Melting Alone

 It may seem I'm on a perpetual quest to find what is Sixpence's anti-"Kiss Me." Is it "Sad But True?" Something slower, like "Trust?" Something with bad-ass guitars, like "Too Far Gone?"

For your consideration, I submit "Melting Alone," the biggest bummer of a song on Sixpence's biggest bummer of an album. The pre-chorus -- which actually feels more like the chorus; it's more memorable, with Leigh singing in as high a register as maybe she ever has -- is mostly the repeated line "Will I ever know what's wrong with me?"

This is probably a "lost love"-type song, as the pre-chorus ends with "will I ever see your hand again in mine?" So in theory there is a lover being sung to here, as in "Kiss Me," but the verses are utterly mired in loneliness. Where "Kiss Me" is clearly about a couple of people going out and having a good time in the "bearded barley" (look, I don't know, it's poetry!), this song is about how it feels to sit in your own misery. I don't have a copy of the CCM magazine interview with Matt Slocum about this record, but I do remember the interviewer posing this question: "True or false: it is possible to fall in love with your problems." This feels like a rhetorical question for a person whose band bio photo features him obscuring his face in his hands, as if in tears, incurvatus in se, as Augustine says.

The whole album revels in this miserable inwardness, and although this is ultimately not a place anybody should stay, I find the record beautiful and important because of this, not in spite of it. It can't be understated how big a deal it was for a band marketed to evangelical teenagers to occupy a space of lament, (self-) doubt, and sadness from a decidedly Christian standpoint. This song is about getting drunk by yourself (or mostly by yourself -- what exactly are the "figures of stone"? Are we in a churchyard or a cemetery or something?) because of a breakup -- but it's coming from a place of yearning for connection with God.

Also, that electric twelve-string. Cannot get enough of that sound.