One of the songs that’s been unskippable for me since the mid 2010’s is a song called “I’ll Find A Way (To Carry It All)” as sung by gospel legends The Blind Boys of Alabama with guest lead vocalist Shara Nova (of My Brightest Diamond) on their 2013 album I’ll Find A Way.
This song came to my ears at a perfect confluence of two factors: 1) we were about four years into the unexpected pseudo-career of our gospel-folk-country-bluegrass collective The Lower Lights and 2) I was probably at my peak4 of Justin Vernon (Bon Iver), who produced I’ll Find A Way, fandom. Myself being a newcomer to the genre and wanting to make sure I had context and history for the music The Lower Lights were making, I was devouring great gospel music wherever I could dig it up. Part of that was making my way through The Blind Boys’ storied, gospel-drenched discography. And then, at the same time, I was well into a love affair with anything Vernon had been involved with—from being Megafaun5-adjacent to his work on Sounds of the South to his co-leading role in Anais Mitchell’s original, pre-Broadway Hadestown to incredible live performances to insane covers to more incredible live performances….all of which is to say: I was all-in on Vernon AND gospel at that time.
Because the song sits on (and is the title track for) a Blind Boys album and probably because I was still a newcomer to gospel music, hearing “I’ll Find A Way (To Carry It All)” surrounded by songs like “I Shall Not Be Moved” and “Take Me To The Water” and “Take Your Burden To The Lord And Leave It There”, I just assumed the song was a gospel standard. Sidestepping my usual musical backstory curiosity, I didn't dive an inch deeper on the song, figuring it must be canon for people outside my LDS church bubble, and just let it be one of my favorite songs without further interrogation.
But then, just the other day, I read a starry-eyed review about a reissue of a lost, previously-impossible-to-find 1975 album, Ted Lucas’s self-titled album. Seeing that it was glowingly-reviewed and in my ongoing quest to “discover” music I’ve never heard, I looked it up and streamed the album while I worked.
The first two songs “Plain & Sane & Simple Melody” and “It’s So Easy (When You Know What You’re Doing)” reminded me of the charm and sound of the first, home-recorded Iron & Wine album, with its homey, acoustic, multi-tracked harmony charms. Which makes sense, since Lucas was, in fact, recording them at home, all by himself, mostly acoustic, and both Iron & Wine and Lucas’s albums have lyrics about the domestic world of crying babies6, these two dads decades apart making quiet recordings while their kids slumber. My minor research found that Lucas’s songs have often been compared to quiet kings, Nick Drake and Elliott Smith (though the ultimate fate of both epochal artists is nothing to aspire to). The Pitchfork review of the reissue, referring to Drake and Smith and Lucas, writes, “And they (all) could sound so bright that you could, at least momentarily, forget the fact that they were singing from the bottom of their existence, from nadirs of being.”
Another song came on, “Now That I Know”, with its practically jaunty feel, seemed vaguely familiar. I thought it was just the folkiness of it—a lot of folk-influenced songs pulling from the same garden—so I just kept listening only to find myself hearing what? You guessed it: “I’ll Find A Way (To Carry It All.”
I immediately stopped working. Did a double-take. Googled the album and year. Double-checked. Triple-checked. Could it be? My mind was blown. Not only was the song not a gospel standard, “I’ll Find A Way” was from an album half a century old, rejected by Warner Bros and self-released to proverbial crickets, eventually finding love after-the-fact as a rare jewel (not unlike albums by Nick Drake or Big Star) among musicians like Devendra Banhart, Clairo, Mountain Man, and, yes, Justin Vernon. Sadly, a lot of these prominent musician fans came along long after Lucas passed away in 1992.
