During a recent conversation with a friend, we somehow wandered into the topic of cryonics. If you’re not familiar with the term – “cryonics” refers to the process of freezing one’s body after death in order to preserve it; the idea being that at some point science will have advanced far enough to be able to bring the person back to life. It’s certainly a controversial concept and I don’t have the scientific knowledge to speculate on whether this is a realistic proposition, but it’s certainly a fascinating thing to think about.
During this conversation my friend asked me if I was familiar with “The Frozen Man” by James Taylor. I hadn’t heard it before and was surprised to hear that there was a song written so relevant to the topic. Although “The Frozen Man” doesn’t specifically address the cryonic process, it tells a very similar story. Inspired by an article Taylor read in National Geographic, the song describes the tale of a man who lost his life in a shipwreck and whose body was discovered preserved in ice.
Released on 1991’s New Moon Shine, “The Frozen Man” is sung from the perspective of the man brought to back to life 100 years after his death. This is an adventurous topic for a song, and a challenge that most songwriters would not be able to pull off, much less consider an attempt at. Although “Copperline” is the better-known song on this album, and a tour de force in its own right, it finds Taylor swimming relatively in his own lane lyrically. Musically “The Frozen Man” may not be wildly different from Taylor’s signature sound, but there are some beautiful and mysterious chord voicings here, that in combination with the song’s lyrics, result in a strange and brilliant work that make it stand out in his canon as one of his greatest achievements.
The arrangement here is wonderful, and Taylor is able to achieve a perfect balance of different energies as he shifts from the open and surreal intro, into the relatively straight-forward verse chord progression, with a brilliant and intricate acoustic guitar phrase weaving the two sections together. In balancing these sections, he’s able to connect what one might call the “Sci-Fi” aspects of the story, to the human elements that make up the emotional core of the narrative. By placing this song in that wonderful space between magic and reality, he’s able to conjure a story that may be far-fetched, but is believable enough that the listener is pulled closer into the story. The song itself, and even the characters within it, seem to empathize with the character more than they seek to objectify or scorn him:
“Newspapers call me state of the art
And the children when they see me cry “
My interpretation here is that the children can sense the man’s suffering, and perhaps have a uniquely inherit understanding that what has been done to this man is wrong, even cruel. There is the persistent refrain, the repeated prayer: “Lord have mercy on the frozen man”.
We’re left to consider what our mortality means, and the sense that it may be more of a gift to us than we realize. Even if we can save our bodies, perhaps are souls are only built to sustain so much? As the music takes on a march-like quality in its final verse, “see when I die be sure I’m gone / don’t leave ‘em nothing to work on” the frozen man leaves no doubt as to his feelings. As for myself, there are no doubts either.
