tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-30247624140249377232024-02-07T11:31:24.865-08:00songs that explainall our circles and strainsJoelhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10707554930245556019noreply@blogger.comBlogger50125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3024762414024937723.post-3306971046847261402022-06-14T08:08:00.006-07:002022-06-14T08:08:45.972-07:00Melting Alone<p> 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?"</p><p>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?"</p><p>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 <i>CCM</i> 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, <i><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Incurvatus_in_se">incurvatus in se</a></i>, as Augustine says.</p><p>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 <i>because</i> 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.</p><p>Also, that electric twelve-string. <i>Cannot</i> get enough of that sound.</p>Joelhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10707554930245556019noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3024762414024937723.post-26539394479287578102022-06-10T09:37:00.003-07:002022-06-10T09:37:26.665-07:00Falling Leaves<p> "Falling Leaves" is my favorite song in the early-period Sixpence sub-genre I'll call "just thinkin' 'bout my thoughts," which includes "Thought Menagerie" (obviously) and "Musings." And like those two songs, "Falling Leaves" isn't really "about" anything. Ostensibly, it's about standing in a forest and watching the leaves change and then falling to the forest floor and being covered by the leaves and then sinking into the ground, never to be found. (This is what we call, in the biz, a "literal reading.") </p><p>The chorus is a young Leigh Bingham at her 10,000 Maniacs/ Cranberries-ish best -- her vocal on "never to be / never to be found" is right in the sweet spot for her range, exquisite, unhoned and pure.</p><p>This is 100% the kind of song you write when you are a teenager just figuring out how to write songs. While a lot of <i>The Fatherless and the Widow</i> transcends this sort of thing, I find "Falling Leaves" quite charming in this respect. The song feels like a vehicle to do interesting things with the guitar -- and even bass, an instrument whose prominence on this record I have neglected, no matter how often various former bass players (there must be hundreds) in Sixpence comment on this blog. There are almost some New Order-style, bass-as-guitar riffs on this track, which I love, but Slocum's love of chunka-chunka riffs with digital delay -- which will reach their absolute chunka-chunka-iest on "Love" -- is what drives this song. </p>Joelhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10707554930245556019noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3024762414024937723.post-29744100250821896972022-06-08T07:22:00.006-07:002023-11-22T22:17:15.607-08:00I Can't Catch You<p><br /></p><p></p><table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEiQLWYAx4pVEjAELMud8q12cxm7iXvZJ7Bs-Bn--F-6-VGrS1M9R8ZAG7W737U0PGdKT3osqMT7ypR73XdKShhn77_DHPkic3jzWJuP8cDnSaX6WzEq9rWKsngk9DnubEnrUS_d1NX61dvmJFm9rRdaAFJAv3Oob4c6vnpkscDhPbobtLZ5wp-ssvgE" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img alt="" data-original-height="252" data-original-width="300" height="240" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEiQLWYAx4pVEjAELMud8q12cxm7iXvZJ7Bs-Bn--F-6-VGrS1M9R8ZAG7W737U0PGdKT3osqMT7ypR73XdKShhn77_DHPkic3jzWJuP8cDnSaX6WzEq9rWKsngk9DnubEnrUS_d1NX61dvmJFm9rRdaAFJAv3Oob4c6vnpkscDhPbobtLZ5wp-ssvgE" width="286" /></a></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><i style="font-size: x-small; text-align: left;">Look how young and sexy this band was 22 years ago.<br /></i></td></tr></tbody></table><p></p><p><b>Q: Why is this not the third single from the self-titled album? </b></p><p>A: Technically, it is.</p><p><b>Q:What do you mean? I never heard this song on the radio.</b></p><p>A: I think <i>I </i>did, once, actually, but it might have been in the<a href="https://gimletmedia.com/shows/reply-all/o2h8bx"> "Case of the Missing Hit</a>" style "test market" way, where a song gets played a few times on a few stations but if it doesn't have legs it doesn't get support.</p><p><b>Q: What do you mean by "support," exactly? </b></p><p>A: That's a good question. I have a vague sense that it is literally person-power, in those days in the form of mailing things and making phone calls, trying to get program directors to add singles to regular rotation. My experience of this was in college radio, and I definitely had a warped sense of the importance of it all -- I even sort of believed that because these people who were being paid a couple of thousand dollars to work on a record for a few months were regularly calling me, that I was somehow part of The Thing we were all doing (what was The Thing? The 'music industry?' 'The arts?'). I would even call them back when they left messages, which I know sounds a like a polite and normal professional thing to do, but now I realize this is tantamount to calling a telemarketer back if you missed their call. In any case, there seems to have been little appetite, either from record company or radio-listening public, to turn "I Can't Catch You" into a single.</p><p><b>Q: You know that apocryphal-sounding story about the online chat Rivers Cuomo had with Weezer fans years ago, where <a href="https://www.weezerpedia.com/wiki/Songs_from_the_Black_Hole">someone asked him why <i>Songs from the Black Hole</i> never came out, and he replied simply "rotr," </a>which allegedly implies that Matt Sharp's <i>Return of the Rentals</i> album covered such similar thematic ground as the putative second Weezer album (a synth-heavy, space-themed concept album, which to be honest Return of the Rentals is not, but I guess you could somehow make the argument that some of it is)?</b></p><p>A: Yes, but I don't see what that has to do with this.</p><p><b>Q: Well, you have several times <a href="https://relevantmagazine.com/culture/2907-a-look-back-sixpence-none-the-rich/">compared Sixpence's relationship with "Kiss Me" to Radiohead's with "Creep," </a>so I thought maybe you'd get the analogy.</b></p><p>A: That's not a question. </p><p><b>Q: My point is, from a larger pop-culture perspective, anything Sixpence does or did always has to contend with "Kiss Me," or to a lesser extent, "There She Goes." These are both so large in the public imagination that they are almost the only things anyone knows about this band. And "I Can't Catch You" was released as a single (<a href="https://www.discogs.com/release/14494041-Sixpence-None-The-Richer-I-Cant-Catch-You">in Australia at the very least</a>) immediately after both of these, probably in the aftermath of the second pressing of the album (with "There She Goes" tacked on), so the fact that it didn't sound like either of these must have been its death knell, don't you think?</b></p><p>A: I sort of do think that, but somehow there's more to this. The song is somehow both too simple and too complex to have succeeded on pop radio. Melodically it's as catchy as anything, and that chorus might even veer further into the ethereal lightness of the Sundays -- man, remember <i>that</i> band? Did you know they broke up in 1997, the year <i>Sixpence None the Richer</i> was originally released?</p><p><b>Q: Yes, because I am you and I also just read that on Wikipedia. But who's asking the questions here, anyway?</b></p><p>A: I'm sorry.</p><p><b>Q: Anyway, you were saying something about how "I Can't Catch You" is both simple and complex, which is of course impossible. Care to elaborate?</b></p><p>A: What is mean is, the riff is complex, but the production is minimalist. It might be the perfect marriage of the guitar-rock-driven Sixpence and the pure aural pop candy Sixpence, but there's somehow not <i>enough</i> of something to make this a big MTV/radio/mall/car speakers song. Not enough what, though -- reverb? Compression? Room sound on the drums? There's nothing dumbing the song down to its melody -- it's a beautiful tangled mess of guitar riff, bassline, vocal -- every part stands out by itself. It's like when you get stoned and you somehow can hear each component of a sound as if it is a separate entity. It's also got that classic thing Slocum does where he plays riffs on the B string but hits the open E every once in a while, which is always <i>great</i>, but it's just another layer of <i>stuff </i>that makes this song too much for pop radio. And man, the way the bassline sneaks higher and higher at the end of the verse? *Chef's kiss*</p><p><b>Q: I thought you said it was not "enough," not "too much." But whatever. What about the lyrics? Is it not happy-go-lucky enough, maybe?</b></p><p>A: It's kind of opaque, I suppose -- who is "you?" What are "these bags in the way?" But yeah, this song is depressing in a way that a lot the Sixpence catalogue is, and that people who liked "There She Goes" probably wouldn't dig -- "what's there to love about myself?" But I don't really see that as the main impediment to radio success. </p><p><b>Q: It's 2022. Why on earth are you still talking about the radio?</b></p><p>A: You might have a point there. </p>Joelhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10707554930245556019noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3024762414024937723.post-48408417623923167952020-06-30T14:35:00.002-07:002020-06-30T14:35:52.171-07:00SoulThis is to my mind one of the heaviest songs on Sixpence's debut, but it's betrayed by a lightness of melody and riffage (it has two distinct guitar riff intros, a peppy 80's new-wave one followed by a more morose alt-rock one). The song is quite plainly about the death of Slocum's father, who, again quite clearly from the lyrics, was not what Evangelicals call "a Believer." Using imagery from C.S. Lewis' <i>The Great Divorce</i> and distinctly Anglican/Episcopal liturgical language, the young Slocum wonders what exactly has become of his father in the afterlife: "Tell me father, are you riding on / The fictional bus up to heaven above? / Do you listen to the angels on the outskirts / Have they persuaded you?"<div><br /></div><div>This is a familiar question for any young person who has lost a loved one, and one every Christian must ultimately grapple with: how could a person we deeply love -- indeed, a person God deeply and unconditionally loves -- somehow be permanently lost? Different Christian traditions, and different thinkers within those traditions, have different answers. And one must come to terms with the temporal loss of death, whether one believes that human souls can indeed be eternally lost. <br /><div><br /></div><div>The sprightly chorus offers no answers: "But I know I'll never know" (which rolls off Leigh Bingham's tongue so nicely) / "'till I pass away to the next life." Yet there is a <a href="https://www.ignatius.com/Dare-We-Hope-2nd-Edition-P591.aspx">Balthazarian</a> hope in the bridge: "mother and I pray/ that it would happen someday."</div><div><br /></div><div>I am grateful not to have known such personal loss even now as I near the age of forty, but I know it is only a matter of time. I am not a theologian and I do not claim to know much of anything about what is beyond this life, but I am, to borrow a phrase from Cornel West, "a prisoner of hope." To quote the folk song "The Old Churchyard":</div><div><br /></div><div><div class="PZPZlf" data-lyricid="Musixmatch72334704" style="background-color: white; color: #222222; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: 14px;"><g-expandable-content aria-hidden="false" data-eb="0" data-mt="0" jsaction=";rcuQ6b:npT2md" jscontroller="wrFDyc" jsname="WbKHeb" jsshadow="" style="display: block; transition: none 0s ease 0s;"><i><span style="color: #444444; font-family: Georgia, Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13.6px;">I rest in the hope that one bright day</span><br style="color: #444444; font-family: Georgia, Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13.6px;" /><span style="color: #444444; font-family: Georgia, Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13.6px;">Sunshine will burst to these prisons of clay,</span><br style="color: #444444; font-family: Georgia, Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13.6px;" /><span style="color: #444444; font-family: Georgia, Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13.6px;">And old Gabriel's trumpet and voice of the Lord</span><br style="color: #444444; font-family: Georgia, Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13.6px;" /><span style="color: #444444; font-family: Georgia, Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13.6px;">Will wake up the dead in the old churchyard.</span></i></g-expandable-content></div><div class="g" style="background-color: white; color: #222222; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: 14px; line-height: 1.2; margin-bottom: 28px; margin-top: 0px; width: 600px;"><div class="rc" data-hveid="CAIQAA" data-ved="2ahUKEwjLo4e0vKrqAhWFt54KHc-qATkQFSgAMAJ6BAgCEAA" style="position: relative;"></div></div><div><span style="background-color: white; color: #4d5156; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: 14px;"><br /></span></div></div></div>Joelhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10707554930245556019noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3024762414024937723.post-37705684818231181232020-03-30T13:18:00.000-07:002020-03-30T13:18:30.573-07:00Puedo Escribir<i> Oír la noche inmensa,<br />más inmensa sin ella.<br />Y el verso cae al alma como pasto el rocío.</i><br />
