I Will Lay Her Heart in Mine, For a Time
on my unexpected Summer of Joan
The Song
Title: Joan in the Garden
Artist: The Decemberists
Album: As It Ever Was, So It Will Be Again
Year: 2024
The Story
I did not intend to spend several months of this year deeply invested in the history and legacy of Joan of Arc, but I did. It was Colin Meloy’s fault.
In June, The Decemberists, Meloy’s band of literary troubadours, released their 9th album and I was smitten.1 From the wild pomp and Eastern Bloc vibes of “Oh No!”2 to the dour simplicity of “Don’t Go to the Woods”, As It Ever Was, So It Will Be Again is as charming and melodic as The Decemberists have ever been. It’s an excellent record from wire to wire, though some parts of it required continued exposure to grow on me.
In particular, album finale “Joan in the Garden” bounced off me during my first few listens. It’s a 19-minute song, which feels like a bit much, even for a prog-adjacent band like The Decemberists and a prog-loving fan such as myself, particularly when considering that roughly five of those minutes contain little more than noise.3 But over time, I found that I kept coming back to it, that I was slowly becoming entranced by its mythic opening and grandiose development. I leaned into that impulse.
Meloy had published a detailed (and paywalled) explanation of the track’s genesis, in which he explains that the original germ of the song came to life after he read Lidia Luknavitch’s absolutely bonkers novel The Book of Joan, a techno-futuristic retelling of Joan of Arc’s life set in a lightly spacefaring, environmentally dystopian hellscape. The book is even crazier than that sentence makes it seem.4 Meloy left The Book of Joan with “this sudden desire to soak up, vacuum-like, everything on Joan of Arc I could manage.” And so he read a proper history of her life5 as well as a novelization of it.6 He watched two movies based on her story7 and spun into the catalog of long-running Chicago band Joan of Arc.
Because “Joan in the Garden” was weaving some kind of magic around me—I kept listening to the song over and over, particularly its opening half, even as I couldn’t yet articulate what had become so fascinating about it—and because I wanted to better understand that magic, I too read The Book of Joan. And then, as an anachronistic millennial who will read 30-odd books each year but can’t find the time to watch three new movies in that same span, I skipped the films that Meloy had noted and dug right into the two additional books from his list. (I’d heard Joan of Arc before. They’re not for me.) Then, in July, providence intervened and I diverged from Meloy’s charted syllabus, while staying on the subject: A tactical strategy game entitled Jeanne d’Arc that had originally been published a decade and a half ago on a long-since dead video game system8 was being rereleased for contemporary consoles. Given the trend of my summer to that point (and my love of tactical strategy games), I couldn’t resist picking it up, and so I’ve been playing that as well.
So … what of it, right? What did I learn from listening to an EP-length song about a peasant girl who changed the world? What was revealed across three books tracing the arc of her life? (Sorry.) How did it feel to direct a 3D model of Joan to stab a demon-pig with a sword until it collapsed into pixelated death? (Jeanne d’Arc is a weird game.)9
Obviously, I learned a lot about Joan herself, including that she probably never heard the name “Joan of Arc” in her life; she signed her name “Jehanne” and referred to herself as la Pucelle, the Maid.10 By her account, the archangel Michael came to her in her family’s garden when she was thirteen, and she continued to hear his voice—and thereby the will of God—for the rest of her life.11 That voice told her that she was to restore the rightful king to the French throne. (The Hundred Years’ War was essentially fought over this disputed throne and was a whole thing throughout the entirety of Joan’s life.) Her supporters fervently believed in her divinity; her detractors claimed that she was possessed by the devil. There were plenty of both. When she was 17, despite the fact that she had no military training, she led the assault that broke England’s siege of the French city of Orléans.12 Later she was captured by the English, and then England, France, and the Catholic Church took turns treating her like shit until England convicted her of heresy and burned her at the stake. She was 19.
Joan’s story is fascinating, in part because of how detailed accounts of it are. Despite the fact that she died almost 600 years ago, one result of the various trials that she was subjected to at the end of her life is that there are vast, meticulously kept records of her life and actions. So much of what she endured seems completely of its time—on multiple occasions she was shot with an arrow! She rode around in a suit of armor! She was burned at the stake!—but much of her story feels shockingly contemporary: Joan was subjected to near-constant cruelty because she was a woman; she refused gender norms and wore men’s clothes, which angered so many people and was a key point in her ultimate conviction and murder; she was a passionate young person who was used and manipulated by the wealthy and powerful, and then discarded when she became a threat to those same powerful parties. Relevant, no?
