The Never Ending Happening

Even in his youth, Bill Fay never composed songs an older, wiser man wouldn’t have written. He already sounds seasoned on 1970’s “Garden Song,” begging to be buried among potatoes and parsley—a humble resting place for a lyricist equally preoccupied with the cosmic and the epic. Identifying with the ingredients of a peasant’s supper, looking “for lasting relations / with a greenfly, spider, or maggot,” he sings of bonding with the natural world, beginning with the bottom rung.

“The Never Ending Happening,” the standout track from 2012’s Life Is People, Fay’s first studio album in four decades, feels like a sequel broadened in scope. It consists of a simple circular piano progression, with a burst of grainy cello toward the end. Fay’s low voice, quavering yet resonant as a kindly senator’s, pores over not only the inevitable marriage of man and earth—in a word, death—but also the lot of man while on Earth:

The never ending happening

of what’s to be and what has been.

Just to be a part of it

is astonishing to me.

The theme that life is a divinely constructed be-in, a piece of collaborative performance art that never concludes, echoes throughout Life Is People. Individuals, as small as greenflies and maggots in the grand scheme of things, are brushstrokes, instruments contributing to the magnificent swell of life governed by an omnipotent force. Fay plays himself, the observer in the twilight of life, still awestruck:

Souls arriving constantly

from the shores of eternity.

Birds and bees and butterflies

parade before my eyes.

He also takes care to emphasize the non-uniformity of the happening’s participants: some are crippled by circumstance, others are emboldened by privilege. Likewise, he sings of the beauty the world possesses—“Nightfall stars sun rise again; / birdsong before the day begins”—but also of its capacity for destruction, even without the meddling of its inhabitants. Awesome and treacherous, the “waves crashing against the cliffs” are beautiful in the way that unrelenting natural phenomena usually are, the way they can carve shapes into slabs of rock but also swallow humanity in salty gulps.

As gentle brimstone suffuses “The Never Ending Happening,” we find Fay considering the ultimate conductor, impresario, and artist of the whole happening, “yearning for the day to be / when God’ll roll his stone away.” As the piano progression loops,...