Ah! Now I know7 where I’d heard “Now That I Know.” One of my favorite albums of 2018, Phil Cook’s People Are My Drug, featured Cook’s cover of the song which I had just assumed—another failure of curiosity and/or casualty of being an adult and having less free time to scour the liner notes on my bedroom floor—was a Cook original. And now the coin has finally dropped, the pieces all fit together: Cook8 (previously of Megafaun and Vernon’s pre-Bon Iver band Deyarmond Edison) was a prominent player9 on I’ll Find A Way. It appears that all through that Megafaun/Bon Iver/Sylvan Esso/Hiss Golden Messenger/Mountain Man10 scene that was happening in North Carolina, the old Ted Lucas record must have made the rounds, long before its 2025 reissue via Jack White’s Third Man Record reissue. And made a big impression. If you listen to Lucas’s original back to back with the Blind Boys’s version, you can really hear Vernon/Cook’s reverence for the original, down to chord changes and emulating some countermelodic touches in Lucas’s original.
LASTLY: In researching the song this week, I found that more than a few reviewers found vocalist Shara Nova’s vocal performance to be detached or underwhelming. I couldn’t disagree more. I would guess that the typical reviewer of a Blind Boys album (aka: a gospel critic) is accustomed to more performative, even histrionic singing11. But Nova is more subtle and, to my ear, dives deep inside the exhausted resignation and melancholic determination to press on, able to express the simultaneous coexistence of hope and despair found in the lyrics12. She does it without the trills and runs and decibels. I believe her, as much as she believes herself (which seems to fluctuate, as many of us do, in the spectrum of hope/despair), that she’ll find a way.
That, to me, is the hallmark of a great vocal. Do I believe you?
Off the top of my head, songs that I’ll listen to and enjoy every time they come on:
- With Or Without You / U2
- Let Down / Radiohead
- Fake Plastic Trees / Radiohead
- Revelator / Gillian Welch
- I Dream A Highway / Gillian Welch (which is saying something given its length)
- Change of Heart / Teddy Thompson
- Samson / Regina Spektor
- No Speak No Slave / The Black Crowes
- Wiser Time / The Black Crowes
- The Times They Are A’Changin’ / The Brothers and Sisters
- Veronica / Elvis Costello
- Favorite Hour / Elvis Costello
- The Wing & The Wheel / Nanci Griffith
- Impossible Germany / Wilco
- Jesus Etc / Wilco
- Drive / The Cars
- The Beast & Dragon Adored / Spoon
- Blue / The Jayhawks
- Long Ride Home / Patty Griffin
- Song for Zula / Phosphorescent
- Place To Be / Nick Drake
- Hard To Find / The National
- Scar / Joe Henry
- Royals / Lorde
- Waiting Room / Fugazi
- Street Fighting Man / The Rolling Stones
- Dear Prudence / The Beatles
- No More I Love Yous / Annie Lennox
- Winning / Emily Haines & The Soft Skeleton
- The Ballad of Peter Pumpkinhead / XTC
- Song of Good Hope / Glen Hansard
- I Will Be There / Odessa
- Love / Lana Del Rey
- Goin’ To Acapulco / Jim James & Calexico
- Killing The Blues / Robert Plant & Alison Krauss
- Wall In Your Heart / Shelby Lynne
- Angels of the Silences / Counting Crows
- The Day I Tried To Live / Soundgarden
- A Little Uncanny - Conor Oberst
- Louisiana 1927 / Randy Newman
- French Disko / Stereolab
- Love Comes Quickly / Pet Shop Boys
- Bleed to Love Her / Fleetwood Mac
- You Don’t Get Me High Anymore / Phantogram
- Mary / Big Thief
- Everything I Own / Bread (it came on this morning actually!)
