Northern Lights

I've been waiting on this one for a long time -- at first I thought to be in the proper mood to write about "Northern Lights," one ought to be as sad as the song itself seems to be. But I'm on the mend (I think) after a week or two of being sick and tired, and I feel like writing about this, my favorite Divine Discontent B-side.

Did I say sad? That's not strictly the case -- this is the prettiest love song Sixpence has recorded: it brings together the best bits of "Kiss Me" (the electric jangles, the effortlessly catchy chorus) and "Field of Flowers" (the nimble guitar solo, and, um, the acoustic jangles) and rises above both with the sincere plea in the chorus: "Baby, please stay/ we can make it through another day." Why then, is this song so sad? As much as I want to tiptoe around the relationship of Sixpence's music to the band's own lives, I feel a deep ache when I hear this song simply because of, well, divorce.

Matt Slocum is a very private person, and the last thing I want to do is discuss the details of his life (not that I know any). Still, many of the songs cut from Divine Discontent (like this one) were relationship songs -- "Us," "Deeper," "Loser Like Me" -- and "Northern Lights" seems to me the most personal of songs the band recorded during that era. It echoes the themes of "Tension is a Passing Note," with more specificity: this is a song about leaving a spouse behind while a band is on tour. Leigh Nash once commented in an interview that she wasn't sure if Matt had written "Tension" for himself or for her, since it was equally applicable to them both. "Northern Lights," though, has the rare quality of being sung almost all the way through by Slocum himself (unless I'm mistake and it's another member of the band -- but I'm almost certain I hear him here) -- he sings every word of the verses in harmony, and in unison with Nash on the chorus, his vocals pushed much further back in the mix.

If either of Sixpence's two principal songwriters can be said to have made a "divorce record," it is Nash, not Slocum -- the Fauxliage album (which she made with the members of the dreamy techno group Delirium) is a brutal and personal account of her breakup with her husband. She's always been the public face of Sixpence, and has been candid about her divorce in interviews. Slocum has to my knowledge never mentioned his own in interviews, and although the songs recorded in the Divine Discontent sessions are not breakup songs, they are beautiful and sad -- none more than "Northern Lights."

I could be reading too much into all this. I know that when I write about music I am writing about people, people to whom I have a responsibility to be charitable. And I love and respect Matt Slocum and Leigh Nash like older siblings; I have been listening to their music for half my life. So my interest in the details of this song -- the reason I'm doing this absurd project at all -- has nothing to do with prurient celebrity gossip and everything to do with wanting to understand this beautiful music by these dear people as best I can.

Incidentally, Matt Slocum got married several years ago, and now has a child -- he wrote beautifully about parents anticipating the birth of a child on "The Last Christmas" from Sixpence's Christmas album, released in 2008 -- and Leigh Nash recently got engaged. She wrote about it in a blog post a few months ago, and I'll quote her final sentences here, because these words are something like what I feel when I listen to Sixpence, even to a song that pulls the heart apart like "Northern Lights":

"Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. I love you. I love you. I love you."