_____Richard Thompson's songs reflect the dark passion of an unclassifiable musical genius.

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Oh the songs pour down like silver
They can only, only break my heart
Drink the wine, the wine of lovers
Lovers tired of being apart
_________-- "Night Comes In"
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BY SEAN ELDER | Five years ago I saw Richard Thompson performing at St. Ann's church in Brooklyn Heights on a double bill with David Byrne. Each artist performed solo in a benefit for the perennially struggling cultural center (performance venue on Saturday night, church on Sunday morning). I'd seen Byrne a few weeks before doing the same schtick he did that night -- guitar, boombox, semi-samba pop pastiche -- and in the past had only seen Thompson supported by big bands (saxophone, piano, accordion, bass, all driven by his silvery electric guitar). Seeing him alone, accompanying himself on acoustic guitar, was a revelation, one that put the fanaticism of his fans (and the fatalism of his songs) in perspective.

Sure, the setting had something to do with it: Framed by stained-glass windows depicting biblical scenes in this Gothic-style cathedral, the audience shifting uncomfortably on hard church pews, Thompson cut a prophetic figure up there onstage. In his cloth cap and beard he looked like some pilgrim called upon to preach. And the acoustics helped: Each note of the opener, "I Ride in Your Slipstream," hung in the cavernous air like the autumn leaves outside, poised to fall. But it was the mystery of his lyrics that made the moment so ineffable. The words could be sung to a remote mate ("You think you don't know me/But you're wearing my ring"), but they could also be sung to an unattainable and unknowable God: "I ride in your slipstream/I wear your reflection/I echo your heartbeat/In the wind." Either way, the song, sung in his smoky baritone, seemed almost sacrilegious in this setting -- was marriage or devotion to God an endless pas de deux with one party retreating, the other advancing, ad infinitum? "I ride in your slipstream/But don't try to touch me/Just trust me to love you/I love you." It seemed, as another Thompson title has it, "The Madness of Love."

The clash (or confusion) of the secular and the religious predates rock music. Fairport Convention, the British folk-rock outfit Thompson fronted as a teenager, walked the line on its second LP as vocalist Sandy Denny sang an ancient ode titled "My Lord Is in This Place, How Dreadful Is This Place." God was spooky and so was life; and love, with all its dangers, was just a reminder of the no-win proposition. But what was winning? Thompson (along with his then-wife and singing partner, Linda) converted to Sufism in the early '70s, and that mystical sect of Islam believes in separateness as our condition. Rumi, the founder of the Mawlawiyyah order ("whirling dervishes"), wrote of the search for an absent God as a separation from a loved one. For Thompson, love songs were always devotional, and songs of separation -- the best of which he wrote during and after his painful divorce from Linda -- are the stuff of tragedy.

But tragedy is not Thompson's stock in trade, and neither, necessarily, is love. Drawing on musical influences from the Middle Eastern to the Celtic to classical, swing and country (with a few stops for oompah bands and Cajun music along the way), he has penned hundreds of tunes about love, yes, and death and betrayal -- but also about ice cream and alcohol and '52 Vincents and old 78s and MGB sports cars, Maggie Thatcher, fast food, you name it. And he has written them in a variety of styles, evoking (sometimes in a single album) Yip Harburg, Bob Dylan, Hank Williams, Randy Newman, Elvis Costello and countless English dance hall plunkers. He is, in short, a master songwriter and a motherfucker of a guitarist, if a vocalist of only limited range. (For years he didn't need a voice: He had Linda.) Listening to "Watching the Dark" (Hannibal), a nonchronological compendium of Thompson's works from 1969 to 1993, is like hearing a musician's life on shuffle. He comes at you from so many places in so many styles that you finally feel surrounded. What strikes you most of all, though, are the images. It's like flipping through a deck of tarot cards, with pictures almost medieval: spinning wheels, fallen soldiers, darkened plains and weeping maidens. He even wrote a song called "Poor Will and the Jolly Hangman" ("Here's a toast to the jolly hangman/He'll hang you the best that he can"). What you do not see is the hanged man, for that is the singer himself.

N E X T_P A G E .|.Life as a high-wire act

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