Pablo Neruda<br />
<br />
This is an epic track. With lyrics in both Spanish and English entirely from Pablo Neruda's "Poema 20," "Puedo Escribir" is the climax of what would be "Side 1" of the self-titled album, propelled by a slinky, vaguely Latin bassline to an eventual frenzy of tom-toms and cellos. (Ironically, the <a href="https://www.discogs.com/Sixpence-None-The-Richer-Sixpence-None-The-Richer/release/3217264">song itself is absent from the actual LP release</a>.) <br />
<br />
If the lyrics weren't from one of the 20th century's greatest poets, it would be easy to see this as a throwback to some of the sad-sack lost-love jams from <i>This Beautiful Mess</i>, but there's more gravitas here. Leigh Nash handles the Spanish ably (she's often said in interviews she feels a connection to Spanish; it is perhaps worth mentioning that New Braunfels, Texas, where Slocum and Nash grew up, is 35% hispanic, and that Slocum's mother was an ESL teacher) and the rhythm section is at its restrained best -- both Plasencio and Baker's technical prowess seem to work better on this record in general; they are not, strictly speaking, balls-to-the-wall rock musicians.<br />
<br />
My favorite thing about this song is the way it grooves despite being in a weird time signature; it is in 11/8, which is why Dale Baker has a writing credit on it -- he is apparently the one who figured this out. (The only other Sixpence track that credits Baker is "The Garden," which starts with a prominent snare drum intro he presumably wrote). In early performances of this song, including one I personally witnessed sometime in 1995, Baker would step up to a microphone and introduce this with a weird double-time clapping thing. I still use this clapping technique today to impress my children.Joelhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10707554930245556019noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3024762414024937723.post-31962572085554201912019-10-04T14:02:00.004-07:002019-10-04T14:02:55.805-07:00The Waiting Room<div>
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
"The Prolific and the Devourer: the Artist and the Politician. Let them realize that they are enemies, i.e. that each has a vision of the world which must remain incomprehensible to the other. But let them also realize that they are both necessary and complementary, and furthermore, that there are good and bad politicians, good and bad artists, and that the good must learn to recognize and respect the good." - W.H. Auden, <em>The Prolific and the Devourer</em> </blockquote>
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
<span style="background-color: white;">"This song is sort of a lashing out against the powers that had put our artistic endeavours on hold. The feeling of stagnation and waiting was like being in a cell, a type of waiting room with no escape." </span><span style="background-color: white;">- Matt Slocum</span></blockquote>
</div>
<div>
<span style="background-color: white;"><em></em> </span></div>
<i style="background-color: black; color: white;"><br /></i>
<div>
One can conceive of "We Have Forgotten" and "Anything" as songs in and of themselves, but "The Waiting Room" seems to exist only as a part of the suite of the three songs that open the self-titled album -- though it's the third of the trilogy, it feels more interstitial than the other two -- perhaps that's intentional, given its subject matter. Matt Slocum <a href="http://www.sixpence-ntr.com/disco.html">subtitled the opening trio "Exploring the Crisis," </a>and "The Waiting Room" does the most direct grappling with the crisis.<br />
<br />
What is "the crisis?" Unlike Auden, Slocum seems to take sides in the Prolific vs. Devourer cage match, placing himself on the side of the angels. In a superficial way, the crisis is that of the band itself, stuck in a bad contract, unable to record their new songs, unsure (a la "Anything") whether it is even worth continuing. But the "feeling of stagnation and waiting" goes far beyond the trouble recording this single album -- it's a constant theme of Slocum's songwriting, from "Within a Room" to "Still Burning" to "Give it Back." On the self-titled record, these problems are eventually resolved by "Love" and "Moving On." But given Sixpence's catalogue, this resolution is, as ever, temporary, and song about the band stuck in indie-label limbo turns out to be a song about the human condition -- the waiting, the in-between, the long middle, the not-yet.<br />
<em><br /></em></div>
Joelhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10707554930245556019noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3024762414024937723.post-20046850887409988602019-09-11T09:52:00.001-07:002019-09-11T09:54:56.501-07:00Tension is a Passing Note<iframe allow="encrypted-media" allowtransparency="true" frameborder="0" height="380" src="https://open.spotify.com/embed/track/5BOW75tu8koCbArUdan9fR" width="300"></iframe><br />
<br />
Sometimes, when I'm feeling melancholy about the way <i>Divine Discontent</i> 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 <a href="https://musicbrainz.org/release/ba5aa82f-6c6d-415d-ae6d-e68bd235eddb">the original pre-release</a>, 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.<br />
<br />
"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 <i>life,</i> across to a listener who is just as likely to hit the shuffle button as to keep listening.<br />
<br />
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!).<br />
<br />
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.<br />
<br />
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 <i>we</i> are -- that we <i>are</i> 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 <i>This Beautiful Mess)</i> 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.<br />
<br />
"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.Joelhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10707554930245556019noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3024762414024937723.post-26547101790680898872017-06-05T13:08:00.000-07:002017-06-05T13:08:31.219-07:00An ApologyI consider "An Apology" the last song on <i>The Fatherless and the Widow</i>, since it's followed only by a reprise of "Trust" that feels frankly unnecessary, like it's only on there to make sure the record has 10 songs on it. I've said before that the last song on a Sixpence album is the record's thesis statement -- the confusion of "I Can't Explain," the triumphant defiance of "Moving On," the melancholy nostalgia of "A Million Parachutes." If we treat the string-quartet version of "Trust" as the actual last song on the record, I'll buy it -- a dark, melancholy take on a hopeful psalm fits Sixpence and the record.<br />
<br />
But what does it mean if "An Apology" is the "last song" on this record? I think it makes the record a little lighter, and maybe that's a good thing.<br />
<br />
"An Apology" is one of Sixpence's breezier songs, at least from the early part of their career. It's also their first offense in the" Repeat the Verse 1 Lyrics for Verse 2" category (see also: "Within A Room Somewhere," "Tonight"), and the chorus is simple and airy. In fact, it's just not a particularly mature song, which is maybe why I like it so much, and why I think it's good as a final track: most of the <i>Fatherless and the Widow</i> is <i>really heavy</i> for a record made by teenagers. It has a right to be, but I like the idea that the album starts and ends with jangly songs about feelings -- from the giddy love of "Field of Flowers" to the simple <i>mea culpa</i> of this track.<br />
<br />
<i>I messed up, I'm sorry, I shouldn't have said that, can we be friends</i>? It wouldn't be an out-of-place sentiment in the church camp context where Matt & Leigh first met and started playing music together. It feels like very little is at stake in the refrain -- "It was a silly thing to say to you, I know" -- but the more it's repeated, the more it sinks in, and the more you realize that these silly little things matter, whether you're a teenager or not.<br />
<br />
Also, that final shift to "we know." It feels meaningful, though I can't put my finger on why. Something about moving from the particular to the universal, the individual to the community.<br />
<br />
<br />Joelhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10707554930245556019noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3024762414024937723.post-16348230671020153252014-09-16T13:51:00.002-07:002021-08-17T09:48:38.495-07:00A Million ParachutesI've alluded in the past to a couple of songs I see as Sixpence's Big Guitar Tracks -- most notably "<a href="http://songsthatexplain.blogspot.ca/2012/05/too-far-gone.html">Too Far Gone</a>" and the Sixpence ur-jam, "<a href="http://songsthatexplain.blogspot.ca/2008/09/within-room-somewhere.html">Within a Room Somewhere</a>." These are the best studio recordings Sixpence has made of Matt Slocum's guitar prowess -- I never get tired of these tracks, and hear new things in the guitar sections every time I listen to them -- but the best example(s) of what Slocum is capable of on the guitar have been the various live recordings of "Meaningless" over the years.<br />
<br />
Until now.<br />
<br />
I will save you the suspense: the video below is a ten-minute version of "A Million Parachutes" from December 2013. Be patient, and watch it.<br />
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<br />
This song is the closer of <i>Divine Discontent</i>, all bittersweet melancholy as the narrator watches the snow fall and remembers happier times. It's a very sad song, made sadder perhaps by Leigh Nash's oft-repeated assertion that it was her late father's favorite Sixpence song. On the record, it meanders, and like many of the longer songs on the record, it doesn't seem to really go anywhere, simply circling back on itself again and again.<br />
<br />
This live version seems to take a similar approach at first -- though Slocum changes the riff to be something more suitable for a single guitarist, it's still a slow, pensive 3 and a half minutes before the song's instrumental bridge.<br />
<br />
But then? Ho. Ly. Crap.<br />
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I heard this for the first time yesterday. I don't remember why I was looking for it, but I could not stop smiling as soon as the instrumental section started. This is the guitar solo I've kind of been fantasizing about since "Within a Room" ended abruptly on <i>This Beautiful Mess</i>. Slocum uses the spacey, reverby tone he was also using at the time on Sixpence's spooky and beautiful cover of Leonard Cohen's "Famous Blue Raincoat" (<a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-XhESqKCj9o">which you can see here -- guitar solo stars around 3:50</a>), but instead of leaving and letting notes ring, he just lets freaking loose.<br />
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I almost don't know what to say about this. You watched it, right? I know, I'm always trying to find a way to show people that Sixpence is a Serious Artsy Rock Band and not a one-hit pop wonder, but <i><b>seriously</b></i>, you guys. This is epic post-rock territory -- Slocum's melodic instincts, but in the style of the soaring, impassioned guitar work of Explosions in the Sky or Sigur Ros. It's the ten seconds of "Paranoid Android" where Jonny Greenwood goes nuts, but for five minutes.<br />
