And I’ll Make You Okay, And Drive Them Away
Elliott Smith, I discovered twice; the first time was during Good Will Hunting, where I thought “This is a terrible film, but I like the music, it reminds me of Big Star,” and thought little more about it, and the second was when I was in the middle of one of those breakups where everything takes on significance of its own, no matter what you do. At that time, I was listening to a lot of Big Star’s third album – the infamous, depressive Third, which I somehow managed to have in two different versions – and from that, mostly “Blue Moon” and “Take Care,” the… I don’t know, the sweetest songs on the album, perhaps? I was melancholy and lost, so it was no surprise that when I heard someone play “Waltz #2 (XO)” on the radio, with its heartbreaking melody and lyrics, that I fell in love.
“Between the Bars,” the song above, is probably one of my favorite songs of his. Again, it’s less anything you can explain and more the overall experience of the song, the way his voice sounds as much as what he’s singing – I’m a sucker for the things you can’t put into words – and the odd, melancholy hope of the song. For someone who gets a lot of shit for being so depressing-sounding (Kate repeatedly says that he sounds so sad everytime she hears him), I’ve always found something optimistic about most of his music. There’s a song that might’ve been a B-Side or a demo or something else that you find on the internet and don’t really know the proper origins of, called “Place Pigalle,” and there’s one point towards the end of the song where he sings the simple line “The taxi waved down, goodnight, sleep well,” and every time I hear it, it makes me think it’s the most hopeful, love-filled thing that I’ve ever heard.
He’s dead, of course, and his death depressed me for weeks after; even now, I secretly hope that it wasn’t really suicide but some elaborate murder that we’ll never know the truth about, as if that’d somehow make it better. The album that he was working on when he died, the post-humous From A Basement On The Hill, may be one of my favorite-sounding albums ever made, but it’s also one that I’m scared of, that I’ve given all this supernatural power to, thanks to my listening to it for the first times around the time that my mum died. For weeks afterwards, I was terrified that somehow the album had some magical power that had indirectly led to her death, and I refused to listen to it, to even let myself think about it. Even today, when I hear songs from it, part of me wonders whether something terrible is going to happen to someone I love.
And yet, despite that, Elliott Smith is a hopeful, positive person to me. Despite all the better reasons to think otherwise. I still don’t know if that’s stupidity or optimism.
Not All Of Us Have An Ace Rock And Roll Club
There comes a point in everyone’s life, I’m convinced, where they fall victim to their own self-mythologizing. Or, at least, start their own self-mythologizing, which is practically the same thing as far as I’m concerned; that time in life when you become convinced that everything is exactly right, that your life is full of fascinating things happening and interesting people and that this is the moment that you’ll always remember and that other people would want to know about.
This may, of course, just be my own rationalization for having done it coming into play; my personal self-mythology begins around 1995 and ends about three years later, spanning the end of my art school experience (as a student, at least; the dark lost years of teaching followed, thereby firmly ending a period I’d like to remember). I’m not necessarily sure why I was convinced at the time that those were going to be the Best Days Of My Life – they weren’t, by the way, and I’m still unsure that I’ve found those particular days yet – but I was, and because of that, every day was lived in some strange mix of expectation of the amazing and constant feeling that I should try and remember everything for posterity… both of which held me back, ironically, from actually doing that much worth remembering years later. Instead, I lived a familiar routine of friends and relationships that were almost certainly doomed from the start, of studying during the day and going to the same clubs at night with the same people and listening to the same music week after week.
To put it like that makes it sound more depressing, more mundane than it was – definitely more than it seemed at the time. But when I think back at everything that was happening, and how caught up in it all, I wonder whether the reason I was so convinced that everything that was happening was so special was because I was trying to make it come true by believing hard enough.
(Here’s an example of the kind of self-mythologizing I was indulging in at the time; this is from 1997, I think.)
The One Band Reunion I’d Want To See Live
Being of a certain age and a certain nationality, it’s probably saying very little to admit that Blur are one of those bands to me, the ones that have some strange magical quality that made them seem, for awhile, to be soundtracking my life so closely it was as if I’d imagined them (In my defense from calls of cliche, it wasn’t the Modern Life Is Rubbish/Parklife/The Great Escape era of their heyday that I fell for so hard, but the Blur and 13 albums, particularly the former). There was something about them that I identified with, but I could never explain it – It’d be the way that Damon Albarn’s voice cracked during “Tender,” or the way that the line “Nothing is wrong, she turns me on… I just slip away and I am gone” seemed too true when I first heard the song, or everything about “Essex Dogs,” from the dystopian summer lyrics to the drone and noise the song falls into – and, when Graham Coxon left the band during the recording of Think Tank, I felt sad as if something important had happened.
That they’ve come back together now, and are playing gigs and Glastonbury and everyone’s singing along, is a weird feeling – I’m jealous that I can’t be there, and curious where my cynicism has gone about the whole reunion thing, and also, in some unspoken and unexplainable way, feeling less old at the thought of seeing them again, just like I did more than a decade ago, in a tent too small, standing next to people who made me happy, nervous and alive in ways I didn’t understand at the time.
