'A song from your favourite album.'
I'm not going to write about my favourite album, because I don't really have a favourite album. There are lots of albums that I love: 'The Joshua Tree' by U2, 'Scarlett's Walk' by Tori Amos, 'Songs From The Deep Forest' by Duke Special... and so many others. I like listening to albums, in general... I playlist obsessively on iTunes, of course, but there's something that just feels 'right' about listening to a selection of songs in the order the artist intended you to hear them... not skipping the tracks you like less, and so on, but experiencing it as a narrative - an entity in itself - a sort of musical novel in an average of about twelve chapters.
Since I last wrote there have been difficult times - times which have made it impossible for me to write anything. Times without words. Times which have changed things completely. So tonight I'm going to write about a couple of songs from an album I had just discovered before these hard times came, and which I listened to a bit during those weeks.
The album is 'The Animal Years' by Josh Ritter.
I discovered this first through a favourite TV programme (so you see, there is a 'favourite' theme after all), the legal drama 'The Good Wife', when the song 'Here At The Right Time' was used on the soundtrack. It was a stunning episode: based in almost real-time on a case concerning a death row prisoner, with the legal team who are the series' main characters having nine hours to save their client's life, the pressure of time preserving the old tragic unities of time and place. The song was used in the final scenes and it really was an effective choice. The way the piano introduction echoes at the start... I imagine an empty room, a wooden floor. It matched what was happening on screen so perfectly that I could feel a lump in my throat: yes, I was moved by the plot, but I was almost even more moved by the perfect matching of that plot with the chosen soundtrack.
The song is about people and relating to each other and timing. Something I've never been much good at. Something it's been important for me to try to get right since that night when I first heard this song. Something in itself which the song refers to in its chorus... the difficulty of getting it right when we try to relate to one another. The simplicity of this song has a beautiful honesty and integrity about it - the piano part is almost Chorus from a Greek drama commenting on the meaning revealed in the lyrics. It's stunning. I love how you hear the pianist's foot release the sustain pedal as the song ends - a final punctuation of sorts to end the song.
In a couple of weeks where it's so often been hard to find the right words, I've taken refuge and solace in songs like this one.
In those weeks I've also done an awful lot of thinking about what it's all about, here: staring out to sea in our almost-too-beautiful late spring sunshine, watching the waves breaking, and thinking about time passing. Shakespeare's Sonnet 60 - that kind of thing. Shakespeare's Sonnet 60, which has a particular place in my heart because I was handed it to analyse, cold, in my university interview! The waves breaking towards the pebbled shore... washing up again elsewhere, hundreds of years later, on Arnold's 'Dover Beach' and again, now, on Ireland's north coast, and everywhere, and timelessly, and forever. I've placed my feet where they will someday be beneath the wind-ruffled grass and thought about the breaking waves and the passing clouds and the profit and loss...
Back to Josh Ritter. The other song from 'The Animal Years' I'd like to write a bit about tonight is called 'Thin Blue Flame'. I knew nothing about this when I heard it first, late one afternoon... but somehow the first time I heard it I stopped what I was doing and just listened. I think it was something about the solemnity of the chord sequences: submediants and subdominants and tonics and all those hymn-like plagal cadences. Majestic and melacholy at the same time, impossible though that may sound. As the song developed I could detect (in the crescendo of chord and the rapidity of lyrical delivery, staccato, like gunfire almost) an anger being expressed. I had no idea what it was about, initially, and read the lyrics several times. War, I thought - or war as a metaphor for something else, a death, a broken relationship perhaps? A bit of reading led me to Ritter's own words of explanation of the song, that it was written during the Bush presidency and was a reaction to 9/11 and the reaction to it by the US government of the time. It's a song about life and death and war and peace and eternity and belief and the temporal nature of our life here and the ultimate pointlessness of what we do to gain revenge on one another.
It's not exactly a protest song - though at times it has that about it. It's more a reflection on a thought, an experience... an individual's reaction to something universal. To me, it's not just about 9/11 and the military policy that followed it. It's about more than that. It's about being human and searching for meaning: about grasping on to what you can find to make sense of what you're going through. Big issues. Difficult times. Sadnesses. Heartbreak. Fear. Suffering. Searching.
When you read something, or listen to a song, or look at a painting, you experience the meaning the artist created through the filter of your own life and your own views. You bring to the book, or the song, or the painting, all your own beliefs and thoughts and preoccupations. Maybe I experienced 'Thin Blue Flame' in my own way because of what was going on in my life when I discovered the song. Maybe that's not what Ritter meant at all. Maybe, though, I was somehow 'meant' to find it just in those terrible weeks of searching - thinking - fearing. Maybe it's a bit like hearing the tracks from an album in the order in which the artist originally intended. Maybe there's a song for a time, an album for a time, and maybe I was meant to discover 'The Animal Years' at the end of April 2011.
Maybe it was there at the right time...
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