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I don't know who's playing drums here -- I think Rob Mitchell -- but the eighth notes he's doing on the bass drum at the crescendo of this thing really work to propel it forward, too. And the end! That classic twinkly Sixpence guitar, fading out into nothing. Slocum keeps playing even when the volume is turned all the way down.<br />
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I thought I was kind over Sixpence as a Rock Band. I think I'm not anymore.<br />
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<br />Joelhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10707554930245556019noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3024762414024937723.post-25925125879552233532013-11-01T21:43:00.003-07:002013-11-02T08:16:29.171-07:00We Have Forgotten<span style="font-family: inherit;">It comes from nowhere, and from everywhere. It is gentle, but it is insistent. It is quiet and persistent. It grows and grows and grows like a garden, opening into something that envelops you in this new world. This is not going to be a rock and roll record; it’s not even an “alternative” or “folk” record. The guitars do not even really announce themselves as guitars -- they are watercolors, or, later, conduits of melody.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: inherit;">And oh, that voice: for the first time not hidden under </span>reverb<span style="font-family: inherit;"> that AM-radio sheen of Smiths/Cure-style production. It is pristine, clear, beautiful and sad. We have forgotten, she sings. You don’t know yet what she is singing about, but you believe her.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: inherit;">And just so we’re clear, a string quartet shows up about halfway through.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: inherit;">“We Have Forgotten” is, obviously, the first track on <i>Sixpence None the Richer</i>, the band’s third and best-selling, best-known, and best album --well, I say “best-known,” but I am not sure their albums are all that well-known compared to their singles. But this is well-covered territory for us.</span><br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgDvCTtqg2c3JgAj8NVEN4CADrNyoSeHtlMtDpJ3FweleriBLhc2mB6iN1TPEN28lpPvJVqrNl_rp6s3pxhoZKzxiTej0O1wVlt6Q4HadAxf3hQmhP1nP1Uf7sBhp4AEn04V7sbDNAYWp8/s1600/4803793509a0e63698c03110.L.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" height="267" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgDvCTtqg2c3JgAj8NVEN4CADrNyoSeHtlMtDpJ3FweleriBLhc2mB6iN1TPEN28lpPvJVqrNl_rp6s3pxhoZKzxiTej0O1wVlt6Q4HadAxf3hQmhP1nP1Uf7sBhp4AEn04V7sbDNAYWp8/s320/4803793509a0e63698c03110.L.jpg" width="320" /></a><span style="font-family: inherit;">So many things seemed to be in the right place for this record, even though its recording began more or less in secret as the band attempted to extricate itself from a raw deal of a contract from a bankrupt record label for what would of course by no means be the last time.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: inherit;">Steve Taylor is probably to be thanked for this album’s immaculate sound. I’m not really familar with his other production work, outside of (I’m embarrassed to admit) the Newsboys’ <i>Take Me To Your Leader, </i>but even there he appears to have had a knack for stripping away distracting sounds and focusing on melodies. </span><br />
<span style="font-family: inherit;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: inherit;">(Thankfully, unlike the Newsboys record, he was not co-writing lyrics for Sixpence. Not that he is an awful lyricist, but when Matt Slocum is writing your lyrics you are pretty much good to go.) There is very little in the way of extraneous instrumentation, or even “production,” on this album. It is drums, guitars, bass, vocals, string quartet, and the occasional tasteful keyboard or horn.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: inherit;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: inherit;">Matt Slocum was once again solely in charge of guitars for this record -- and to be honest I’m not sure how many, if any, of the guitars Tess Wiley recorded on <i>This Beautiful Mess</i> -- and he uses a variety of textures: jangly chords, e-bowed melodies, spacey delayed riffs, most of which are on offer in this first track.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: inherit;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: inherit;">J. J. Plasencio, who famously played a six-string bass, at least at times, recorded nearly all the bass tracks for this record before leaving the band, but he and Dale Baker on drums are an infinitely more restrained rhythm section here than on their previous recording with Sixpence. Baker’s beats on “We Have Forgotten” are a clue to what is to come: he almost never even plays quarter notes on the hi-hat in this song, and the first chorus is a study holding back.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: inherit;">It’s difficult to say more about Leigh Nash’s voice -- I tried at the beginning there -- and her voice is clearly the guiding light for these songs, but to my mind it is actually the string quartet (I’ll be honest: I’m not sure it’s always a quartet, but it sounds classier to put it that way) that makes this record. Earlier records had Slocum on cello, and <i>Divine Discontent</i> has its big-budget, Van Dyke parks-arranged orchestra (or what feels like an orchestra), but in the bridge of this song, we get a beautifully arranged, never-ostentatious string section that feels like a natural part of the band rather than a tacked-on extra, as it often did in 90’s rock. The cello, viola, and violin are essential parts of the sound of this record, doubling or playing off the bass and guitar.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: inherit;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: inherit;">“We Have Forgotten” is an immaculate-sounding, gentle pop song about life in an irreparably fallen -- yet somehow, </span>indelibly<span style="font-family: inherit;"> lovely -- world. Its form is its function; its sound is its message. It is the opening chapter of Sixpence None the Richer’s clearest, purest artistic, spiritual, and musical statement. With each listen, the garden blooms again.</span>Joelhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10707554930245556019noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3024762414024937723.post-71154655342922525072013-07-09T15:42:00.002-07:002013-07-09T15:45:59.823-07:00Safety LineI believe, deeply, in marriage as a concept. But it is easy to believe in a concept, or rather it is impossible to believe in a concept: intellectual assent signifies very little, if belief is taken to be analogous to trust -- to "believe in" something/someone is to trust in something/someone. How can you trust in a thing, a concept, a disembodied idea?<br />
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This song suggests that spouses act as anchors for one another. Maybe marriage does not always feel like this, but when it's at its best (or rather when things seem to be at their worst) this is how it works: two people shepherd each other's pain and craziness, tether each other to a better reality when one threatens to spiral out of control with grief or stress or anxiety or trauma. I know this works. I have seen it work in my own life.</div>
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This song capitalizes on a strength of late-period Sixpence, which is a kind of relentless, mid-tempo groove. (See also: "Give it Back," "A Million Parachutes") Played live, these songs open up a lot of space for interesting guitar work and solos, but on record they give a sense of -- and I mean this in a good way despite the way I'll state it -- a kind of plodding, neverending stalwartness. I do mean it in a good way -- I think of these as songs that are always playing somehow, eternally -- it's just as if we turn the fader up for a few minutes at a time, then turn it back down, but those four piano and guitar chords keep playing, even if we're not listening. (With occasional breaks for truly tasty pedal steel.)</div>
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And that, I hope and pray, is what marriage is: relentless, monotonous, worn and comfortable; an anchor, a tether, a line connecting me not only to Big Things that I believe in, like love and charity and hospitality and kindness, but to one person to whom I have committed my life, to whom I have sworn I will never leave, will never let go.</div>
Joelhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10707554930245556019noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3024762414024937723.post-61243256913237336222012-08-04T11:24:00.000-07:002012-08-04T11:24:08.479-07:00Bleeding<br />
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<span style="font-family: inherit;"><i><b><a href="http://www.pollstar.com/news_article.aspx?ID=802247">Pollstar</a>:</b> Regarding the business side of Sixpence, are you and Matt the sole members, essentially owning the band 50/50?</i></span></div>
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Is Sixpence None the Richer a band?</div>
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That's an odd question; by all accounts, they are -- they've got guitars, drums, etc., and "Sixpence None the Richer" is not a pseudonym for a solo artist (unlike, say, Nine Inch Nails or even the lesser known Christian band/artist <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plumb_(singer)">Plumb</a>, which most people assumed was a band when Sixpence bassist J J Plasencio joined it, but was later said to merely be the <i>nom de rock</i> of one Tiffany Arbuckle).<br />
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But Sixpence has been through numerous lineup changes in their twenty years, and since around 2004, they've been marketed more as a duo than a band. Publicity photos no longer include any other band members but Slocum and Nash, which makes more sense, really -- especially if you remember the two versions of the photo in their self-titled record: the 1997 version with Slocum, Nash, and Dale Baker (a guitarist, a drummer, and a singer do not a band make), the 1999 one with Slocum, Nash, Baker, and Justin Cary and Sean Kelly, the latter two of whom played not a single note on the original recording.<br />
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Many hardcore Sixpence fans, or at least those nerdy enough to be on a long-running Yahoo email list about the band, which has been heating up in anticipation of their new record which is <a href="http://www.amazon.com/Lost-Transition-Sixpence-None-Richer/dp/B008B089SQ">out tuesday </a>, see the 1995-ish lineup for This Beautiful Mess and the subsequent tour as the definitive period of Sixpence as a band. It's hard to argue with this: in terms of a cohesive unit, it's the most deep and versatile the band qua band has been -- Baker, Plasencio, and Slocum worked well as an instrumental core, all of them having played together for long enough to read each other well -- the several versions of the "Meaningless" jam available on bootlegs attest to this. I've never actually seen or heard the version of the band with Wiley on guitar and vocals, but having another woman on BGVs would certainly have been another strength -- Sixpence appears to be <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DPW7RlD5ng8">touring with another female vocalist</a> (Kate York, perhaps?) at the moment; and the video clips of Jerry Dale McFadden trying his best falsetto to match Leigh are...a bit much.<br />
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So: let's take "Bleeding" as Sixpence's quintessential "band" album track: the persistent, hypnotic drumming intro, the plodding bassline, all kinds of guitar agony: a desolate landscape is evoked. It's not that other Sixpence recordings are <i>not</i> textured and evocative, but this is one of the few tracks where we really get a sense that there could be a rock and roll band making this noise together in a room. (Never mind whether that really happened -- the point is it <i>feels</i> like a band, unlike some of Sixpence's other masterful recordings, also full and deep, but more orchestral and arranged. We're talking about the difference between, say, The rock-band Radiohead of <i>The Bends</i> and the careful studio technician Radiohead of <i>In Rainbows</i>.)<br />
