I depend on The New Pornographers for peculiar and delightful songs, messages I can by no means decode however someway perceive anyway. “Pontius Pilate’s Residence Motion pictures,” from their ninth album, Proceed as a Visitor, is a mosaic.

A. C. Newman’s lyrics give us fragments of exercise, fragments of panorama, occasional fragments of commentary (“stunning, I assume.”) It feels there’s loads happening: a journey on “the trail by the mountains,” harmful, so that you just “sleep in your garments now, it makes you’re feeling protected.”

However it’s not a narrative you possibly can summarize, solely expertise.

A few of the most vivid and concrete scenes of the tune are fully unattainable. Think about: “On three, we burst by the Overton window.” It’s an action-movie break in. We’ve characters and dialogue: coconspirators whispering past the panes. We’ve a correct noun: possibly an Overton window is an Artwork Deco design, like a Tiffany lamp? It’s not: the Overton window is a time period in political science that describes a spectrum of political beliefs, from the unthinkable at one excessive, to the unthinkable at its reverse excessive, and in between, middle-ground positions of various thinkability. This isn’t a window you possibly can break together with your foot. However it matches in a world the place the morning has gracenotes, the place “a house within the stars” will be discovered on a map. On this tune, concepts will be touched, or kicked in.

What do you do with a tune fabricated from impossibilities and items of damaged mirrors?

Earlier than the rest, you groove. As you do, you uncover a story arc in Joe Seiders’s drumming. This is smart for a tune that’s (a minimum of considerably) about journey. The chorus “I acquired you a map to discover a house within the stars / I hope you get there” tells us we’re on a journey; drums are the instrument by which to measure your steps. And should you’re questioning the right way to really feel about every part that’s happening, the harmonizing saxophones will inform you: they’re like city criers on the courtroom steps, solemn, resignedly mournful, delivering judgement. Needing a good friend, you retain shut beside Newman’s voice; needing a defender, you shelter behind Neko Case’s vocal force-field.

If, like me, you continue to need to squeeze some sense out of the phrases, take a clue from the title. The chorus, “Now you’re clearing the room, identical to Pontius Pilate / when he confirmed all his house films, / all of his buddies yelling Pilate, too quickly” stands out, partly as a result of it repeats, but additionally as a result of right here’s our man, Pilate from the title. We all know him: fifth governor of the Roman province of Judea, who ordered the execution of Jesus. We additionally don’t know him in any respect. All that is still of Pontius Pilate the precise individual is a part of his identify on a damaged stone. What survives is Pontius Pilate, the character, as written by the authors of the Gospels, by Jewish historians of his personal time, by later Roman historians, and by artists, playwrights, novelists, and screenwriters in all of the centuries since. Their tales compose an infinite literary ghost.

Newman offers his model of Pilate an opportunity to self-narrate: anachronistically, he has a video digicam, with which to make his personal number of scenes, from his perspective. However even his buddies run out of the room slightly than see issues as he noticed them. Pilate is a personality in another person’s story; at greatest, somebody whose skilled obligations left blood on his arms, at worst a villain. Who desires to see that from the within?

Imagining what these films may need proven, the fragmentary scenes on this tune begin to match collectively. The sense of unintended catastrophe, ambiguous guilt, and political upheaval might all belong to Pilate. However they may as simply belong to Jesus, or to somebody by no means made it by the mountains, whose story was forgotten. The road, “I acquired you a map to discover a house within the stars / I hope you get there” might be spoken by any of those characters, to any of the others, however I feel it’s Newman chatting with all of them. The story is the map, and house is what occurs after we get to interrupt out of the loneliness of solo expertise. After we get to inform somebody “This occurred to me; pay attention, it was like this.”