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).