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I'm over the fact that Sixpence is no longer a guitar band, but this song probably does the most creative work with distorted guitars that we hear on TBM -- single chords ring forever and feedback is allowed to roam freely across the track, and the solo is less melody than roar. In a long-lost feature on the band form this era, writer from the Chrindie zine <i>True Tunes</i> quoted Slocum: "How did you like those My Bloody Valentine notebends I was doing?"<br />
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I'll go ahead and answer that: we liked them.<br />
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"Bleeding" goes a little over the top in the melancholy department; there's maybe not <i>infinite</i> sadness in the lyrics and the pleading drone they're sung in, but "I'm beating my soul to make it bleed a drop of hope" is about as brilliantly mopey as any Smashing Pumpkins track from the era. Yes, the Pumpkins: I will stop mentioning them when I talk about this record from now on, but they were mentioned by Slocum in an interview right before TBM was released, and the guitar tones here do owe something to that band, who in the 90's really were, in my book, the masters at eliciting pathos from distortion and feedback. "Bleeding" would not be the song it is if it were made by the Sixpence of <i>the Fatherless and the Widow,</i> where it would have been all reverb and acoustic strumming, nor the Sixpence of <i>Divine Discontent</i>, where the ringing feedback might've been replaced by a tasteful, swelling orchestra. This is Sixpence None the Richer as a 90's rock band, and they were great at it.Joelhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10707554930245556019noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3024762414024937723.post-78038512547595450782012-05-26T07:51:00.002-07:002012-05-26T07:51:21.343-07:00Too Far GoneI am tempted often to speak of the desperation I hear in the songs of this band. Yet as much as they express frustrated human longing, what else is remarkable about the songs of Sixpence -- and perhaps of any compentent pop band -- is their formal elegance. Theodor Adorno once denegrated popular music as lacking "concrete totality" when compared to classical music, which was allegedly more cohesive due to the relationship of its constituent parts of the whole. Pop songs, I suppose, were seen more like a clumsily pasted-together collage than, say, the thoughtfully balanced composition of a painting.<br />
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There is a sense in which Adorno was right: while a classical piece may follow its compositional threads multifariously, a pop song is math and psychology. Intro + Verse + Chorus + Verse + Bridge + Chorus + Outro, mostly in 8- or 16-bar subdivisions. Chords and melodies are easily manipulated in order to evoke in us certain predictable reactions.<br />
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But is the skillful manipulation of these things not, to most of our ears, utterly satisfying? And can a pop song not, whether at three minutes or stretched nearly to seven, as in the case of "Too Far Gone," surprise and delight? And cannot guitar solos do totally bad-ass stuff which, using the magic pixie dust of improvisation, move a pop song from the realm of the regiment and structure to that of imagination and possibility?<br />
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Before we consider the structure of "Too Far Gone," let me mention another seemingly unrelated pop song I love: <a href="http://tvs.soymilkrevolution.com/?p=372">Weezer's "Undone (the Sweater Song)</a>." It was said by Jim deRogatis to "have at least three distinct movements." I assume he refers to the spoken-word sections, the chorus, and the frantic crescendo of the conclusion (probably?), but whatever he meant, it's clear that the song includes several very simple sections, smushed together, which, when following one after the other, lead to something spectacular. The end of the song, in fact, I'd argue, is impossible without the parts that come before it, and its impact is also imposible without the wailing guitar solo, which breaks the song out of its incredibly simple three-chord beginnings to a a twisting bridge and a frenzied, joyous end.<br />
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So: "Too Far Gone." A simple Casio beat and a four-chord piano sequence that rewinds itself every four bars unfolds into a pre-chorus carried by a mellotron to the chorus and its three-part harmony payoff: "Am I just too far gone to be saved?" After only one minute, the song's structure has been wholly revealed, and it will essentially repeat itself for the next six. Organ and guitar are added, and at nearly three minutes in, when the pre-chorus starts to come back, one starts to feel cheated. Two short verses? A plodding vamp that simply repeats itself? No bridge?<br />
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But here is where the song, using no more than the building blocks already provided, takes a turn: the two pre-choruses are stacked one after the other, the metaphors of self-sabotage piling up till hope seems lost ("I'm shut out, I'm shut in ... I'm tied up, I'm tied down"), and then, the final twist: "You'll never be too far gone to be saved." This seems too pat, though -- too obvious, right? What's that, Christian rock band? You did a song about how things seem bad, but in the end, they're all going to be OK?<br />
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In the hands of another band, this would ring hollow. But remember this: Matt Slocum can say things with his guitar. Did you not know this? I remind you of a sentence from the liner notes to the song "Big Reconstruction" on<i> Soul Rash, </i>the first record by Slocum's pre-Sixpence band Love Coma:<br />
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<blockquote class="tr_bq">
<i>If you listen closely, Matt's guitar speaks:</i></blockquote>
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Yes -- that is what I've been trying to say each time I mention a Slocum guitar solo, and on "Too Far Gone," after the lyrical shift to hope, we get almost three more minutes of guitar work -- way more than on "<a href="http://songsthatexplain.blogspot.ca/2008/09/within-room-somewhere.html">Within a Room Somewhere</a>," the band's previous guitar masterpiece. What Slocum's guitar is saying at any moment is difficult to translate, but it is always couched within the sentiment already created by the music and lyrics of the present song (how's that for totality, Adorno?). What seems to be happening here is a meandering, a twisting back, and a questioning that rises and rises as the notes of the solo climb higher.<br />
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Within the song's final minute things reach a much more fevered pitch than the lyrics could have suggested. There is a hard-won victory in that final high, repeated riff that ends around 5:58, a suggestion of existential triumph -- yet as the solo continues and the song fades out, I'm left with a distinct "I Still Haven't Found What I'm Looking For" vibe. Guitar solos are hard work, and they shape a void into something real, if only momentarily. This one gives glimpses of awful clarity, but it never ends -- it makes beautiful shapes before diving back into the fray (I accidentally typed <i>gray</i> there, which seems appropriate). Nash's vocal gives "Too Far Gone" an answer, but Slocum's guitar lives the questions.<br />
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PS: <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e2K7KwVut1A&feature=related">here</a> is a copy of the song on YouTube, just so you can listen if you like.Joelhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10707554930245556019noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3024762414024937723.post-59731177663396583632012-03-18T15:07:00.000-07:002012-03-18T15:07:47.554-07:00Circle of Error<div class="" style="clear: both; text-align: left;">
<span style="font-family: inherit;"><i>I'm very happy to present the first ever guest entry on Songs That Explain, written by my good friend Kevin Davis. I've known Kevin for over a decade and have had the pleasure of watching his career as a musician grow and change in remarkable ways. He has been a member of the bands Glowworm, Pacific UV, and Strange Holliday, and is currently making music under his own name. His music has been featured, among other places, on the HBO series </i>Californication<i> and the public radio program </i>This American Life<i>. Please visit his new blog at <a href="http://www.kevinscottdavis.net/">www.kevinscottdavis.net</a> or listen to his new album at <a href="http://www.kevindavismusic.com/">www.kevindavismusic.com</a>. -- Joel</i></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;">Dm7, F, C, G. Who starts a
song with what has been, historically speaking, the least resolved chord in the
world? Matt Slocum. And for good reason. His 1995 song “Circle of Error” is
about trials and mistakes, and being stuck in a self-inflicted pattern of
dubious repetition. Here in the key of C, a D minor chord has no strong pull to
resolve upward or downward, giving the progression the feel of having no
definite beginning or end. The usually dominant G chord, which wants so badly
to resolve to the key's center of C, is never given a chance to, but is always
followed again by the D minor, forcing the progression to start over again. The
pattern could repeat endlessly. Even on the recording, Slocum’s band opts for a
fade out instead of an ending, suggesting that the song continues on well past
the audible mark. </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;">“Can I ask? Can I find? Can I
scream for you to forgive the time I spend on this awful carousel again? In my
circle of error, I go round and round again…”<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: inherit;">My first experience hearing
this song was when I was 16. I attended a concert by a local folk -rock band,
in the sanctuary of a church near my small hometown in Northern California. I
hadn’t expected a lot, but was soon struck by two things. First, the otherwise
all-male group was fronted by a female singer – a young, shy blonde, standing
very still on stage, and holding the microphone as if it was a foreign object,
her blue eyes scanning the room nervously but sweetly. There were not a lot of
musicians in my small town, and a sight like this was even stranger. It was
obvious that the guitarist was the musical force behind the band- but he did
something smart: just like Matt Slocum, he stepped into the background and let
someone a little more iconic, and with an untrained, naturally beautiful voice –
like Leigh Nash – take a very unassuming
lead. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: inherit;">The second thing, which I’ll
never forget, was when the group announced a cover by a band called Sixpence
None the Richer. They strummed that first D minor in “Circle of Error”, and I
was enthralled. The singer’s fragile voice had a crisp purity, giving the
song’s lyrics a transparency that felt mature beyond the band’s collective age.
I knew I had to track down the song and figure out who the band was. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<br /></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;">After the concert was over, a
friend introduced me to the musicians, whom I was eager to commend. We got
invited to a party, and hung out together in someone’s living room late into
the evening. Being the church-hatched youth we were, acoustic guitars came out
and whittling away ensued. I had been playing guitar for about a year and half
then, and eventually one landed in my lap. By the end of the night, I was
invited to join the band. That was it. I was in my first band. No auditions,
just mutual youthful exuberance, and a sort of innocent magic exploding around
the room. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<br /></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;">I must have played “Circle of
Error” a thousand times over the next two years. It was the first cover I ever
performed. It contained my very first guitar solo. And it was the introduction
to my long-lasting love of Sixpence's music. I even went on to major in music
in college, learning to arrange strings, initially, because I wanted to be able
to do it as beautifully as Matt Slocum did on their self-titled album.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<br /></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;">Fast-forward fourteen years.
I am now 31, and though I still cannot arrange strings as beautifully as Mr.
