John Hardin stares down death on “To The Terrible Blood”

The Americana songwriter discusses his forthcoming album ahead of a show at The Bur Oak on July 13.

John Hardin is afraid of everything. Except for death. The fear is fed by what he describes as a “massive major depressive and panic disorder,” something he’s dealt with his entire adult life. The exception is a result, in large part, of working among the dead and dying as a nurse in a Madison emergency room since 2020. The confluence of fear and acceptance blows like a hard wind through the confessional that is his new album, To The Terrible Blood. Nine songs that ask the listener to accept the only two things we all have in common: “Being born and dying.” At least that’s how Hardin put it during our conversation at the end of last month. It was a fitting moment of punctuation during a talk that was anything but light.

The album is the second from Hardin’s Bright Arcana moniker. As was the case with Bright Arcana’s 2020 debut album, Bright Arcana In The Lowland Plains, To The Terrible Blood was produced by Shane Leonard in his Eau Claire-based Bungaleau Studio. In addition to producing, Leonard plays drums on the release. 

“I always try to be the weakest link in the room when recording with other players,” Hardin says. His selection of the other musicians on Blood certainly brought him close to that goal. Adding to Leonard’s emotive percussion, Courtney Hartman sings and plays guitar, and both J.E. Sunde and Hardin’s long-time collaborator Hayward Williams provide additional vocals. Ben Lester plays pedal steel, Paul Brandt tackles keys, and Jeremy Boettcher rounds out the group on bass guitar. 

This same ensemble will gather for what may be a one-time only performance of the album this Saturday, July 13 at The Bur Oak. Sunde and Williams’ own respective solo projects will open the show.

The subject matter at the heart of the album is imbued with a knowing heaviness and an unflinching clarity. That comes with the territory when the stakes are literally life and death, especially when the emphasis is on the latter.

In fact, the album’s title is lifted from a phrase in William Faulkner’s As I Lay Dying: “I believed that the reason was the duty to the alive, to the terrible blood, the red bitter flood boiling through the land.” It’s a verse that reflects a desire to tend to the sick while contending with the cold, hard problem-solving of what that entails. Poetic, but precise. 

“One of the strangest things about working in the ER, in my role as a nurse, is that I have to have the ability to walk out of a room where my patient has just died,” Hardin says. “It’s an unplanned tragic event. And I have to be able to walk out of that room and go right into another room for somebody who has a bruised toe, and pretend like what I just experienced and what this individual just experienced didn’t happen.” 

Hardin says he copes with these transitions by compartmentalizing. By putting these episodes “into a box.” To keep sane, he maintains a handwritten ledger of people who have passed in his care listed by their initials, date of death, and cause of death. “Every patient that I’ve ever had who’s died,” he says. He reads through the list from time to time. “Then I can go back and kind of process it a little bit, and sort of process that person’s experience, that family’s experience,” he says. “They live on that page, even if it’s a stranger. It’s always a stranger.”

Hardin says that unlike people who die during hospital stays, patients in the ER most likely wake up the morning of their demise never thinking this is the last day. “People who die in emergency rooms are often forgotten people,” he says. “Drug overdoses, things like that.” He says his list of initials is an act of respecting the life they had: “Something you don’t have time to do when it happens.” 

“Our society hides death,” he says. “I think it’s very unhealthy.” 

“I Wash The Bodies Of Your Dead” speaks to Hardin’s focus shift during COVID’s peak. During that time the songwriter paused his pursuit of music to become a registered nurse and start a hospital career.

“Traded in a song to sing for the isolation suits at the infirmary / Now I wash the bodies of the dead / And the only songs I sing I sing for them,” goes a particularly telling portion of the song.

“It’s just a song about working during the pandemic when I had to get dressed in a big isolation suit and go in and wash somebody’s body after they died,” Hardin says. “And in that moment I found that the only songs I’m singing in my life right now are for these [people], you know. I’d be in there… You’re alone with an individual in their room. I talked to them as though they could still hear me. I use their name.”

Just as Hardin blanches at the thought of people thinking he flips these moments into art fodder, he’s also concerned that people would conflate the clinical depression he endures with a “tortured artist” profile. Hardin says he’s struggled with depression for “all his adult life.” On this topic he’s very direct. “I hate that people romanticize that about musicians or artists in general,” he says. “Because there’s nothing I wouldn’t give to take it [away]. And if there’s anything, any byproduct that comes with it, you can take that, too.” He pauses. “I don’t want any of it. It’s ugly and it can run your life.”

These themes of self-doubt and sadness, away from the hospital, are explored in the track “I’m Afraid Of Everything,” where Hardin mourns:

“Punch the clock until my fingers bleed / Take the doctor’s pills until my blood stands still / Will it be the starter home or the infirmary / For the family man afraid of everything?”

Hardin says his approach to writing is always words first, music second. He writes giant slabs of lyrics, then whittles down until the words left belong together. Like chapters in a book. And the songs on Blood create a musical novel. The lyrics are included in the beautifully packaged vinyl LP, the cover of which is a blurry, close up picture of his father shooting a photo back at you with an old Pentax.

Music actually smoothes the ride for these turbulent themes. But melodies power the album’s emotive punch as well. To say the least, it’ll be intense to see Hardin do these songs live. Apart from death, he’s still afraid of everything—including live performance. On Saturday he’ll be surrounded by the very people who lifted these songs into existence with him, which should provide a level of both camaraderie and comfort.