Off the legendary Pieces of a Man album, possibly the finest singer-songwriter record of all timecomes The Prisoner, a progressive song from one of the best voices in soul.
A 9 minute epic that starts ominously with the soul dampening thud of some bass drums, the eerie otherworldly scratchiness of an avant garde violin and the jangling of set of rusted chains. We are instantly thrown into a slave ship, the minimalism of those drums being struck with oppressive finality, the trembling vulnerability of Brian Jacksons' piano and Heron's iconic achingly crisp rasp. As always he is found contemplative and commenting against a smooth jazz double bass and piano combo, but the self destructive lyrics are given a new edge with the ceremonial pounding of the drums.
Delivering images of "black babies shackled and bound" and the violence done to them is arresting in it's horror and the desensitized brutality.
Further lines such as
"If I follow my mind, I know I'll slaughter my own" and "My woman, she don't say, but she hates to see her man chained this way...hemmed in by a suit and choked by a tie" sum up the existential jail or prison of his state of mind that so many of his songs were set in.
The clinking of the rusting chains and the continual interruption of those one two punch drums are again another brutal contrast to the endless fluid piano runs.