Slocum, music has provided the pathway into almost every major endeavor in my
life. A lot of shows, a lot of bands, a lot of recordings, and a lot of good
old-fashioned band breakups have happened in that span of that time, and I owe
Sixpence thanks for inspiring me to get started. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: inherit;">Other things have happened
too. It’s tough to keep up youthful innocence in the big, bad, world—especially
in the world of music. This is something Sixpence should know well, if their
tumultuous history with the record label industry is any indication. If you were
to meet me today, I’d have to introduce myself as a struggling artist, a
recovering alcoholic, and, above all things, a prodigal son. As it turns out,
my own life has been about trials and mistakes, and self-inflicted patterns of
dubious repetition. How little I’d understood at 16 what Slocum was writing
about, how he might have felt—and how well I understand it now! I think many others
must understand it, too; as the apostle Paul wrote, “I do not understand what I
do. For what I want to do I do not do, and what I hate I do.” (Romans 7:15) <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<br /></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;">I’ll end here, without any
great punctuation on the positivity or ease of Christian life or making music.
But I will say, with a great big smile, that in 2010, I came back to my faith,
and learned for the first time how to really get up off the floor and begin
again, and again, and again…<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<br /></div>
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<br /></div>
<!--EndFragment-->Joelhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10707554930245556019noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3024762414024937723.post-70988788646389837972012-02-14T15:30:00.000-08:002012-02-14T15:30:02.917-08:00UsI've got this theory. A lot of people have theories about stuff -- people who normally seem to be within the pale of conventional wisdom in whatever intellectual tradition or community or belief system you'd expect, but then you suddenly hear them casually mention something you'd never have guessed someone like them -- whoever you believe them to be -- to think; like maybe "I believe in past lives," or "Satan makes people do things" or "bad things happen in threes" or "I don't see what the big deal is about illegal immigration" or "evolutionary theory should be applied to every aspect of human culture" or "I think unicorns really used to exist" or "I think everyone should try LSD at least once" or whatever.<br />
<br />
So here's mine: I believe that music and love are the same thing.<br />
<br />
That sounds really sentimental and cheesy and stupid and I've got almost nothing to back it up with. But I believe it. I feel it in my bones so obviously. I literally, actually believe that to play or sing music in a certain way is to actually, literally express love. <br />
<br />
My friend Matt wrote a master's thesis about the way that musicality and lyrics interact to create meaning in pop music (I haven't read it, I'm sorry to say), and that might be kind of what I'm getting at here; if I actually knew more about music I might be able to make a more intellectual, Pythaogorean argument about music and math and how certain ratios of things resonate deeply within us because they're somehow built into the fabric of the universe.<br />
<br />
But I don't even really know what the circle of fifths is, so how am I supposed to explain this? How am I supposed to explain that even though the chorus of "Us," one of the more cerebral pop songs of Sixpence's career, is simply one word -- you guessed it, "us" -- that the whole song, from the strings to the castanets to (especially) the bendy, zig-zagging guitar line, is an affirmation of love?<br />
<br />
Maybe it's like this. Maybe "us" is a mantra. Maybe we start out believing that this song is just about the love between two people which it obviously is, on the surface. It's relationshippy and romantic in the verses, so there's no reason to believe the choral "us" is anything more than a couple. Yet as the song progresses, as the repeated "us" of the chorus seeps out and bleeds into the music, so the "us" of the song begins its semantic -- maybe even mystical -- shift from the particular to the universal (and, one hopes, back to the particular): Suppose, one thinks, suppose I were to live like "you're the only thing that matters" (repeated three times at the close of the song's bridge). Suppose I were to give warmth to the cold. Suppose I really <i>do</i> "sacrifice myself."<br />
<br />
Suppose, as Tim Winton writes in his lovely novel Cloudstreet, " it's not us and them anymore. It's us and us and us. It's always us."<br />
<br />
Suppose "Us" is not a silly love song. Suppose "Us" is the central fact of existence, the mystery that it is not good for man to be alone, that the two will become one flesh, that the unmanifested divine, in fact, will become flesh, that the kingdom of God is <a href="http://bible.cc/luke/17-21.htm">within/among</a> us.<br />
<br />
Suppose that it takes you repeated listens to a four-minute pop-song to figure all this out, and that when you finally figure it out it's not only because the singer kept repeating that one word, but because the guitars were somehow echoing with questions, the chords somehow were tugging your mind toward revelation, the harmonies and strings were somehow pulling you out of yourself, and the drums were backing off to give you space to think.<br />
<br />
I say "suppose" because I can't be sure you're feeling that. But human subjectivity being what it is, I'm going to go with it. I don't suppose I've explained how music is love, here, exactly, but in the end I guess I can't. <i>Fides quarens intellectum</i> and all that.<br />
<br />
Today's the twelfth anniversary of our first date, by the way, me and my wife -- from whom I have learned a lot about what really matters. <br />
<br />Joelhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10707554930245556019noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3024762414024937723.post-39106705474145599792011-07-15T09:01:00.000-07:002011-07-15T09:01:53.885-07:00Thought MenagerieSixpence None the Richer's new album has been delayed.<br />
<br />
This is a sentence that you could write at almost any point in the band's career after about 1995.<br />
<br />
Thankfully, though, this is their first album that's been delayed in the era of social media and streaming music, so we've got two (three, if you count the already-released "My Dear Machine") new songs to tide us over: "Safety Line" and "Failure," which you can listen to on <a href="http://www.facebook.com/pages/Sixpence-None-The-Richer/53206870173?v=app_178091127385">Sixpence's Facebook page here.</a><br />
<br />
They're beautiful songs, of course (what, you think I'm <i>not</i> going to like them?), but what stood out to me immediately was the almost complete lack of electric guitar. I'm not saying everything's gotta be all guitars, all the time, but even as Sixpence has made their shift from melancholy Smiths-rock to brooding alt-rock to symphonic pop to something bordering on No Depression-style Americana, Slocum's electric has been front and center in all kinds of important ways. Even a piano-driven track like "The Lines of My Earth" is kicked into gear by a guitar solo, and while piano played a much more prominent role on <i>Divine Discontent</i> (a record with no guitar solos at all, if you don't count the much-missed "Too Far Gone"), most songs were driven by a complex, nimble riff.<br />
<br />
The Sixpence of 2011 (or 2010, or even 2009 or 2008, really, if we want to think about when these songs actually had their genesis) is driven by three things, in this order: Leigh Nash's voice acoustic guitar, and Rhodes piano. The two new tracks are accented by a lovely pedal steel -- but not by Matt Slocum's Fender twelve-string, nor by any other guitar of his we've come to know as the heart of the band's arrangements.<br />
<br />
"Thought Menagerie," on the other hand, from the tail end of This Beautiful Mess, is Slocum, at his twinkliest -- three distinct riffs meander throughout the song -- the subtle intro/verse plucking, the slightly more energetic first chorus/bridge melody, which fights the vocal melody for attention and finally moves <a href="http://www.flickr.com/photos/inkedmn/2173115125/">way up high on the tiny strings</a> by the second half of the chorus.<br />
<br />
Lyrically, this song is one of the last vestiges of Slocum's atmospheric stream-of-consciousness style (see "Musings" and "Falling Leaves") -- it even describes itself in the chorus: "all the thoughts that escape the cage/ can vamp across the spiritual plane." This is as neat-and-tidy a pop song as Sixpence wrote for this record, but the band manages to fit all sorts of wandering, musical and spiritual, into the form.Joelhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10707554930245556019noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3024762414024937723.post-81935014275234560232011-03-30T07:00:00.001-07:002011-03-30T08:32:12.930-07:00Paralyzed<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiatLu6_0akW1EckQeQgnH7odzJTZPs4wGBqieYVlcFcog4yQWMn1ZPlLPC_4247WRfpG2LW2k5O-BDC-OB4zs9YHkDJ7EPiyAIkMN2gx2eDaJWtxoD7SsK1WR2btke0WFV5SJgzcda14g/s1600/Kosovo+Graves.jpg" onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}"><img style="display:block; margin:0px auto 10px; text-align:center;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 320px; height: 210px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiatLu6_0akW1EckQeQgnH7odzJTZPs4wGBqieYVlcFcog4yQWMn1ZPlLPC_4247WRfpG2LW2k5O-BDC-OB4zs9YHkDJ7EPiyAIkMN2gx2eDaJWtxoD7SsK1WR2btke0WFV5SJgzcda14g/s320/Kosovo+Graves.jpg" border="0" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5589892405856150626" /></a><br /><div><br /></div><div><br /></div><div>A few years ago, a friend from China asked me what I had thought of Bill Clinton's presidency. I had to think about it, because I was relatively young and not really aware of what was going on. I remember the 90's as a time of relative ease and comfort, when there were no bad guys, not the Soviets of the 20th century nor the terrorists of the 21st. "I think it was pretty good," I said. "I mean, there were no wars, at least."</div><div><br /></div><div>"What about Yugoslavia?" said my friend.</div><div><br /></div><div>I have to admit I barely had any idea what he was talking about. I knew that something bad had happened in Kosovo, just as I know something bad has happened in Darfur -- these are words we hear on TV and the radio, bad places where people are using bombs and guns to kill other people. But as long as it remains in the realm of the media, these conflicts are hardly real to me.</div><div><br /></div><div>It feels the same with pop songs, in a way. These are media products, surely, not the works of flesh-and-blood people. Are not the latest singles from Weezer and Britney Spears and Lady Gaga and the Black Eyed Peas written by automatons or computers powered by scientifically advanced pop algorithms, commissioned by large corporations to generate revenue? Is not the sensationalism of "news" a similar product, just another reality show that can generate ad sales?</div><div><br /></div><div>Maybe. But there are beating hearts and brains and bodies behind all this, as rarely as that truth emerges. To quote the radio announcer who witnessed the Hindenburg crash and burn, "oh, the humanity."