Ames Progressive

“This song has actually been known to make it rain,” Michael Martin said from the stage at Papa’s Corner a few weeks ago, introducing his song “Thunderstorm Waltz.” He was not joking. I first saw Michael play at an open mic at the Roosevelt Summer Music series in 2007. Through the dusk, the sky above the schoolyard had been darkening, the surroundings deepening into a thick pink glow, and when Michael and Tom Russell, on the mandolin, played “Thunderstorm Waltz,” the rain began to fall.

Well, perhaps Michael didn’t make it rain, but the correspondence of his song and the weather is more than a straightforward coincidence. “Thunderstorm Waltz,” the eighteenth of the ninety-seven (ninety-seven!) songs Michael has composed in the past three years, is a beautiful expression of the desire to break down the barriers separating one person from another and make a connection. As the song progresses, the speaker makes a long-desired confrontation with the mysterious Virginia, a recurring character in his songs, and the two of them are caught outside in a thunderstorm. But instead of fleeing the rain, the song’s characters abandon themselves to the elements, to the weather, to the world as they dance in the downpour.

I recently spoke with Michael about his songs and the craft of songwriting and we lingered on “Thunderstorm Waltz.” “I tap into this idea of weather and weather meaning other things and it’s not so much intentional,” he said. “I love that idea, you know, that rain is this cleansing thing and that the weather, the power of the weather, the lightening … illuminates things in the dark.”

The weather, as it cleanses and illuminates, also provides an opportunity for the song’s characters to share the unusual intimacy of a dance in the rain. Michael spoke of an “inability to connect and always feeling like I’m on the outside” which he transcends in the course of the song: “this perfect storm is when I break through and then it happens. And that’s why it’s a happy song because I finally - I do break through, in the song at least.”

In early 2008, Michael composed a song cycle that he calls the Transatlantic Trilogy. The trilogy of songs – “Mind the Gap,” “Elizabethtown,” and “Across the North Atlantic” – tell an ongoing story of characters separated by distance who can only communicate in snatches, from afar, and who yearn for impossible confrontations. The story was inspired, in part, by a friendship Michael formed with an English woman, whom he has never met, in an online acoustic guitar forum. “There was kind of this idea about not knowing somebody, but feeling like there was this need to connect. But you can’t, because they’re on the other side of the ocean,” he said. The experience of communicating without actually meeting resonated with the songwriter’s perception of disconnection in his interactions with others. “I feel this distance a lot of times that I can’t bridge; I can’t close the gap,” he said. In the Transatlantic Trilogy, human characters are separated from one another like small outcroppings of arid land surrounded by endless ocean. A gulf opens between selves: “Mind the gap, there’s a very long way from me to you,” he sings.

The Transatlantic Trilogy explores the parallels between physical distance and psychological distance – separations of continents and separations between people. As a professor of Landscape Architecture at Iowa State University, Michael’s mind is well-attuned to the nexus of place and person. “A landscape architect who is a designer is engaged in this idea of creating places that are going to affect the way people live,” he said. And the way many people live today involves a ceaseless flow from the small-scale of our immediate surroundings to the large-scale of our globalized world. The feeling of disconnectedness that is expressed in the trilogy reflects the realities of human separation in a global landscape. But Michael’s thoughts are occupied with the relatively small-scale, too. “My biggest interest in landscape architecture is in neighborhood landscapes and thinking about how to design places so that people have opportunities to, for instance, interact socially with each other in a way that maybe they can’t in the landscapes we design in this country, in suburbia in particular.”

Roosevelt Elementary School, where I first saw Michael make it rain, was once the social center of a neighborhood that grew around it. The school is closed now, but in the summer it still serves as a place where people can meet and connect - because music is there. Music has the unique power to forge bonds between humans as it breaks barriers between strangers. Michael often sings of the failure to connect, but the very act of singing about that failure can lead to a new connection between the singer and the listener. His songs are musical communications with the power to create connections. “There was never a way to do this until songwriting for me,” he said.