“Joan in Garden” begins at the outset of Joan’s journey, told through the outset of Meloy’s (“in a book I found / Joan in the garden”), and in a few minutes she has become the larger than life figure of historical record (“make her ten miles tall / make her arms cleave mountains”). Joan’s biographical thread is more thoroughly explored in the song’s three-minute, punk rock finale,13 but as the song’s ten-minute first half swells and develops, the story traced uses Joan primarily as a lens to get at something deeper: the power, depth, and challenge of creative endeavor.
This is Meloy’s contribution to the magic of Joan: He extrapolates something mythic from her story, using the details of her life to speak to the power and challenge of creation—the creation of songs, yes, but also the creation of tales and heroes, the creation of someone like Joan, who is now much, much more than any living person could be. Married to evocative instrumentation that grows and shifts with the narrative, the song is proof of the concept it presents: a brilliant experience that is more than it seems and, importantly, more than its authors could ever directly intend.
Meloy is a fabulous wordsmith; he’s written countless lyrical masterworks—often with thesaurically-impressive vocabulary—as well as a half-dozen novels. The man can write. Here, he is at his simplest and it works so, so very well. When he sings “now to try / write a line / erase a line,” the melody is piercing and the mood of the song enthralling, but it’s the power in those plain words that tugs at my heart. That’s the ease and challenge of writing, isn’t it? That’s the whole damn enterprise, right there, with all the doubt and failure and success and hope that comes with it. Now to try. Write a line. Erase a line.
Fuck, that’s good.
Later, as the song is bursting into sonic fireworks, he illuminates the will of art to find its own direction, regardless of authorial intent: “I don’t remember what I ought to be / I only know what’s right.” Joan’s here, too, of course, the personification of these impersonal ideas, as she was doomed to be in both her life and death. And this is at the heart of that deeper magic, the lure that keeps stringing me back and back and back. Meloy and team have captured something eternal here, in the way that Joan’s story is Meloy’s story is my story is your story is everyone’s story because this is the story, the only one we ever really have to tell. We burn, for a time, as brightly as we can, these little piles of dirt with star-stuff embedded in us, and we hope that others, now or later, will see our light. As Meloy explains: “just another tinsel ornament / another troubled sky / we are folded in the firmament / catch us as we fly.”
Yes, do. What else are our hands for?
I give “Joan in the Garden” five out of five stars.
If you’re looking for a primer for their first eight albums, I’ve got you covered.
I was able to attend the band’s Detroit date just a few days before As It Ever Was dropped and the show was simply wonderful. “Oh No!” in particular, performed with multiple horn players and such obvious theater-kid joy, was the show’s highlight—and one of the most memorably fun single-song performances I’ve seen in years.
There’s technically more going on here, but to my ears it’s mostly just noise.
That book is so, so much weirder than any one sentence can make it sound. Another sentence, as proof: The story’s elite live in a space station wherein everyone has become sexually and culturally sterile such that the only remaining form of personal expression is receiving cosmetic skin grafts and then carving stories into said grafts and reading the resulting scar tissue. (!!!!!!)
Joan of Arc: A History by Helen Castor.
The Maid by Kimberly Cutter.
Carl Dreyer’s The Passion of Joan of Arc (1928) and Luc Besson’s The Messenger (2009).
RIP, PSP.
Like The Book of Joan, it is a totally batshit version of Joan’s story. In this case, the child-king of England, Henry VI, is possessed by literal demons and the Duke of Bedford is a spider-thin ghoul with a giant headdress and red eyes. After all the time I’ve spent thinking about her this summer, I still don’t know what it is about Joan of Arc that inspires such madness.
Her virginity (i.e. maidenhood), which she maintained until her death, became a meaningful piece of her story, particularly once she started leading all-male military outfits.
Along with the voices of St. Catherine and St. Margaret and, more or less, God himself.
She was not given formal command, but she carried her own banner in the front lines and her presence was said to have dramatically increased the morale and vigor of her fellow soldiers.
We’re moving on with our narrative, but Meloy has delivered a great bit of lyricism here, so I’m quoting a whole damn verse for you: “she is daughter and son / the imperium undone / all autocrats are laid to waste / to waste / oh holy whore androgyne / come and sunder the stop signs / break it all so we can build again / bring on duke or dauphin / blood will flow like a fountain / as it ever was, so it will be again.”