</div><div><br /></div><div><iframe title="YouTube video player" width="480" height="390" src="http://www.youtube.com/embed/XnnUWlZYWhw" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen=""></iframe></div><div><br /></div><div>All this is to say: "Paralyzed" is a place where these media products become real and meet, this abstractation called "Kosovo," this pretty diversion called "Kiss Me." [In fact, "Paralyzed" could be to "Kiss Me" as Radiohead's "My Iron Lung" is to their "Creep," an existential inquisition to a top-40 single.] It's a thick and deep song, more textured than most of the record it appears on. The bass is sinister and low, the organ rough and ragged, and--for the first time in quite a while--guitar piercing through the miasma with a genuine Rock and Roll Riff.</div><div><br /></div><div>It's important to note the transformation of "Paralyzed" from a third-person account by a songwriter of his encounter with a journalist to a first-person story narrated by the journalist himself. The songs that ended up on <i>Divine Discontent</i> were developed during the early days of Music on the Internet, the days of Audiogalaxy and Napster and Minidisc recorders, so we have concert recordings of Divine Discontent songs well before they were recorded -- "Melody of You" with only one verse written, "Dizzy" with violin instead of French horn, gems like "Train Wreck" and "Stronger" and "Monteiro" which never made it to tape. There were some significant changes made to the lyrics "Paralyzed" between its early live performances and its recording. As I recall, the original second verse goes:</div><div><br /></div><div><i>I breathe in, and breathe out</i></div><div><i>and go to do an interview</i></div><div><i>about a song, three minutes long</i></div><div><i><b>that will mean nothing to you</b></i></div><div><i>especially when <b>your </b>dearest friend was sent to cover Kosovo</i></div><div><i>his last assignment brought a bullet, and now he's gone</i></div><div><i><br /></i></div><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhqT0JIX23-OHuQlAn8Wbo_U4slaawdMFxDVXzDfvl3l-AHyfjOKPuuY7bxJqUF25RC2ShlkQyQ5_BcDsYhS1OifMSkb2mSgEjqINdj79ZVOf9t7pet3GLYqvNj8g-75h0_2GFlawQZ09k/s1600/mattslocum-tbm95.jpg" onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}"><img src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhqT0JIX23-OHuQlAn8Wbo_U4slaawdMFxDVXzDfvl3l-AHyfjOKPuuY7bxJqUF25RC2ShlkQyQ5_BcDsYhS1OifMSkb2mSgEjqINdj79ZVOf9t7pet3GLYqvNj8g-75h0_2GFlawQZ09k/s400/mattslocum-tbm95.jpg" border="0" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5589891650467913234" style="float: left; margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 10px; margin-bottom: 10px; margin-left: 0px; cursor: pointer; width: 108px; height: 150px; " /></a><br /><div>This is pretty clearly Slocum lamenting the relative worthlessness --not to put words in his mouth -- of talking about a pop song to a person who has recently and greatly suffered. Even to the songwriter, war is nauseating; both the live and recorded versions maintain the beautiful, blunt line "my stomach's reeling at the thought of all those human beings dead."</div><div><br /></div><div><br /></div><div><br /></div><div>Yet by the time the record was released, the interview has become, from the journalist's perspective, a way to numb the pain:</div><div><br /></div><div><div><i>I breathe in, and breathe out</i></div><div><i>and go to do an interview</i></div><div><i>about a song, three minutes long</i></div><div><i><b>I just need something to do</b></i></div><div><i>especially when <b>my </b>dearest friend was sent to cover Kosovo</i></div><div><i>his last assignment brought a bullet, and now he's gone</i></div></div><div><i><br /></i></div><div> </div><div><div>We are now in the world of this European journalist, yet the chorus is ambiguous -- it could be the reporter feeling impotent for keeping the war at arm's length, or the songwriter feeling doubly so for being at one more remove, not even being able to feel genuine sympathy and concern for a fellow media-maker. Either way, look at the significant changes made to the lyrics of the chorus. The original:</div></div><div><br /></div><div><div><i>Feels like I'm fiddling while Rome is burning down</i></div></div><div><i>Should I lay my fiddle down, take a rifle from the ground?<br /><b>God give me strength to pray that you will set things right</b></i></div><div><i>'Cause I'm paralyzed, I'm paralyzed</i></div><div><i><br /></i></div><div>I admit that when I heard the Divine Discontent version, I was looking for someone to blame, like maybe the evil secular record label that not only made Sixpence record more 80's pop covers, but made them "de-Christianize" this chorus like so:</div><div><br /></div><div><div><div><i>Feels like I'm fiddling while Rome is burning down</i></div></div><div><i>Should I lay my fiddle down, take a rifle from the ground?</i></div><div><i><b>I need the ghost to breathe a northern gale tonight</b></i></div><div><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: normal; "><i>'</i></span></i><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: normal; "><i>Cause I'm paralyzed, I'm paralyzed</i></span></i></div></div><div><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: normal; "><i><br /></i></span></i></div><div><i>That's lame, </i>I thought. Just some throwaway line about a ghost. It was years later that I realized it was <i>the </i>Ghost, not a ghost, that the whole purpose of the prayer had been shifted from a desire for God to work to a desire for the spirit of God to work through the pray-er. Maybe just a semantic shift, yet it makes a difference. </div><div><br /></div><div>The final verse is an even more personal encounter -- again told either third-person or first-person, depending on the version -- where the journalist tells his friend's pregnant wife that he has been killed, and cannot find any words beyond reporting this singular, awful fact. The song ends with another pleading chorus, and a final repetition of a motif that has been running throughout the verses: "I breathe in, I breathe out." Sure, I suppose that suggests life, survival, at least, but there's precious little solace in ending on that image, either the songwriter or the journalist simply looking down in shame and powerlessness, unable to do anything but breathe.</div><div><br /></div><div>And oh God, the end of this song. The sound and fury of the drums and organ and guitar. I can hear nothing but the relentless and unfeeling explosion of bombs and I cannot move.</div>Joelhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10707554930245556019noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3024762414024937723.post-81954896864247133412011-02-22T11:06:00.000-08:002011-02-22T11:43:59.661-08:00Loser Like Me<a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiHysO-qUo-z2hSBKZ7CibBMEwggMMHa7lB6jKKF97rinCgpznQgBKjnNRAOitixQMEpLrRU5zgpb4Cncjg7MuUvYoTA3JsoLAUcFvd4piTiHnh3cntD5ao-WiHhJQKTDuTFxdEw719ODg/s1600/Glee_Cast-Loser_Glee_Cast_Version_3.jpg"><img style="float:left; margin:0 10px 10px 0;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 200px; height: 200px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiHysO-qUo-z2hSBKZ7CibBMEwggMMHa7lB6jKKF97rinCgpznQgBKjnNRAOitixQMEpLrRU5zgpb4Cncjg7MuUvYoTA3JsoLAUcFvd4piTiHnh3cntD5ao-WiHhJQKTDuTFxdEw719ODg/s200/Glee_Cast-Loser_Glee_Cast_Version_3.jpg" border="0" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5576600228381950658" /></a><br />I'm not a huge fan of the TV show <i>Glee </i>-- I kind of think it is to pop music what McDonald's hamburgers are to food -- but when I saw a few items online suggesting that the show would be featuring a cover of the under-released (on the <i>Best of)</i> head-bobber "Loser Like Me," I could almost see it.<div><br /></div><div>Almost.</div><div><br /></div><div><br /></div><div><br /></div><div><div><br /></div><div> (Apparently, <i>Glee </i><a href="http://nymag.com/daily/entertainment/2011/02/glee_is_doing_original_songs.html">will actually be featuring a song of the same name </a>by the Swedish uberproducer/hitmaker Max Martin. We can only wonder what might have been -- perhaps a repeat of what happened to Sixpence's career after <i>Dawson's Creek</i> and <i>She's All That</i>? A resurgence of recognition might be nice, but perhaps Sixpence not appearing on Glee is for the best.) </div><div><br /></div><div>(Also, while we're getting parenthetical, I'd like to remind you that shortly before they broke up, Sixpence actually appeared on another popular (I assume) show for teenagers, Sabrina the Teenage Witch. <a href="http://il.youtube.com/watch?v=qKDUgzjYBiY&feature=related">I'll let you decide</a> whether it was a good thing for the band or the show.)<br /><div><br /></div><div>"Loser Like Me" is one of the triumphs of the sugary pop side of the <i>Divine Discontent</i> sessions. While songs like "Tonight" and "Breathe Your Name" come down a little too hard on the repetitive hooks, and "Us" is cursed by the unsingalongable albatrosses of a complex guitar hook and a one-word chorus, "Loser Like Me" (like the last song we discussed, "Northern Lights") is light on its feet in a way that betrays its deep subject matter. I hadn't actually even noticed the beautiful image of the chorus (or is it a pre-chorus, and the instrumental bits are the chorus?), because I'm so distracted by the mesmerizing way the melody line swoops and soars over and under that break in Leigh's voice: "Your love is fire/and I am the wood/that burns inside the warmth of your blood."<br /></div><div><br /></div><div>Maybe I am being uncharitable, but I think maybe a lyric like that is why Sixpence, whose brilliance is small and subtle, and Glee, a show that traffics mostly in flash, aren't the best match.</div><div><br /></div><div>The guitar hooks during the vamp are extremely modest -- you've got to love those four notes followed by a bicycle bell -- but typically of the DD sessions, this song is not satisfied with chords: there are all kinds of countermelodies, arpeggios, and other musical things that I don't know the names of throughout the verses.</div><div><br /></div><div>Thematically, I'm torn between declaring this a self-deprecating love song, almost reaching back to the mopiness of <i>This Beautiful Mess</i>, and a John 3:30-style psalm on the order of "Don't Pass Me By" or "Dizzy." Like much of <i>Divine Discontent</i>, this song is a bewildered recognition of being loved, an attempt to come to terms with good news that sounds too good to be true.</div><div><br /></div><div><br /></div><div>Buy the song on Amazon <a href="http://www.amazon.com/Loser-Like-Me/dp/B001RID5B0/ref=sr_1_8?ie=UTF8&s=dmusic&qid=1298402505&sr=1-8">here</a>.</div><div>Listen to it on Youtube <a href="http://%20www.youtube.com/watch?v=RWqdZEXxUMA">here</a>.</div></div></div>Joelhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10707554930245556019noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3024762414024937723.post-9657822706987403382010-12-22T08:32:00.001-08:002011-02-16T10:32:43.608-08:00Northern LightsI'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 <i>Divine Discontent</i> B-side.<div><br /><div><object width="480" height="385"><param name="movie" value="http://www.youtube.com/v/MrDmechCd8s?fs=1&hl=en_US"><param name="allowFullScreen" value="true"><param name="allowscriptaccess" value="always"><embed src="http://www.youtube.com/v/MrDmechCd8s?fs=1&hl=en_US" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" allowscriptaccess="always" allowfullscreen="true" width="480" height="385"></embed></object><br /><div><br /></div><div>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. </div><div><br /></div><div>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. </div><div><br /></div><div>If either of Sixpence's two principal songwriters can be said to have made a "divorce record," it is Nash, not Slocum -- the <a href="http://www.amazon.com/Fauxliage/dp/B000SQKZOW">Fauxliage </a>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 <i>Divine Discontent</i> sessions are not breakup songs, they are beautiful and sad -- none more than "Northern Lights."