Shallow Songs

It’s all in the context really. First you hear the beat and only then do you pay attention to the lyrics. It’s madness pretending to be music. Loud and quiet, terrible twos. Sometimes so soft, that you strain your ears trying to catch the barest intonation. Is it a window or a willow? Trying to make sense of inchoate sounds. Is it a man or a woman? Warbling syllables and sighing vowels, murmur and brush past each other. Delirious in dreams, words missed out and not missed. Saxophones and trombones, metallic and melancholy, leading to wonder and then fading a bit too soon.

I love words. I love reading. I love reading about reading and reading about books (and they are different things). It’s my most favourite thing in the world. But I am curiously drawn to songs that give me goosebumps and often I am not even hearing the words. Call it a drop, call it a hook, I am like a cat which has gotten its favourite treat. I will stick out my neck and allow you to pet me then. A bassline that carries the certainty of desire, a drum solo that answers to no one in its indulgence, virtuosity shown in creating something that’s sharp angularity and snappy chaos and doesn’t explain itself and is unashamedly unapologetic about it. It luxuriates and wallows, taking directions only in the moment it finds itself in, glorious and joyous, but only sometimes and sometimes driving deeper and darker, but even then, without purpose and predestination. I react to it without thinking, without hesitation as my limbic system processes pleasure and joy and gives me chills and makes me fearless. The frequency just matches somehow and yes, resonance results (I know).

We are such tactile creatures, seeking to capture moments and emotions and I don’t know how mere sounds can provide such stimulus in what it essentially an intangible and ephemeral medium. These songs evoke that feeling of extreme satisfaction. Keeping you sated, even as you place it on a loop, looking to wring the last bit pleasure from it, putting the volume on high and drowning out the disturbances and distractions. Closing your eyes, sometimes sighing from the pleasure of it and sometimes crying like your heart would break without really knowing why. There are songs that take you back to a moment in time, like when you came home almost running from school because you wanted another listen of that Savage Garden track to see if the goosebumps still happened and when you cared too much about the quality of sound for the first time (and frustrated that the parents bought a Philips machine when Sony had, obviously, the best sound).

So yes, there are these songs and thank God that they exist. Intensely personal and extremely surprisingly, not because of the lyrics. Sometimes you are even ashamed of liking them (and that’s all me) but despite everything, they exist on your playlist and they travel with you, device to device, growing up yet standing still, primal echoes in your head, tribal and monastic and shallow and deep.

__________________________________________

So a post about songs. I want to be perverse and not put in songs today. But that would be wrong. 

1. Massive Attack - Paradise Circus. From Heligoland. Mezzanine is their best album probably but this song has been stuck in my head for a few days now. Do hear Teardrop (hearing it for the first time is like nothing else).

2. Jeff Buckley and Liz Fraser - All Flowers in Time. A bootleg probably, this unreleased song is raw and unfinished and so very very sweet. A talent lost too soon, like Shannon Hoon maybe (but a bit more famous I guess).

3. Leonard Cohen - Suzanne. Just because.

________________________________________

I used to quiz. So I want to point out that Liz Fraser sang on Teardrop and Buckley is probably best known for his cover of Hallelujah. Connections. And I want to suggest a book that seems appropriate tonight (Love is a Mixtape).