An Album for Armistice Day

Anders Parker — The Black Flight

“Don’t worry about me. They say here that I have a charmed life.”
— Flight Lieutenant Leslie Hunter Parker, France, October 14, 1916

I’ve been fascinated by the First World War ever since I was a little kid. Though my interest in the conflict predominately lies in the strange assortment of national alliances, festering grudges and political intrigues that dominoed into the horrific and unnecessary war, and the awful collision of 19th century military strategy and 20th century weaponry that defined it, it was the fabulous airplanes of that first aerial war — the Sopwith Camels and Fokker DR.Is — that originally grabbed my attention.

Anders Parker felt the mighty pull of those fragile planes as a youngster, as well. Not just because he grew up watching mock WWI air battles at the Rhinebeck Aerodrome in New York’s Hudson Valley, but because his great uncle Leslie Hunter Parker had died in a 1917 dogfight over Belgium while piloting a black-painted Sopwith Triplane for the 10th Squadron of the Royal Naval Air Service of Great Britain. He was just 21 years old at the time of his death.

The WWI heroics of Flight Lieutenant Parker — who was reportedly shot down while successfully distracting enemy pilots from his airborne comrades, who had just enough fuel left in their planes to get back to the Squadron’s base — loomed large in young Anders’ imagination. “To me,” he says now, “he was a mythic hero… A young man from the backwoods of Canada flying a primitive open cockpit airplane made of wood, wire, and canvas with a giant machine gun strapped to it, battling enemy aircraft in the skies over the trenches of Belgium and France.”

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Anders — a charming and talented gent whom I first met back in my college days, when our bands wound up on the same bill one late-’80s night in Poughkeepsie — went on to become a singer-songwriter of considerable note. Maybe you know him from his time in Varnaline and Space Needle, his collaborations with Jay Farrar, or his many fine solo records; maybe you’ve never heard of him. But either way, you should check out his latest album The Black Flight, which tells his great uncle’s story from a variety of perspectives — the young airman from the backwoods of Canada, his girlfriend, his parents, his fellow pilots, and Anders’ own.

The Black Flight is a stark and deeply haunting record, one which uses Flight Lieutenant Parker’s story as a jumping-off point to unflinchingly examine war’s adrenalized allure and its brutal, generation-spanning costs. Recorded with only Anders’ soulful voice and ringing guitar, the songs — which were recorded and mixed by Eric Heigle (Arcade Fire, Snarky Puppy, Lost Bayou Ramblers) at WixMix Productions in New Orleans, where Anders currently calls home — radiate trace elements of Neil Young, The Who, John Fahey, Bert Jansch and a bunch of other things I can’t quite put my finger on, but its passionate performances and thoughtful, evocative lyrics will also keep you coming back for more.

He’s coming home in a letter/ He’s coming home light as a feather/ They say it all has a meaning/ They say - there’s a cosmic reason/ They wrote his name’s upon a wall/ Across the ocean with them all/ And sure as winter time will come/ That list of names is never done

— “The Black Flight”

I’ve been coming back to The Black Flight a lot since I first heard an advance copy back in April, and it’s become one of my favorite albums of 2023. I haven’t had much luck pitching coverage of it to any of my various journalistic outlets, for various reasons — but I wanted to write about it here, because I feel like more than a few of you Jagged Time Lapse readers will dig the hell out of it.

“It is difficult to fathom the scope of mayhem and death that the human race has wrought on each other throughout millennia,” Anders reflects. “Looking back, one often asks, ‘For what?’ I hope that humanity someday finds a way to free itself from the seemingly endless impulse to kill each other. But the stories, like that of my great-uncle, hold great power and gravity. His is just one of an infinite number throughout history… tragic and audacious, mundane and legendary. The death, grief, pain, extremes, and heroics that people experience during war cascades down through generations, and is a thing to be reckoned with.”

Today is November 11. Here in the US, we call it Veterans Day — but up until 1954, it was known as Armistice Day, as it still is in many other countries including Canada. The major hostilities of “The Great War” officially ended when the Armistice was signed on the eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month of 1918. The war’s survivors would have to find a way to live with the trauma of what they’d experienced; but for the estimated 9 million to 11 million military personnel killed in the conflict, Flight Lieutenant Parker included, there would be no digging out of the psychic or physical rubble.

If you listen to just one album today, make it The Black Flight. You can listen to (and download) the whole thing over at Bandcamp.

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