MAN, IT'S COLD. I just had to open with that. It's easily forgotten how arduous January can be, and I'm sure you're all being reminded of it as you desperately clamber into your houses, where the heating is on, and press against your living room radiators for all you're worth! I have just done exactly that, after going to see Faux Feet play at The Sugarmill. Chatting to their frontwoman Sian about songs afterwards, in response to me enthusing about one of their songs called 'Tribes' (which I can't share with you as it's not been recorded or filmed yet!), and I started to tell a story, which I never got to finish, which is, in part, why I'm telling it here.
I react really strongly to songs. My earliest memory of this is going back quite a few years to when I was living with my parents, a silly-headed lad in my late teens (approaching my twenties). I was really starting to listen to music, and had fallen very much in love with Crowded House. They were songs that evoked strong imagery, had soaring choruses, and just embedded themselves in my subconscious. 'Distant Sun' was a song that was so uplifting in it's choruses and harmonies that, one night, that optimism and beauty just went straight into my heart, and I found myself crying, happily.
The next time that happened was under a strange setting. I was, once upon a time, engaged, and was staying at my fiancee's parents' house for a week (they lived quite a way away, it's a long story). I got on well with them, despite some quite serious ethical issues with what was a simple-yet-complicated situation, and had, in the course of that week, discovered Eels' 'Electro Shock Blues' record. The thing I connected to with Eels (especially with this record) was this one man who had suffered so much grief, yet although these songs said "Things have never been worse", they also said "but they will get better". There we sat, in a living room heated by a small log fire, in the middle of the Welsh hills, television on, and I was trying to be happy whilst fuming so vociferously at aspects of the world, that I put my new copy of 'Electro Shock Blues' on my CD walkman, in company, and stared at the TV, wondering how this whole thing would ever straighten out into something resembling happiness, when 'Climbing To The Moon' started.
The corners of my mouth started to twitch, and I couldn't swallow properly, and I had to leave the room. I lay in the spare room with the lights off and cried as quietly as I could. I know that I wasn't crying just at the sadness of the song, but at the beauty with which it was articulated. It is a beautiful song, no doubt about it, and the emotion of it (and subsequently the whole last half of that record) is there and very, very real.
The main crux of what I was trying to say to Faux Feet's Sian (and it is curious going from that previous part of the narrative to this, as there is a shared name involved, which has just amused me no end) revolved around the band Jimmy Eat World. I daresay most people in the UK's introduction to them was the record 'Bleed American' (which was, for some reason, renamed to be an eponymous record), and this was certainly my introduction to them. I found it to be loud and exciting, and tender, by turns. Stirring is probably a good word to use, and the same goes for their next records, 'Futures' and 'Chase This Light'. Digging backwards to their previous records, though, wasn't especially revelatory, save for two songs ('For Me This Is Heaven' and 'Just Watch The Fireworks', both of which can send me into reverie). This week I bought their most recent album, 'Invented'. It's just as musically tight and well-produced as ever, but it lacked, for me, the emotional punch and the weight of those previous albums.
But I know that feeling when it comes, when a song is bursting with life and feeling, and that Faux Feet song, 'Tribes', is loaded with it, because every time they play it, a small flutter goes from my chest to my throat, and I smile.
It's funny how different songs can get into your head and affect the way you feel, and how other songs just don't do that at all. It's even more amazing how one can be moved enough to write music oneself. The songs I write, for example, I really hope that they strike a chord (sorry) with whoever listens to them. Each one comes from a personal place in one way or another (yet have I to master the art of writing narrative songs that tell a story not belonging to me, and I couldn't honestly say it's a skill that I can imagine myself learning - I am in awe of the Colin Meloys and Tom Waits' of this world for that reason), and they tend to wear my heart on all their sleeves. It is the music that has made me cry, and laugh, and think, that has made me want to keep writing and playing songs. It has, in various songs over the years, shown me true feelings, and in doing so hand-delivered a way for me to keep expressing myself in turn. It's almost as if music, that almost intangible force, is passing a message on, and has been for centuries, through all the myriad people that have put pen to paper, and hand to instrument (although quite what happened as far as speed metal goes, is a bit beyond me).
I'd like to raise a glass to all the music makers, the people who make us happy, sad, and most of all, not so alone in the world. It's these reflections of life that give us hope, tell us everything is going to be okay, and that it doesn't matter if we worry, so long as we know that things work out in the end. I couldn't go a week without hearing the songs that make me stop and have a bit of a happy sob. I've listed some of them below, why not list yours in return?
Goodnight, sleep well, and keep singing.
Love,
John xxx
Music that has made me go a bit wobbly
- Crowded House - Distant Sun
- Eels - Climbing To The Moon
- Barenaked Ladies - War On Drugs
- Ben Folds Five - Selfless, Cold & Composed
- The Mutton Birds - Last Year's Shoes
- Jimmy Eat World - Hear You Me, For Me This Is Heaven
- Jeff Buckley - So Real, Grace
- Erin Mckeown - Aspera
- Lamb - Gorecki
- Bright Eyes - Landlocked Blues
- Queens Of The Stone Age - Everybody Knows That You Are Insane (that bit in the middle where Josh Homme sings "I feel nothing, am I better yet?" is just powerful)
- Gemma Hayes - At Constant Speed, Keep Running
- Cathy Davey - Sing For Your Supper (those harmonies!)
- Liam Finn - Second Chance
- Nerina Pallot - Learning To Breathe, Human, Blood Is Blood, and the entire 'Year Of The Wolf' record
- Dead Radio Society - Untitled #2
- Bon Iver - Towers
- Lisa Hannigan - I Don't Know
- The Do - Too Insistent
- Clint Mansell - 'Welcome To Lunar Industries (Three Year Stretch)' from the 'Moon' score (I think soundtracks deserve their own separate hall of fame, which I can't be bothered to do, as I've been writing this for a while now, and it's late/early, depending on your perspective. Can you measure a person's personality by how they view this time of day? A bit like the glass half full/half empty, if they say it's late or early at 2am, what must that tell you about their personality? If a person just says "It's 2am!" that could either mean they view things in a very literal context, or it could mean that they've been trying to sleep and it's probably time to stop playing the drums.)
No comments:
Post a Comment