1971: Loving Her Was Easier (Than Anything I'll Ever Do Again) - Kris Kristofferson

Teaching me that yesterday was something that I'd never thought of trying

That title tells a whole story all by itself. There is more captured, imbued, summed up, let on, kept hidden and accidentally revealed in those ten titular words than some people can get across in a whole song or novel or film or photograph or even lifetime.

This is a brutally beautiful and beautifully brutal song. It’s as elemental as it gets. Sometimes Kristofferson could sound like Roger Miller, but here he wrote and sang like the wind, instead; blowing a chill right straight through your mind and down your spine and all through your aching bones with his tender words and aching, heartfelt tones.

He looks like he is made of the earth itself, as well. He looks like an old oak tree, or a rugged mountain or hillside. He looks like a bear, and this song sounds as old as any of those things is, too. It is a song that is so perfect that it must have been, can only have been, refined over millions of years; evolving through the aeons on the waves and on the wind and growing up from the soil itself. It’s been whittled out of mud and roots and rain and wood, carved into its final form and presented as easily as anything Kristofferson ever did again.

It’s a poem, pure and simple. It’s a paean, and, it’s a painful triumph; a celebration of love lost but a celebration of least love having existed in the first place at all. You’d be happy to have written a single one of these lines in a lifetime—“turning on the world the way she smiled upon my soul as I lay dying”, “teaching me that yesterday was something that I never thought of trying” or “I don't know the answers to the easy way she's opened every door in my mind” and each and every other lyric in the song—but Kristofferson got them all down in one short burst.

Not only that, but he’d repeated the feat over the years in Sunday Mornin’ Coming Down, Help Me Make It Through the Night, Me & Bobby McGee, Just the Other Side of Nowhere, From the Bottle to the Bottom, Come Sundown, To Beat the Devil, For the Good Times and countless others.

Is it any wonder that with all this beauty flowing around inside him then, that by all accounts it didn’t sound like Kristofferson was just merely one of the good guys, but one of the very best? He stood by all his friends and pushed them onwards—Prine and Dylan and Cash and Nelson and more—and he stood alongside Sinead O’Connor when no one else would. He stood up for and alongside the Palestinian people and he didn’t care that he lost work as a result, and he stood alongside his Native American heroes, too. He stood against the invasion of Iraq and Iran and stood against the political classes and media propaganda that called for more war and destabilisation in the Middle East and in Asia. He stood for peace, but wasn’t afraid of the going getting tough, describing himself as a"dove with claws”. He’d been in the military himself and so knew first hand the futility of young men being sent off to their deaths, whether they were physical or mental.

Put simply, he is an all time great. He might have returned to the earth now but his songs will live on as long as they can be carried on the wings of an eagle as she flies; carried on the waves that ripple down on the shores, carried on the wind that blows through the pines, and carried in all of our hearts that love him.

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When Kris Kristofferson passed away last year at the age of 88, there were a lot of excellent tributes to him, but none finer and more heartfelt than the one posted over at The Mixtape by Michael Elliott, which you can find here:

R.I.P., Kris Kristofferson

I was lucky enough to catch Kristofferson in concert once, at the Glastonbury festival in 2017. Somehow, he was both frail and mighty. Lean and strong. Old, weak and as powerful as they come. He couldn’t get through every song, and he forgot the words to a couple of others, but it didn’t matter. He was radiating a power that I’ve only come into contact at a handful of other shows; Dylan, Nelson, Mavis Staples, Burt Bacharach, Franki Valli and Tony Bennett to name a few. Usually it comes from the old guard, raging against the dying of the light. Loving them is easier than anything we’ll ever do again, so let’s love them while we can.

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