Tension is a Passing Note

Sometimes, when I'm feeling melancholy about the way Divine Discontent turned out (yes, I do actually devote mental energy to such things, sorry to say)  I lament that it does not end with “ Tension is a Passing Note," is it did on the original pre-release, the one with the sad songs that were eventually replaced by all those pop singles I assume someone forced the band to record at gunpoint.

"Tension" would end the record on a note of peace and resolution, instead of the melancholy and regret of "A Million Parachutes." (For the record, I think that song works very well as an album closer as well.) Yet perhaps it is appropriate that it ended up in the middle of the record. Pop songs are (or should be) studies in restraint, of artistic expression flourishing within incredible constraints. You've got three minutes, much of which will be repeated, to get your musical ideas, your feelings, your life, across to a listener who is just as likely to hit the shuffle button as to keep listening.

This is another campfire acoustic tune, the horizontal-romance cousin to the vertical-devotion psalm "Melody of You." "Tension" is a song with a gorgeously catchy fingerpicked hook, about leaving a lover behind, hopefully temporarily (clearly in the context of being on tour in a band, but it works for anybody -- try listening to it next time you're on a business trip, and cry!).

It's the temporariness that I think works. Put it at the end of the record, and it wraps everything up in a neat little package. Like I said, I wish it was at the end, and that everything did resolve. But put it before "A Million Parachutes," and you get a tension that only temporarily resolves, and eventually gives way to loss and nostalgia. And the cycle repeats, again and again.

A few years ago I read through the Hebrew Bible book of Judges with some friends from church. When I was younger I thought the Biblical stories were simple: stories about good people, or cautionary tales about how not to be. What struck me through this reading was not that we can "apply" the "lessons" of the Bible somehow, thousands of years after the writings were collected -- that the purpose of Scripture is somehow to thank God we're not the Bad Guys as we try to be like the Good Guys. What struck me is that these are in part stories about who and what we are -- that we are the bad guys, most of the time, even when we think we're doing what's right. That maybe we're all trapped in (as Sixpence put it on This Beautiful Mess) a "Circle of Error," but that amid the wrongheadedness and injustice and pain, there is great joy and beauty to be found if we know how to pursue it.

"Tension is to be loved," Slocum writes and Nash sings, "when it is like a passing note to a beautiful, beautiful chord." But the chords never stop changing, and the song never ends, thank God.