Kate Campbell has been doing shows large and small following release of her 12th album, Save the Day. The veteran singer-songwriter, who’s known for mining literate influences and producing quirky human-interest ballads as well as folk-pop with prominent spiritual leanings, sometimes introduces numbers with some wild webs of observations and associations that somehow led to the songwriting. About two weeks ago at a cafe in Virginia, she suddenly turned to the audience and said she wanted to introduce us to something that happened in a corner of Louisville — Fourth and Walnut, to be precise. “It’s now Muhammad Ali Blvd., down by the Seelbach,” she confirmed in later conversation. “I went down to the see the plaque, last time I was there in Louisville.” The plaque commemorates — and Campbell’s new song “Shining Like the Sun,” celebrates — Thomas Merton’s epiphany of a half-century ago.
As he wrote in his journal, Merton “suddenly realized that I loved all the people and that none of them were, or could be, totally alien to me. As if waking from a dream—the dream of separateness…” His capture of this experience, and his later revision for the book “Conjectures of a Guilty Bystander”, are, to at least one source, “arguably the most famous piece of writing associated with Louisville.”
Campbell has brought Merton into song before. “He was writing in the middle of the 20th century. But most everything of his I’ve read could be just as relevant today—and I think that’s pretty cool.” So how might the Trappist monk interpret the fact that his spiritual awakening occurred at the spot that’s now entrance to the Hard Rock Café? “Well, he was wild in his younger days…He might’ve thought it was ironic. But I think he’d say the same thing today.”
Campbell’s not playing Louisville on her current tour—but she’ll be close by on two nights. On Friday, Oct. 24 (The Centre in Evansville) and Saturday, Oct. 25 (The Carson Center in Paducah), she’s the opener for concerts by John Prine. The craggy-voiced legend joined in as guest vocalist on Campbell’s “Looking for Jesus,” a wry number (think corn flakes and eBay) on Save the Day. –T.E. Lyons