[Image(s): Water Liars. You’d never imagine that a couple of guys who look like this would
write, play, and sing so sweetly, would you?]

I don’t know how the duo who call themselves Water Liars came up with that name. I do know, however, that it’s the title of the first story in a collection by the late Mississippi writer Barry Hannah, 1978’s Airships. You can read the story here or here; briefly, it’s a first-person narrative of a man who’s come to the sudden awareness that he was not his wife’s, y’know, first. (In short order, he remembers that she wasn’t his, either — but he seems to dismiss this little dissonant factoid with ease, not to say convenience.)

Before coming together as Water Liars, the two guys — Justin Kinkel-Schuster and Andrew Bryant — had been performing alone or with other bands. For their first album, Phantom Limb, they just sort of shut themselves away in a room in a small Mississippi town, with a single microphone, their instruments, and a handful of songs. Among them, the lovely, haunting “Dog Eaten”:

Lyrics (if anyone can fill in the gap for me, I’d be grateful!):

Dog Eaten
(by Water Liars) 

The smallest hours of the morning,
When I was busy dreaming
Of tender-hearted girls
And the world without end
Forever and ever amen

My father was quietly takin’
The money I was makin’
From the dog-eaten wallet
He gave me that year

Our blood is our own but it does what it pleases and there
Ain’t much more to say
I’m alive on the highway
Dead on arrival and that’s no way to live this life

We lay on a Mexican blanket
[…inaudible…] by a carillon and some roses
And I was an owl’s ghost
And died on the side of the road

She laid her head on my shoulder
She nibbled on my ear lobe
And that was about all

My blood was my own, it done what it pleased to, and there
Ain’t much more to say
I’m alive on the highway
Dead on arrivin’ and that’s no way to live this life

Whether or not Water Liars intended the connection, it’s not hard to trace a dotted line from Hannah’s story of broken, childish illusions to the sorry tale told by this song’s protagonist.

____________________________

P.S. From a good interview at No Depression (the speaker is Andrew Bryant):

Lately, my biggest influences have been writers. We all love music of all kinds. That’s should go without saying. But I’ve been really into stories and poetry lately. My favorite writer at the moment is a Mississippi writer named Barry Hannah. He wrote this book called Airships and it really shook me. He did his own thing, and he did from his gut. I’d never read anything like it.

I guess the connection between the band’s name and Hannah’s story isn’t so coincidental!

Update 2012-05-05: I’ve received a genial email from one of the members of Water Liars to “de-mystify a couple areas you touched on.” First up was a clarification of the lyrics (I’ve made that correction above). Second, no need to wonder further about the band’s name:

…we did in fact name ourselves after Barry Hannah’s “Water Liars”. It’s one of the best book-opening stories of all time, not to mention one of our favorite stories in one of our favorite books by one of our favorite writers of all time.

Thanks, Pete!