Song of the Magi - Anais Mitchell

Typically, I am skeptical (if not downright ornery) about making political statements with songs. Even the masters of the form (Difranco, Dylan, Prine) rarely slip one by me without a scoff or two. But here, Anais Mitchell has distilled the meaning from a massively complex political/religious war and made from it a succinct, understandable, moving story.

The song opens with a pretty but unsettling chord progression, and we find ourselves wandering through Bethlehem at Jesus' birth. It's a freezing night in the desert, and we're carrying our gifts to the celebration. Anais' voice, also, is pretty and unsettling; she is courageously emotive and impeccably intoned, with a voice from a Grimm's fairy tale, at once a child and a crone.

As the story continues, Mitchell leads us to a much darker scene. She gives us only the necessary details, and we follow each line eagerly, with equal amounts of reverence and terror. In the second verse, she carries us from this peaceful, joyful biblical scene to modern day Bethlehem, a city embroiled in seemingly endless war.

welcome home my child/your home is a checkpoint now
your home is a border town/welcome to the brawl
life ain't fair my child/put your hands in the air my child
slowly now, single file/up against the wall

These last lines are my favorite by far. I am floored by Mitchell's ability, in the space of a single verse, to shift the plot so seamlessly to the same city 2000 years in the future - and in doing so, illuminate the tragedy of both stories. Suddenly, in our minds eye, Jesus is a Palestinian youth, born into a vicious cycle of war. Though she never mentions it, we're asking ourselves: would a modern-day Prince of Peace surmount such odds, or would he be swallowed up in a sea of statistics, just another gun-toting teen, or victim to a suicide bomb?

But she's followed us here to this winter desert, in the midst of a war, bundled in our warmest coats, and she meets us with a prayer: open wide the gates of hope, and let us through.