Tracklist:

1. Mickey Newbury - Heaven Help The Child (LP Version)
2. Bill Callahan - Heaven Help The Child

A wildly ambitious, cross-generational odyssey, written in 1971 against the backdrop of the waning days of the Vietnam War, ‘Heaven Help The Child’ is the closest Newbury ever came to writing a pure protest song – albeit one that, in true Newbury style, breaks the mould and emotes heartfelt paeans, seeking solutions rather than mere dissent. Allusive, elusive and emotionally direct, the song conflates myth and memoir until the two are inseparable and interchangeable. A reference in the lyrics to Fitzgerald and Hemingway draws on the idea that, for Newbury and his peers, Nashville of the 1970s was like Paris in the 1920s, a meeting place for writers in exile; outsiders working within the mainstream of culture, whose artistic concerns were too epic and personal to be constrained by it. “The point I was trying to make in that song,” said Newbury, “is that every generation thinks that its problems are unique where its problems really are as old as man. There are no new problems; there are only new faces having them.” Mickey Newbury often referred to ‘Heaven Help The Child’ as his ‘second Trilogy’, the first being ‘An American Trilogy’, the song with which he is most closely associated yet, paradoxically, did not write. But ‘Heaven Help The Child’ is Newbury through and through: the work of a master songwriter at the height of his powers.