spectral

At its most brilliant and spectral, beauty helps us hold on.

Other highlights included Weir’s spectral solo performance of Bob Dylan’s “When I Paint My Masterpiece,” Church’s funky “Up on Cripple Creek” and a stately version of “The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down” by the fearsomely bearded country singer Jamey Johnson, who also spent the evening in the concert’s crack house band alongside Campbell, Tench, Don Was, Ryan Bingham and an assortment drummers, backing singers and horn players.

Otis Jones IV’s Will, the character whose plans to run off with Johnny are upended by his girlfriend’s pregnancy, and Landen Gonzales’ Tunny, who chooses the military route as his answer only to be seriously wounded in combat, are treated almost as spectral presences, insubstantial and more or less tangential.

He does not require any evidence, not even spectral, to trigger their need to demonstrate unswerving faith.

Albums like the next year’s “Skeleton Tree” and especially 2019’s spectral “Ghosteen” “track a development through grief,” Cave says, “because that’s simply what happened to me.”