The record
At a glance
- Artist
- Pearls Before Swine
- Released
- August 1970
- Album
- Fourth studio album
- Original tracks
- Ten
- Label
- Reprise RS 6405
- Producer
- Peter H. Edmiston
Why it matters
Rapp's most concentrated songs meet Nashville chamber precision
The Use of Ashes is the album on which Pearls Before Swine's changing-group identity becomes a focused studio method rather than a personnel problem. Tom Rapp wrote all ten songs and sings with Elisabeth, while Peter Edmiston places them among Nashville musicians chosen for specific instrumental colors. Charlie McCoy, Norbert Putnam, Kenny Buttrey, Buddy Spicher, Mac Gayden and David Briggs bring the discipline of a session ensemble without smoothing away Rapp's cracked, intimate delivery. Flute, oboe, viola, cello, violin, harpsichord, dobro and harmonica allow orchestration to remain tactile rather than cinematic background.
The first side moves from an ash-polished jewel through an imagined film and spaceflight toward childhood and a rose. The second side becomes more recognizably human and historical through questions, named figures, age, the Riegal disaster and a long closing war song. Every composition is credited to Rapp, but the album is not a closed solo performance: Elisabeth and the instrumentalists continually alter how each narrative can be heard.
Its achievement is compression. Ten songs in roughly thirty-two minutes make private images and public catastrophe share one carefully proportioned language.
The Netherlands and Nashville
Written near Utrecht, recorded in three Nashville days
These Things Too had moved Pearls Before Swine from ESP-Disk to Reprise while the original Florida lineup dissolved around Rapp. After that album, Tom and Elisabeth Rapp lived for several months in the Netherlands near Utrecht. Most of The Use of Ashes was written during that Dutch period, and the finished LP is dedicated to the Netherlands.
The recording moved to Woodland Studios in Nashville in March 1970. Sessions took place across three days with musicians associated with the city's studio network, including several Area Code 615 players.
Peter H. Edmiston produced, Rick Horton engineered and Brooks Arthur mixed.
More material was recorded during the Nashville sessions than the ten-track album required; some of it later appeared on City of Gold. Reprise issued RS 6405 in August 1970 as the fourth Pearls Before Swine album and the second for the label.
Rapp and the Nashville circle
Two voices and a bounded studio ensemble
Rapp's sole writing credit across the programme makes lyrical continuity clear, but his guitar does not dictate every arrangement. Elisabeth's voice changes scale around him, sometimes widening a private thought into dialogue and sometimes making a refrain sound communal. McCoy's dobro, guitar, bass and harmonica permit folk and country colors to enter as individual choices rather than a blanket Nashville style. Putnam and Buttrey create a stable low-register and rhythmic foundation while remaining session contributors, not a newly named Pearls lineup.
Spicher can move between violin brightness, viola depth and cello weight, allowing one string player to support several emotional registers. Briggs' piano and harpsichord help separate direct songs from more suspended pieces such as From the Movie of the Same Name. Duke and Pippin use flute and oboe as countervoices rather than continuous sweetening. Edmiston, Horton and Arthur preserve Rapp's vocal vulnerability inside playing whose technical polish never becomes the subject.
Orchestrated intimacy
Harpsichord, dobro, strings and winds around fragile narratives
The Jeweler opens with a plain guitar-and-voice center surrounded by delicate keyboard and orchestral detail; the cleaning action becomes a model for revelation through residue. From the Movie of the Same Name is largely instrumental, with harpsichord and winds making an absent film feel more vivid than a supplied plot. Rocket Man uses a compact rise-and-fall arrangement to keep space travel connected to family separation and mortality. God Save the Child and Song About a Rose complete side one through protection and organic fragility rather than increasing scale.
Tell Me Why begins side two with a direct question; Margery answers abstraction with one name. The Old Man uses measured tempo and lower instrumental weight to make aging an observed human process. Riegal brings historical catastrophe into the programme without changing Rapp's vocal into documentary narration. When the War Began lasts more than five minutes, letting the final arrangement accumulate rather than ending in a concise protest slogan.
Track guide
Ten songs from The Jeweler to When the War Began
The Jeweler
A jeweler cleans precious material with ash, joining damage, residue and renewed clarity in one small action. Rapp's restrained vocal and the fine instrumental detail make craft a moral practice rather than a display of wealth.
From the Movie of the Same Name
The title promises a film that does not exist for the listener, and the largely instrumental arrangement supplies atmosphere without story. Briggs' harpsichord helps turn absence into a screen on which sound can project its own scenes.
Rocket Man
Rapp draws on Ray Bradbury's astronaut story but keeps the machinery secondary to a family living with repeated departure. Space is not liberation: distance becomes work, fear and the possibility that return will fail.
God Save the Child
The familiar form of an invocation is narrowed to one vulnerable life. Elisabeth's vocal presence and the chamber arrangement complicate protection, making it a shared wish rather than proof that safety will arrive.
