A Blade is about responsibility to oneself and to others, and the ways in which those responsibilities overlap. To heal others, you must heal yourself, and to heal yourself, you must confront discomfort. On “Thank You My Pain,” DePlume invites his pain in, sits down with it, proffers his gratitude. “Thank you, my pain/For coming again/When so often I turn away,” he sings over a fluttering saxophone and grooving rhythm section, stretching out his syllables with the tender emphasis of a reunited lover regretting his absence. “A Paper Man” recognizes the potential for avoidance and finger-pointing. “A paper man/Lighting candles/Doing things/He can’t handle,” he growls while his sax curls and drifts like wisps of smoke. “Do the flames blame the paper?” Still, DePlume’s anger at his self-destructive interlocutor dissipates over the course of the song until he ends with a sweet invitation to reunite: “Let’s try, while we still can/Let’s just try/Would you be up for that?”
Four instrumentals run consecutively through the second half of A Blade, as if DePlume must reach beyond poetry to elaborate on his ideas. These songs act as a guided meditation on healing, and DePlume can express more with his saxophone than a guru with a well-thumbed thesaurus. A title like “Who Are You Telling, Gus” is sufficient to telegraph the theme of self-doubt; the track’s quavering melody, building from quiet hum to triumphant roar, conveys all the drama of the inner search for assurance. At the song’s end, Thompson’s rolling drums and Ruth Goller’s steady bass drop out and only DePlume’s sax is left, whispering his hard-won secret in your ear.
Spirituality infuses DePlume’s music, making many songs more like wordless hymns than jazz tunes. “Prayer for My Sovereign Dignity” does have lyrics, technically, but they float so effortlessly amid an ether of sax and violin that DePlume considers the song an instrumental as well. You might guess what he’s singing based solely on the celebratory verve of his sax lines, lifted from below by ascending piano and from above by soaring violin, a melody that works like a mantra. It’s a rare gift to make an instrument speak, rarer to make it communicate such a vital truth: Dignity doesn’t have to be sought after or even prayed for; it is always there, intrinsic in each person.
When DePlume’s voice returns on “Too True,” it is as hesitant as a false dawn, reluctant to break the spell that he and his band have just cast. The song is about loss—the loss of a loved one, and the loss of the self that could only exist in relation to them. DePlume barely mutters its words, barely plucks its notes on an acoustic guitar. It is perhaps DePlume at his most vulnerable, but he radiates strength in the afterglow of the album’s triumphant run of instrumentals—having done the work, he can face his pain, settle into it without fear.