</div><div><br /></div><div>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. </div><div><br /></div><div>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 "<a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YUXjB1XL0AE">The Last Christmas</a>" from Sixpence's Christmas album, released in 2008 -- and Leigh Nash recently got engaged. She wrote about it in a <a href="http://www.bullypulpit.com/leighnash/2010/10/maui.html">blog post</a> 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":</div><div><br /></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span">"Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. I love you. I love you. I love you."</span></div></div></div>Joelhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10707554930245556019noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3024762414024937723.post-91084768419924876122010-12-21T12:48:00.000-08:002010-12-22T08:07:37.277-08:00Moving On<i>This post will be written in the style of the late <a href="http://www.emotionalkaraoke.blogspot.com/">Emotional Karaoke</a>, a Mountain Goats ouevreblog, whose manifesto was: "I <span class="Apple-style-span" style="line-height: 19px; "><span class="Apple-style-span">will only write about the songs while I listen to them, for as long as it takes me to listen. Granted, I've heard them before, but getting wound up by a favorite band while you listen is part of the point." Ready? Go!</span></span></i><div><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="line-height: 19px; "><span class="Apple-style-span"><br /></span></span></i></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="line-height: 19px; "><span class="Apple-style-span">Trying to find a "happy" Sixpence song to help dispel the gloom of winter and sickness. Those lovely basslines usher us in as Leigh sings "a new and happy song," her voice oddly far-away, through a chorus effect. That scraping strum from Slocum, and then the militant chorus: I WILL NOT LET THEM RUIN ME. Who are "they," one wonders? The record label? The inner demons? The haters? It almost doesn't matter. This song is defiant hope, directed not so much outward at a foe as inward, a rock-steady pep talk to oneself.</span></span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="line-height: 19px; "><span class="Apple-style-span"><br /></span></span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="line-height: 19px; "><span class="Apple-style-span">The gorgeous bridge, the punishing strings, the relentless drums, the self-assured vocals; they all say one thing, joyously, defiantly: this stupid world doesn't get to win. Love does. Music does. Beauty does. Joy does. Happiness does. Truth does. </span></span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="line-height: 19px; "><span class="Apple-style-span"><br /></span></span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="line-height: 19px; "><span class="Apple-style-span">You've got to believe me. You've got to believe Sixpence. You've got to believe this string quartet that just won't shut up, even after the guitars die out.</span></span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="line-height: 19px; "><span class="Apple-style-span"><br /></span></span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="line-height: 19px; "><span class="Apple-style-span">Amen.</span></span></div>Joelhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10707554930245556019noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3024762414024937723.post-8010838052943170742010-06-20T11:24:00.000-07:002010-06-20T08:52:54.937-07:00LoveThere are two definitive versions of "Love" -- the first is the album version (I'm most accustomed to the original pressing, which, if I recall correctly, doesn't overlap with the previous song -- "I Won't Stay Long" -- as much it does on the pressing that added "There She Goes"). The second, a live version which was developed some time later, ditches the slap-bass groove, the defiant strings, and the sneaky (what else can I call it?) Johnny Marr-ish chords on the chorus (have you really listened to just how furious that strumming is, buried in there?) -- but adds an absolutely devastating guitar riff, a melting, dying hook, opening up the verses for Dale Baker's tom-driven beat and soaring to great heights on a chorus in which Leigh Nash, for maybe the first time in her career, absolutely <span style="font-style:italic;">commands </span>a song.<div><br /></div><div>Seriously, listen to this. Sorry the video doesn't sync up with the sound, but this is a phenomenal performance:</div><div><br /></div><div><object width="480" height="385"><param name="movie" value="http://www.youtube.com/v/_z54aMI5Dr0&hl=en_US&fs=1&color1=0x5d1719&color2=0xcd311b"><param name="allowFullScreen" value="true"><param name="allowscriptaccess" value="always"><embed src="http://www.youtube.com/v/_z54aMI5Dr0&hl=en_US&fs=1&color1=0x5d1719&color2=0xcd311b" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" allowscriptaccess="always" allowfullscreen="true" width="480" height="385"></embed></object></div><div><br /></div><div>Wasn't that <i>great?</i> And that organized chaos after the final "let the cut begin" -- Justin Cary proving himself a worthy successor to J.J. Plasencio on the bass -- I want that to last about 100 times longer than it does.</div><div><br /></div><div>There's much to love about the recorded version, too, of course, starting with the absurd power of the drums -- an effect achieved by having two drummers each play half a set; Dale Baker plays the drums, while Mark Nash (then Leigh's husband) absolutely wails on the hi-hat. It sounds like, to quote Baker, "one barely competent drummer playing his heart out." I'd be lying if I said the drums on this song, so simple and powerful, haven't influenced me greatly in the drumming I've done since I first heard it. (The drums in the last part of <a href="http://joelandsarah.org/synthar/web/dandelionmethod/music/TheWoolGathering.mp3">"The Wool Gathering"</a> by the Dandelion Method are my feeble attempt to approximate it, in fact.).</div><div><br /></div><div>As for the words, how straightforward is this chorus?</div><div><br /></div><div><i>I need love</i></div><div><i>It is patience, it is kindness</i></div><div><i>I need love</i></div><div><i>It is rain after the dryness</i></div><div><i>I need love</i></div><div><i>Sister Wisdom, help me see</i></div><div><i>It's the one thing that I need</i></div><div><i>The only thing that I need</i></div><div><i><br /></i></div><div>The repetition of "I need love" recalls the Sam Phillips song Sixpence covered ("I Need Love"), but is also one of Matt Slocum's most nakedly simple lyrics, up there with the "baby/please stay" of "Northern Lights" and the "I miss everyone" of "A Million Parachutes." And that repetition is one reason why I'm drawn to Slocum's lyrics again and again. Here's a guy who hardly ever looks up from his guitar or moves, even when he is wailing (see above video), who is clearly drawn inward to a world of books and thoughts, yet whose pleading prayer is for love, that force that comes from God and can only ever be understood when one is drawn out of oneself and into the world, that can only be experienced in life with others, that stirs and moves us not simply to <i>feeling</i> but to <i>action, </i>even when that action sometimes presents as pain, as a deep cut.</div><div><br /></div><div>I am also that guy and I also want to feel that cut. I want all the thoughts, beliefs, and ideas bouncing around my brain to worm their way out into the world, transformed into genuine acts of a love that sustains the universe. Maybe that's a tall order. But it's what I need.</div><div><br /></div><div>"The Harvester is near/his blade is on your skin/to plant a new beginning/well then let the cut begin."</div><div><br /></div><div>I really, really love this song.</div><div><br /></div>Joelhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10707554930245556019noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3024762414024937723.post-28444209309714984392010-06-15T07:00:00.000-07:002020-03-11T13:35:34.010-07:00Kiss Me<span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: rgb(76 , 76 , 76); font-family: "helvetica" , "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 11px; line-height: 17px;"></span><br />
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My <a href="http://imagejournal.org/page/blog/kiss-me">commentary on "Kiss Me" at Good Letters,</a> was published on Good Letters, the blog of <i>Image: A Journal of the Arts and Religion</i>. Visitors from Good Letters: if you're new to Sixpence, try <a href="http://songsthatexplain.blogspot.com/2009/02/love-salvation-fear-of-death.html">"Love, Salvation, the Fear of Death"</a> or <a href="http://songsthatexplain.blogspot.com/2008/11/ive-been-waiting.html">"I've Been Waiting"</a> to start.</div>
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</span></span><a href="https://imagejournal.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/02/20100615-Kiss-Me-by-Joel-Hartse.jpg"><img alt="" class="alignleft size-full wp-image-19385" height="152" src="https://imagejournal.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/02/20100615-Kiss-Me-by-Joel-Hartse.jpg" width="100" /></a><br />
<br />
Sixpence
None the Richer is my favorite band. I used to be embarrassed to say
this, particularly in 1999, when their bouncy pop song “Kiss Me” became a
ubiquitous, worldwide radio hit. I knew, and know, that the band was
more than this one song, but “Kiss Me” on the radio, in 1999, was the
moment when Sixpence None the Richer ceased to be a band and started to
be an idea.<br />
For some people, the Sixpence of the “Kiss Me” single were the latest
(and perhaps last and best, the evangelical desperation for “relevance”
being what it is) in a series of Christian rock bands who, by,
“crossing over,” lent pop-culture credibility to faith—not something
faith is particularly in need of, but which would provide validation in
the eyes of those for whom success and popularity matter a great deal.<br />
<br />
From another perspective, they became an oddity, another Jars of
Clay, a band who had toiled obscurely in a parallel universe called
“Christian music,” poked its head through the curtain of the “real”
contemporary cultural conversation, hung out for a few drinks and the
time it takes to earn a gold record, record a couple of covers of 80s
pop songs (that’s “There She Goes” and “Don’t Dream It’s Over,” the
other two songs for which the general public may know Sixpence) and went
back to wherever it was they came from.<br />
<br />
For some, Sixpence became idyllic cutesiness personified—a first date
band, a wedding band, a romantic-montage-in-a-teen-comedy band—while
for others they became a symbol of all that is sentimental, trite, and
commoditized about popular music. “Kiss Me,” for those people, is a slab
of 90s naivete, and I note, heartbreakingly, that it has even become a
Bad Song Signifier in the hipster jokebook, from Aziz Ansari’s “<a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zp_wIZ1kVVg" target="_blank">Shittiest Mixtape</a>” to Garfunkel & Oates’ “<a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cegC5vS4DuA" target="_blank">Worst Song Medley</a>.”<br />
Others read into the song something close to what is known,
politically, as the “defense of marriage.” One Christian magazine, in
particular, was quick to quash vague questions of same-sex snogging (who
exactly is wearing the flowered hat in the lyrics?), by insisting that
Leigh Nash wrote the song for her husband, which was untrue; Matt Slocum
wrote the music and lyrics to “Kiss Me,” as he did most of the band’s
songs.<br />
<br />
For me, “Kiss Me” was a mixed blessing in that it assured that
everyone I knew had heard of a band I’d been religiously listening to
since I was thirteen years old, but also that they assumed Sixpence was
an innocuous soundtrack band. The teenybopper fans of <em>Dawson’s Creek</em> or <em>She’s All That</em>
would never heard the anguished guitar solo on “Love, Salvation, the
