Forgotten Movie Songs #4: "The Maker" from SLING BLADE

Super-producer Daniel Lanois had twisted the sound knobs for artists like U2, Bob Dylan and Peter Gabriel long before he composed the thoughtful, isolation-flavored score to Billy Bob Thornton's 1996 directorial debut, Sling Blade. As a capper to this movie about the long-hospitalized Karl Childers and his loving and violent adventures outside institution walls, Lanois offered up a forceful yet gracious closing credits song called "The Maker." The song wasn't written for the film, surprisingly, though it works splendidly as commentary on a story that sports dark notions about how we fight one evil with another and, as a bonus, it weaves in religious commentary where Thornton's film often was just too subtly-written to tread. I'm sure that Thornton--a musician himself--garnered great inspiration from this song while writing Sling Blade, and that it led him to hire Lanois as a composer of what still stands as a outstanding rock-based score.

Here is a circa-1990 live performance of "The Maker," music and lyrics by Daniel Lanois.



Oh, oh deep water
Black, and cold like the night
I stand with arms wide open
I've run a twisted mile
I'm a stranger
in the eyes of the maker

I could not see
For fog in my eyes
I could not feel
For the fear in my life
From across the great divide
In the distance I saw a light
Jean Baptiste
Walking to me with the maker

My body is bent and broken
By long and dangerous leaps
I can't work the fields of Abraham
and turn my head away
I'm not a stranger
In the hands of the maker

Brother John
Have you seen the homeless daughters
Standing there with broken wings
I have seen the flaming swords
There over east of Eden
Burning in the eyes of the maker
Burning in the eyes of the maker
Burning in the eyes of the maker
Burning in the eyes of the maker

Oh river, rise from your sleep