Song About a Rose
The first side closes with an object associated with beauty but equipped with thorns and decay. Rapp avoids decorative description; the short song treats the rose as something living whose meaning changes with attention.
Tell Me Why
Side two begins by replacing first-side images with a direct unanswered demand. The arrangement remains poised, so urgency comes from the repeated question rather than from increased volume.
Margery
A proper name concentrates the album's human scale. Rapp sketches relation without converting Margery into a complete biography, while the Nashville ensemble leaves enough room for absence to remain audible.
The Old Man
Age appears as a person observed in time rather than a general symbol of wisdom. Lower strings and measured movement give weight to ordinary endurance without forcing pity or resolution.
Riegal
Rapp approaches the wartime sinking of the prison ship Rigel through the title's issued spelling and a restrained narrative frame. The song acknowledges mass death and the captain's final grounding action without turning disaster into spectacle.
When the War Began
The longest track closes by returning from one historical vessel to the wider recurrence of war. Instruments accumulate around Rapp's quiet delivery, making the contrast between human voice and organized violence the album's final pressure.
Uses and remains
What remains after love, memory, machinery and war
The album has no linear plot, but ashes establish a method: remains can clean, reveal, preserve memory or testify to destruction. The Jeweler uses residue constructively, while Rocket Man and Riegal approach forms of human loss that cannot be polished away. An absent movie and a distant astronaut both test how stories mediate experience. Child and rose bring vulnerability into the center of the first side.
Tell Me Why refuses explanation, while Margery and The Old Man insist that history is lived by named and aging individuals. Riegal moves from personal observation to a documented wartime catastrophe. When the War Began broadens that event into recurrence without claiming every conflict is identical. The title therefore remains plural in meaning: ash is tool, remnant, devotional material and evidence of what violence leaves.
Reprise 6405
A captured unicorn on Reprise RS 6405
The original American Reprise issue carries catalogue number RS 6405. Its sleeve reproduces a detail from The Hunters Return to the Castle, a tapestry woven around 1495-1505 and now held by the Metropolitan Museum of Art. The image joins the unicorn's killing with the return of its body to the castle, placing beauty and violence together before the record begins.
Ed Thrasher received the art-direction credit. Five tracks occupy each side, with Song About a Rose and When the War Began as the respective endings. The dedication to the Netherlands records where most of the songs were written, not where the Nashville performances were made.
The second Reprise LP
An uncharted album with a durable critical afterlife
Reprise released The Use of Ashes in August 1970. The Jeweler and Rocket Man were paired on Reprise single 0949. Neither the album nor the single entered the principal American charts, so later reputation should not be rewritten as contemporary commercial success.
Period reviews recognized the strength of the writing and the unusually sensitive studio arrangements. Later critics and listeners frequently place the album among Rapp's most consistent records, especially valuing its first side. The album's reputation has been sustained through Reprise anthologies, paired reissues and covers of The Jeweler.
The fourth record
The central Reprise-era Pearls Before Swine album
The Use of Ashes became the defining Rapp-centered Pearls Before Swine album because the studio ensemble enlarges his writing without disguising its fragility. This Mortal Coil's later recording of The Jeweler carried one of his most concentrated songs into a different independent-music lineage. Rocket Man entered popular-song history independently of the later Elton John song with the same title. The Nashville players demonstrate that session professionalism and idiosyncratic folk writing need not cancel each other.
Riegal and When the War Began extend the anti-war commitment of Uncle John and Balaklava through quieter historical narration. The album's five/five balance gives images of craft and vulnerability one side and named human-history pieces the other. City of Gold's use of further Nashville-session material makes edition boundaries especially important; later tracks should not be backfilled here. Its legacy rests on precise arrangement: every added instrument creates space around the words instead of claiming attention from them.
Original programme
Keep the original five/five sequence
The original album contains ten tracks. Five tracks occupy each side. Song About a Rose closes side one. When the War Began is the original ending.
All ten compositions are credited to Rapp. From the Movie of the Same Name is largely instrumental, not a reason to classify the album as instrumental. Riegal retains the issued song spelling. Later Nashville-session material belongs to City of Gold.
A listening path
From a jeweler's ash to the beginning of war
- Begin with ash used as a tool rather than only a remnant.
- Let the absent movie create its own instrumental screen.
- Hear Rocket Man at family scale.
- Take child and rose as the end of the original first side.
- Restart with a question and move toward named lives.
- Approach Riegal as history, not atmosphere.
- Give the closing war song its full accumulating duration.
Research trail
Sources and further reading
- Official ten-track digital programme — Apple Music / Warner Records
- Tracks, sessions, personnel and production credits — AllMusic
- Original Reprise RS 6405 catalogue record — Reprise Album Discography
- Contemporary British review and catalogue number — Beat Instrumental archive
- Official artist and Reprise catalogue chronology — Drag City
- The Hunters Return to the Castle — The Metropolitan Museum of Art