Down and Out of Time

Sometimes examining emotional pain through the lens of other peoples' songs is a pretty healthy experience that doesn't actually cause a lot of personal grief. I've had bouts of remarkably detached emotional catharsis listening to "Virtute the Cat Explains Her Departure" by the Weakerthans, for example. (If you don't think a song about a cat can be unbearably sad, I'm afraid you're wrong.)

We like that songs reflect life, or that in the particularity of the songwriter's own pain and hope and sadness and joy, we can locate ourselves -- as Neko Case says, it can be comforting to hear "someone singing my life back to me." But when your life is being sung back to you and it is something you wish was not happening, when you are in the middle of the kind of thing that Leigh Nash wrote this song about, you don't want to hear it. It's like the chorus says -- "you're gonna feel my pain / like it or not."

Well, I don't like it. Yes, of course pain is real - but one person's pain cannot always be another's. I have seen too many times how genuine hurt turns into twisted bitterness, and how that emanates from one person and is absorbed into others. It should not happen, but it does.

The last line of the song is "your mystery is not worth being solved."

I don't want to hear this. I don't want to believe it. But sometimes I do.

Anything

But we're sealing our lips for the someday

When the needle and the vinyl play

All the songs of our pain

Songs that explain

All our circles and strains

Which begs the question: "What the heck are circles and strains?"

One John Adams, who named his blog after a line "Anything" (as I did this one) answered this question better than I could. Though his blog "Circles and Strains" has since been abandoned to the wilderness of the internet, here's what he had to say, way back whenever.

" The song is about their band being down in the dumps, haggard with the writing and recording process. They're tired, depressed, sick of seeing each other, sick of singing the same songs over and over, sick of hearing their songs over and over, sick of wondering whether or not they still have it, etc. The only thing that keeps them together, ironically, is pain. The pain inside them that fueled the creativity to write those songs in the first place. The pain that is reflected in every melancholy note the guitar plays. The pain in every percussive note missed due to sheer exhaustion. The pain that drove the pen to write words that sear the conscience with their honesty. The pain in taking the risk to bare their souls in order to record an hour's worth of music. Most of all, the pain transmitted in every breath the singer breathes, struggling to relay with honesty and conviction the battle going on inside her. Those feelings that drive us to our wit's end—seemingly on a quest to be exorcised—are our circles and strains. "

Man, I wish I had written that.

And it's an interesting comment on what, exactly, is the "essence" of Sixpence, of what they are as a band. I've brought up certain repeated motifs -- being trapped, being weary, longing, and the big dumb obvious divine discontent itself -- each of which suggests flux, a temporary state that always involves hope and change even if it is rooted in pain. Adams, however, places pain itself at the center of Sixpence's work. It's hard to argue with that -- even if pain is a catalyst, if tension really is a passing note, pain may just be the first and most immediate force driving the songs of Sixpence.

"Anything" is a song about wanting to give up, wanting a sign that it's time to quit, a sign the band wouldn't get for years after "Anything" was written. One wonders, then, what sign, burning-bush-type or otherwise, they got when they decided to regroup and start the band again. Surely, it is not only pain that compels the two principal members of Sixpence None the Richer to continue their partnership -- joy and beauty are there, undeniably, if subtler.

But watch, just watch Leigh singing one of the band's new songs earlier this year at the Greenbelt festival , as she repeats "I've failed to make it...I've failed to make it..." The guitar shrieking, her body twisting and swaying -- circles and strains here become present tense verbs, not abstract ideas. The song circles, the singer strains, and more than a decade after "Anything," Sixpence is still making songs that explain.

Watch a performance of "Anything" here.

I Can't Explain

Here are some phrases people have Googled in order to arrive at this blog:

"songs that explain love"

"i need songs that explain my life for a cd"

"songs that explain life" (many times)

"songs that explain to a person your love for them"

"songs that can explain who a person is"

"songs that explain someone"

"songs to explain hate"

"songs that explain everything"

"songs that explain things"

"songs that explain your first love"

"songs that explain everyone being alike"
"songs that explain someone not feeling like they are enough"

"songs that explain how beautiful how someone is"

To those people, well:

Sorry to disappoint you.

