‘A song which describes you.’
It’s getting predictable by now, isn’t? My inability to get these things down to the one song demanded. I’m going to cut the preamble tonight. It’s Good Friday but it hasn’t been a good Friday. I’m tired and strung out and…
… well. Here goes.
‘Oh My Life’ by Beth Rowley sums me up. The lyrics of that song talk of a person who claims a book tells her story: well, that’s just right for someone like me, someone who’s had her nose in a book ever since she discovered the magic of stories. I remember hearing this for the first time, live, at a concert at which Beth Rowley was supporting Duke Special. A magical event, in Belfast’s Grand Opera House… a day I’ll never forget. Beth Rowley has an incredible voice, and the song, the arrangement, everything, is very life-affirming. It’s not without its note of sadness - I mean, it couldn’t be, could it, if I’m choosing it to describe me? But it’s also lively and upbeat and full of life, which I hope I usually am as well. So to that extent alone, the song describes me: a cheery exterior of someone who loves life, with a different person somewhere underneath, who probably thinks about things a bit too much. And the ‘book which tells my story’? That’s easy. It’s ‘The Great Gatsby’ by F Scott Fitzgerald. But it doesn’t tell my story in the sense that I’m not one of the central characters. I’m not Gatsby and I’m most definitely not Daisy. No: I’m the almost peripheral Nick… observer, narrator. Biased or unbiased - ‘one of the few completely honest people I’ve ever known’, with all the semantic punctuation of questioning that such a statement could entail. In ‘Gatsby’, Nick is akways the observer, often a part of the action… once, he’s the agent of the action, reuniting Gatsby and Daisy, but mostly he’s the reporter, the thinker, the reflector. And that’s me. Those words of Nick’s, those reflections which begin and end the novel… I have never, ever read anything in the so-called literary canon which has made me shiver quite so much with recognition. Good or bad: readers have railed at Nick’s judgmental passivity or occasional moral ambivalence… but that’s me too. Nick got caught up in the world of New York’s high society for so long, but eventually became disgusted by it and had to return home to the ‘conservative’ mid-west, reassured by the common connections of everybody knowing everybody else. It’s like a hall of mirrors producing a concertina of everlasting reflections. Nick reflects me, or at least the person I think I am, in my own first person narrative, a flawed and imperfect one… and this feeling is in turn reflected by ‘Oh My Life’.
‘Roll Away Your Stone’ by Mumford & Sons sums me up. I don’t make friends - properly friends - easily. Or often. I have such a huge circle of acquaintance that I need to start writing Christmas cards in the Halloween holidays, and that’s wonderful in itself… my address list labels span Ireland, England, France, the US… and many places in between. But as for true friends? I’m just not good at it, really - because I’m terrible at letting people get to know me. Really know me. The imagery of ‘Roll Away Your Stone’ brings Easter to mind, and of course it’s Good Friday evening as I write this. If we’re following the real-time of the triduum, the stone hasn’t quite been rolled away yet. But the song’s about the magic of what happens when you do roll away the stone and let someone get to know you properly, and when they respond by rolling away their stone too, and how wonderful that can be. The song picks up on how terrifying this rolling away can be, and on how lonely life can be if we never take that risk. The tempo of the music, constantly shifting, sums it up too - the exhilaration of the choruses showing the excitement of a returned trust or a new friendship, the more thoughtful, quiet verses showing the writer thinking about it a bit more. And that’s me - really. There’s nothing better than that feeling of being able to trust someone, but nothing worse than having that trust betrayed. The rhythm-change towards the end of the song, with the references to ‘Macbeth’ (‘stars hide your fires…’) sum up the insecurity of these things… how someone can take advantage of you when you’ve rolled away your stone and been a bit too honest or too open. The song ends quietly… the intertextual references continue to the end. It sums me up in its changing attitudes and its obsessive references to books or songs or poems, and in how it analyses every detail just a bit too much. ‘You read way too much into them things,’ said an AS student to me once, commenting on a lesson on textual analysis. In life as well… and quite possibly in analysing this song!
‘Fallen’ by Sarah McLachlan sums me up. This is quite a negative song, lyrically, despite being very beautiful in musical terms. I am neither negative nor beautiful, but I do identify with this song in that it’s about getting things wrong but constantly trying again. I have an endless admiration for small children who are learning to walk - their curiosity, their habit, when they fall over, of (largely) getting up and having another try. I suppose it’s like the Fingal’s Cave story, Robert the Bruce and the spider. I’m not so good at the getting straight back up and trying again bit, but then I suppose falling over (whether literally or metaphorically) hurts a bit more for a grown-up. But I do always try, in the end, no matter how discouraged I’ve felt, and this is what this song is about. Difficult times leave nobody unscathed… I have yet to meet the person who has had the perfect life… but in general people are quite good at the ‘brave face’ thing, so sometimes going through difficulties can feel very lonely. When that happens I turn to music or poetry or novels, and the lyrics of this song, I think, introspective as they are, are good at describing what this feels like. What it feels like when you turn to something different when you’re let down by the people you thought you could trust.
And in the predictable perfect cadence, keeping with the cadent theme, ‘Falling Slowly’ by Glen Hansard sums me up. The song is, famously, from the film ‘Once’ - a film I loved. When trying to describe it to someone, the Monday morning after seeing it, I said ‘it’s like a cross between ‘Lost in Translation’ and ‘The Commitments” - enough to put the person off, I fear - a funny, often light-hearted, but in the end deeply felt film. The song fits the film perfectly, but more than that… long after some of the details of the film were forgotten, the song lingered in my memory. I find something of myself in the simple arrangement of voice and piano (for the most part anyway - let’s forget, briefly, about the strings in the bridges and choruses, shall we?) -I do think of myself as quite a simple person, really - I’m not someone given to an elaborate or ostentatious social presence, in any way. The kind of person who’s invisible in a crowd. The song draws me to it in how it makes reference to the shipping forecast. I’ve always loved listening to the shipping forecast, ever since childhood, and now, living a mile from the sea, and noticing every change in waves and breeze, the imagery and language seem even more crucially part of life. People say you get more attuned to weather and seasons as you get older: I’m not sure whether it’s that, in my case, or spending my life until my late twenties in towns and cities, but I know the last 10-15 years have seen me becoming hundreds of times more aware of these things than I’ve ever been before. I even have apps about weather, tides and so on on my phone these days. And if the apps on our smartphones are the indices of our personalities, well… then I fit the stereotype about age and weather and the seasons.
Either way. Perhaps it was taking things a bit far, on reflection, to find, on a trip to Dublin, the music shop which was the set for various scenes in ‘Once’, to sneak into the piano showroom at a quiet time, and to play, so quietly that only I could hear it, a verse or two of ‘Falling Slowly’. Perhaps a little sentimental… perhaps a little ridiculous. But still. If I’m rolling away my stone and writing honestly about songs which describe me, then I’m the person who would do something like that once in a while, and I don’t think that’s something which lies outside the lyrics of any of the songs I’ve written about tonight.
Just like a song might, I’m going to finish what I’m saying with a reference to the start: to ‘Oh My Life’. A couple of verses in, we find this:
‘And my thoughts
Are there to see
Too late to change
Anything that’s mean
If I’d a pen
I’d change some facts
But I’m scared
Of how my family
And friends will react…’
… and that certainly describes how it is, right now, to be pressing ‘create post’ at the end of this box.
Terrifying.
No comments:
Post a Comment