- There She Goes / The La’s
- I Never Loved A Man (The Way I Love You) / Aretha Franklin
- I’m Expanding My Mind / Superdrag
- Sweet Surrender / Sarah Mclachlan
- Easy Is The New Hard / The Lower West
- Me and Your Cigarettes / Miranda Lambert
- She Will Have Her Way / Neil Finn
- Someone’s Favorite Song / Sunfall Festival
- I Know / Fiona Apple
- Teardrop / Massive Attack
- No Roots / Alice Merton
- Last Goodbye / Jeff Buckley
- Bad Guy / Billie Eilish
- Lift / Brad
- This Is Me Trying / Taylor Swift
- Great Big No / The Lemonheads
- Brutal / Olivia Rodrigo
- Jealousy, Jealousy / Olivia Rodrigo
- The Trapeze Swinger / Iron & Wine
- Now At Last / Feist
- It’s Good To Be King / Tom Petty
- Punisher (the orchestral one) / Phoebe Bridgers
- Sidelines / Phoebe Bridgers
- You Missed My Heart / Phoebe Bridgers
- Back In the High Life Again / Steve Winwood
- I’ll Find A Way (To Carry It All) / The Blind Boys of Alabama feat. Shara Nova
- Life According To Rachael / Madison Cunningham
- There, There / Mideau
- As It Was / Harry Styles
- Digging In The Dirt / Peter Gabriel
- Washing of the Water / Peter Gabriel
Ok, so there are more than a few handfuls of songs. (Might be a good place to start pulling from for my newly introduced Song of the Week.)
Would you believe me if I told you that these aren’t all necessarily what I would consider my “favorite” songs? There’s some overlap, sure, but the inconsistency of that particular Venn diagram is something to unpack another day, I think.
Can an app “really”? Do androids dream of electric sheep?
Here are the songs Spotify currently resorts to in a Paul-skipping-too-much pinch. I cross-referenced these songs with the songs I listed off the top of my head in the previous footnote, just to see where the algorithm and I meet. I’ve bolded the ones that we agree on.
- Digging In The Dirt / Peter Gabriel (we just barely talked about this one)
- If I’m Unworthy / Blake Mills
- Doo Wop (That Thing) / Lauryn Hill
- Kiko & The Lavender Moon / Los Lobos
- Punisher (the orchestral one) / Phoebe Bridgers
- Sweet Surrender / Sarah McLachlan
- I’d Run Away / The Jayhawks
- Videotape / Radiohead
- The Fade / Megafaun
- Sweet Al George / Brad
- No One Knows Me Like the Piano / Sampha
- Falling Up / Rickie Lee Jones
Before he started throwing out absurdist, unpronounceable song titles like:
22 (OVER S∞∞N)
21 M♢♢N WATER
715 - CRΣΣKS
____45_____
10 d E A T h b R E a s T ⊠ ⊠
U (Man Like)
iMi
RABi
Not that some of those songs weren’t still good, but—to my judgy ears—they got more abstract and pretentious and production-concerned (vs. song-centric). Vernon’s lyrics have always been impressionistic and have prioritized feeling over literalism. That’s not really the problem. But how about naming the songs something I know how to pronounce (to say nothing of how many times we all pronounced “Bon Iver” in any number of wrong ways)?
Them: which song are you hoping he plays tonight?
Me: Oh, sheesh, let’s see…I’d love to her Re colon Stacks or maybe U parentheses Man Like parentheses.
an all-time favorite of mine, live and on their albums
Iron & Wine
Love is a tired symphony
Tou hum when you're awake
Love is a crying baby
Mama warned you not to shake
Ted Lucas
Just as the baby cries out for its mother
So we all have to cry out for each other
No pun intended
It might actually be more truthful that finding “I’ll Find A Way” was due to my newfound love of gospel music and PHIL COOK, not Justin Vernon, intersecting. To this day, my family listens to Phil’s pandemic-era gospel playlist nearly every Sunday morning. My kids will forever associate The Dixie Hummingbirds’s “In The Morning” with our Sunday mornings.
I wish Phil had kept doing weekly DJ playlists. Every one of them had a song or bunch of songs that really opened gospel music for me.
and maybe co-producer, depending on who you ask
Mountain Man, which includes Sylvan Esso’s Amelia Heath, does a gorgeous cover of Lucas’s “Baby Where You Are.” They really wring out the heartbreak inherent in the song.
And don’t get me wrong: I love a big gospel vocal as much as anyone.
From the excellent Pitchfork review, by Grayson Haver Currin:
The hypnotic sway of “I’ll Find a Way (To Carry It All)” feels like the last sigh of someone deserted by everyone around them, just before they decide how best to move on.