"I Can't Explain" is one of Sixpence's most important songs, but it's easy to ignore, buried all the way at track 12 of This Beautiful Mess. It begins (and remains) anxious, frantic, searching -- Baker's 16th-notes on the high-hat push the song forward, and Slocum plays a variation on only two chords during the verses, making for a kind of paranoid rush (and it ends with a positively spooky pedal-trickery riff, an echo into an abyss of confusion). And although Sixpence songs frequently unearth hope from the soil of despair, "I Can't Explain" never moves further than its title, repeated again and again in the song's chorus and its end. The song frequently asserts that there must be answers, there must be an end to pain, redemption has got to come, Roxy Music was wrong when they said there is nothing "More Than This," this cannot be all there is -- yet "I Can't Explain" stops short, way short, of any other Christian rock of this era, which almost always, in the last verse -- a shiny happy final couplet to the 4 miserable quats of an Elizabethan sonnet -- turns the tables and makes sure we know that Jesus Makes Everything OK.

If you consider that Sixpence emerged from a Christian culture where there are always answers, no matter how ill-suited they are to the questions, the chorus of "I Can't Explain" is positively aggressive in its refusal: "I can't / I can't explain" -- an extra "can't" for emphasis that this record, even as it asserts God watching over "this beautiful mess," will not reach a conclusion about how or why there can be such a mess, such beauty, such a God.

Because sometimes, songs do not explain anything.

Art: "Beautiful Mess" by Howard Finster, from the This Beautiful Mess liner notes.

Hear the song at YouTube, here (start at 3:43).

Brighten My Heart

In the course of doing archival research on myself, which is a somewhat distressing enterprise if only for the amount of sheer earnest emo-style songs I wrote between the ages of sixteen and nineteen, I came across a tape of myself singing "Brighten My Heart," a Sixpence song from a worship compilation called Exodus which I have never owned. I must have heard the song on Christian radio, or maybe gotten it on a compilation CD with one of the music magazines I was in the habit of reading.

The reason it felt significant -- to come across a recording of myself singing the song, I mean -- is because it is the pretty much the only song on hours of tapes I have listened to that actually still means something to me, with a sentiment that matters to the person I am ten years later. (With the possible exception of "Sucked Out" by Superdrag. But all the other songs are essentially improvised punk rock or emo numbers about a handful of girls, and most of them contain either the words "girl," "school," and "cool" in rapid succession.)

"Brighten My Heart" is a simple four chords, and the lyrics have a lovely clarity bemoaning (as usual) an undesirable state of heart/mind/body/soul. The second verse repeats the first, a sneaky tactic I don't like to let this band get away with, though they do it once in a while, but it's the prayer-response to the malady-call that makes the song work: brighten my heart, lighten my soul, still my thoughts...and ultimately, "help me open my heart to you / O Jesus, it's what I long to do."

This is a prayer I needed ten years ago, and one I need now, and one I think I will always need.

Here is a link where you can listen to this lovely song -- one of very few that Sixpence recorded which can accurately be called a "worship song."

Field of Flowers

O YOU whom I often and silently come where you are, that I may be with you;
As I walk by your side, or sit near, or remain in the same room with you,
Little you know the subtle electric fire that for your sake is playing within me.

I will tell you something I have not been telling anybody: I am writing a book. When I was 27 years old, I was floating some paper boats down a canal with a group of Chinese college students and we were writing our hopes and dreams on the boats and sending them off, wishing them well. I wrote "to publish a book before I am 30." It seems like maybe it's going to happen.

The scary thing, though, is that this book is almost -- not exactly, but almost -- a memoir, a book about my own experience, and so I am faced with a task that is actually not really easy at all: to come up with a narrative shape for pretty much my entire life and who I am.

I kind of have no idea how I am going to do this, because all I can remember about my life are little random things that seem to have no bearing on anything. One thing I remember is that The Fatherless and the Widow, by Sixpence None the Richer, was the first CD I ever bought. I had just read about Sixpence in a magazine called Breakaway, which is (or was, actually -- I think it's been a casualty of the recession) published by Focus on the Family and which probably bills itself as a magazine for "teen guys." I find it pretty amusing that this magazine -- which regularly ran articles on stuff like mountain biking, rock climbing, what to do about "zits," dating, etc. -- ran an article about a band with a girl singer who sang songs about feeling lonely and sad and spinning around in fields of flowers.

But I'm really glad they did, because I was at a phase in my life where I was looking for something in the way of guidance re what was cool and what was worth my time and what was, in a sense, "OK" music for me to listen to as a Christian teenager. I'm not sure what it was about Sixpence that made me want to buy their record -- I guess it was because they were called "alternative" music and I was 13 years old and thought maybe I was "alternative."

I am glad that I bought the CD and I am glad that "Field of Flowers" is the first Sixpence song I heard. There are things about it I didn't understand at the time -- like how influenced by the Smiths and the Cure it was, or what Slocum meant when he wrote about Whitman's "subtle electric fire" -- but I did understand the most important thing, which was this is a song about love, by somebody who knows about love. Really, it's a remarkably mature love song for such a young band, mature and knowing in its simplicity: let me know what makes you happy and I'll do it over and over and over again. Something must have stirred in my brain, an alert to the potentially erotic sentiment.

Do I have to keep using that word, erotic, to describe what Sixpence has done? If I do, it is only because so very few Christian bands have ever even dared approach the sensual and erotic, and Sixpence does so even here, on the very first song on their very first album. Nearly everything worth loving about Sixpence, the bright melodies and poetic lyrics and Leigh's paperthin voice and Matt's nimble solos and the clear, focused tightness of the pop form, is present on "Field of Flowers," with one notable exception being the song's lack of spiritual angst. That will come later, and plenty of it. So for now, let's just spin around.

Also: I could write what I've written about nearly every other song and say that "Field of Flowers" has a truly excellent guitar solo, but I'll just assume that's a given.

Sister, Mother

One thing you have to remember: even though a girl is singing it, a dude wrote it. Usually. So things get a little confused about "Kiss Me" -- not sure who is wearing the flowered hat and/or the dress, but I think it's the same person, though the "bearded barley" I'm pretty sure is just barley -- and some other Sixpence tracks. This is something I've come to appreciate about the band; not that the sentiments are necessarily somehow ungendered by virtue of being a male songwriter channelled through a female singer, but that notions of femininity and masculinity and personhood seem rather tied up in each other, like both are needed to fully realize the third.

"Sister, Mother" is one of those tracks where all the genders and family relationships are rather blended up, and (spiritual) (or any kind of) wisdom/love is somehow a picture of relationships rather than an abstract idea. "Hug him like a brother / kiss her like a sister / let it be my mother" -- is that hug him like he is your bother, or like you are his brother? Like she is your sister, or you are hers? And what is "it" and how is "it" your mother? Somewhere Slocum's liner notes for this song explain that the "Sister" here is wisdom -- Sophia -- and my money is on God being the Mother - and the Father.

Or, it could be that wisdom is just an articulate lady with a bottle of cheap blush on the corner. Sounds good, either way.

This live version of the song has a truly tasty guitar solo.

My Dear Machine

If you give up a lot, you get to come back a lot, too, and every comeback, even if you know things are never going to turn out the way you want them to, is a blessing and a promise. From the first few dirty notes on that Rhodes piano to the horns (must be John Painter on those, no?), Sixpence announces its intent to kick ass. Sixpence is not a band that does a lot of ass-kicking, as a rule, but they can when they want to, though not so much with distortion and anger as with melody and arrangement. The fist-pumping energy of "My Dear Machine" doesn't come from shouted self-righteousness -- not even from an encouraging declaration like, say "Moving On" with its "I will not let them ruin me" refrain. It's the energy of the earth and the spirit, the shoots ascending for the rebirth, the careful husbanding of a craft left to rust.

It was LL Cool J, Google tells me, who said "Don't call it a comeback." But I say, always call it a comeback. Always come back.