Fear of Death.” They wouldn’t get lost in the Ecclesisastical drone of
“Meaningless,” the quiet adoration of “Melody of You,” the triumphant
defiance of “Moving On.”<br />
<br />
Those songs would remain gloriously mine, though I’ve always held out
a little hope, each time Sixpence put out a new single, that others
might pick up on the spark of sheer God-given genius and start to delve
into their back catalogue. (Seriously, do it. Start with <em>The Fatherless and the Widow</em> if you like the Cure and the Smiths, <em>This Beautiful Mess</em> if you like the Cranberries or the Smashing Pumpkins, or <em>Sixpence None the Richer</em> if you have a heart and a soul and a pulse.)<br />
<br />
Sixpence is about to put out another album, though this time (having
broken up and reunited during the last decade), in a pop world where
radio singles matter less, and I’m anxious to see what this new record
will do for their reputation as a pop band. And actually I’m just
anxious, period, because I just got an email from their publicist saying
that the August 24th release date has been delayed, and I do not want
to wait three years like I did for <em>Divine Discontent</em> as it was lost somewhere between bankrupt record labels and executives who wanted to hear more singles.<br />
<br />
I realize that no amount of prodding will change your feelings for
Sixpence into mine, and perhaps there are others who share my pain—all
the 90s has-been bands I’ve long since written off as chaff may have
fans by the legions. (Tal Bachman? Stroke 9? Reel Big Fish?) Perhaps you
will not even be moved by the embarrassingly in-depth song-by-song
commentary I’ve been working on over at <a href="http://songsthatexplain.blogspot.com/" target="_blank">Songs That Explain</a>.<br />
<br />
But let me ask of you one thing: try at least not to think of
Sixpence none the Richer as nothing but “Kiss Me.” It’s not a bad little
ditty, but a hit single does not a career make. And that’s my favorite
band you’re talking about.<br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: rgb(76 , 76 , 76); font-family: "helvetica" , "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 11px; line-height: 17px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: "georgia";"></span></span>Joelhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10707554930245556019noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3024762414024937723.post-73249416582480085652010-03-30T11:48:00.000-07:002010-03-30T12:08:47.514-07:00Amazing Grace (Give It Back)<div><object width="480" height="385"><param name="movie" value="http://www.youtube.com/v/er8vmgejlco&hl=en_US&fs=1&"></param><param name="allowFullScreen" value="true"></param><param name="allowscriptaccess" value="always"></param><embed src="http://www.youtube.com/v/er8vmgejlco&hl=en_US&fs=1&" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" allowscriptaccess="always" allowfullscreen="true" width="480" height="385"></embed></object></div><div><br /></div>Every year I seem to hit my lowest point -- physically, mentally, spiritually -- right around Holy Week. I don't think that's entirely a coincidence. I've recently been reading through Christopher Cocca's blog <a href="http://orthoproxy.tumblr.com/">Orthoproxy</a>, which is kind of a memoir of belief and skepticism, and one theme he returns to is that maybe God deigns to show up in manmade structures and rituals like religion, but God doesn't necessarily prescribe those things so much as tolerate them. <div><br /></div><div>What's funny to me is that I feel like I'm on a journey in the opposite direction -- moving from the "spiritual, not religious" (or "relationship, not religion") dictates of my evangelical faith to a place where I'm drawn specifically to rituals. I sneak off to midday masses and search the web for nearby Anglican services. These days I feel "religious, not spiritual," and I'm wondering if that could possibly be a more robust and restful place for my faith, at least for now, for me. The anxieties of belief -- that my salvation depends on what I believe about God -- are sometimes too much; the ache and hunger for an anchor doesn't go away, though, no matter if you're singing praise choruses with hands raised or kneeling at a rail for a wafer. The idea of participating in the life of an ancient church seems rather comforting to me.</div><div><br /></div><div>Anyway --aside from being their first song with a swear in it (The wonderful and cutting couplet "You're everywhere in every time/ and yet You're so damn hard to find"), "Amazing Grace," to me, is a portrait of steadfast longing-- almost petulant in its demands. Its persistent, mid-tempo beat underscores the committed persistence. I want this song to build to a crescendo during the instrumental break --the entire final half of the song -- but it continues to be subtle, steadfast, transformed only by a gently falling piano riff -- maybe because God is, as we heard on "Melody of You," "a simple tune" we "only write variations to." The fadeout here feels tentative. I keep expecting the song to come plodding back after the fadeout.</div><div><br /></div><div>To come plodding back -- I guess that's what I expect from my own faith, too. Slow and steady, I am waiting for somebody to show up amid the ritual and longing.</div><div><br /></div>Joelhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10707554930245556019noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3024762414024937723.post-20202863211507783652010-02-21T22:27:00.000-08:002010-02-21T23:48:55.612-08:00Still Burning<a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi2iDwd8YZvQEDCC84bEpMsw2Skfv2y3QVu86gr0n26rqHQetCd4gBzLsqJo5Wc-muOKmjwatl6G1z9Z6vlJts-uiHQNwPS1pdfMVX7o7hOzOhdlrIOt9w7oQ1QkvtTODZAI_TxbnG20F0/s1600-h/3838104382_5c00e3a8d8.jpg"><img style="display:block; margin:0px auto 10px; text-align:center;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 320px; height: 230px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi2iDwd8YZvQEDCC84bEpMsw2Skfv2y3QVu86gr0n26rqHQetCd4gBzLsqJo5Wc-muOKmjwatl6G1z9Z6vlJts-uiHQNwPS1pdfMVX7o7hOzOhdlrIOt9w7oQ1QkvtTODZAI_TxbnG20F0/s320/3838104382_5c00e3a8d8.jpg" border="0" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5440970509047468050" /></a><br /><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'Times New Roman';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="-webkit-border-horizontal-spacing: 2px; -webkit-border-vertical-spacing: 2px; font-size:medium;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'lucida grande';"><div><br /></div><div><br /></div><div>“Still Burning” tries to explore the way suffering is a gift and a catalyst to help one transition to a better state of living. The chorus lines are inspired by Rilke. I like the image of the heart reaching out like a hand." - Matt Slocum</div><div><br /></div><div><br /></div></span></span></span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'Times New Roman';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="-webkit-border-horizontal-spacing: 2px; -webkit-border-vertical-spacing: 2px; font-size:medium;">"Extinguish my sight, and I can still see you;</span></span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'Times New Roman';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="-webkit-border-horizontal-spacing: 2px; -webkit-border-vertical-spacing: 2px; font-size:medium;">plug up my ears, and I can still hear;</span></span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'Times New Roman';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="-webkit-border-horizontal-spacing: 2px; -webkit-border-vertical-spacing: 2px; font-size:medium;">even without feet I can walk toward you,</span></span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'Times New Roman';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="-webkit-border-horizontal-spacing: 2px; -webkit-border-vertical-spacing: 2px; font-size:medium;">and without mouth I can still implore.</span></span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'Times New Roman';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="-webkit-border-horizontal-spacing: 2px; -webkit-border-vertical-spacing: 2px; font-size:medium;">Break off my arms, and I will hold you</span></span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'Times New Roman';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="-webkit-border-horizontal-spacing: 2px; -webkit-border-vertical-spacing: 2px; font-size:medium;">with my heart as if it were a hand;</span></span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'Times New Roman';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="-webkit-border-horizontal-spacing: 2px; -webkit-border-vertical-spacing: 2px; font-size:medium;">strangle my heart, and my brain will still throb;</span></span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'Times New Roman';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="-webkit-border-horizontal-spacing: 2px; -webkit-border-vertical-spacing: 2px; font-size:medium;">and should you set fire to my brain,</span></span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'Times New Roman';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="-webkit-border-horizontal-spacing: 2px; -webkit-border-vertical-spacing: 2px; font-size:medium;">I can still carry you with my blood.</span></span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'Times New Roman';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="-webkit-border-horizontal-spacing: 2px; -webkit-border-vertical-spacing: 2px; font-size:medium;"><br /></span></span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'Times New Roman';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="-webkit-border-horizontal-spacing: 2px; -webkit-border-vertical-spacing: 2px; font-size:medium;">- Ranier Maria Rilke, from The Book of Hours (trans. Annemarie S. Kidder)</span></span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'Times New Roman';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="-webkit-border-horizontal-spacing: 2px; -webkit-border-vertical-spacing: 2px; font-size:medium;"><br /></span></span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'Times New Roman';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="-webkit-border-horizontal-spacing: 2px; -webkit-border-vertical-spacing: 2px; font-size:medium;">"Still Burning" is the best of everything <i>Divine Discontent</i> has to offer: a melody that moves and soars, elegant string arrangements, pristine production, piano (not guitar) hooks, and devastating lyrics. I have to hold back to prevent myself from quoting the lyrics in full (<a href="http://www.songmeanings.net/songs/view/3530822107858658944/">read them here</a>). I love ragged question of the bridge: "Why do you set out to break the one thing I have to give?" And I love the way the bit of the chorus is tagged on at the end of the bridge, how the question is answered yet not-answered by the lyric "but I know your heart is a hand."</span></span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'Times New Roman';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="-webkit-border-horizontal-spacing: 2px; -webkit-border-vertical-spacing: 2px; font-size:medium;"><br /></span></span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'Times New Roman';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="-webkit-border-horizontal-spacing: 2px; -webkit-border-vertical-spacing: 2px; font-size:medium;">It's Lent now, again, just like it is every year at this time since the tradition began, which was in the eighth century, according to the priest who presided over the Ash Wednesday service I attended last week (I believe him; I don't feel like Wikipediaing it). This priest also said something that I found both daunting and comforting, which is that Lent is a time for each of us to confront the chaos in our own hearts. Maybe it's just because I feel like now is the time for being "spiritual," and I'm thinking about it now, but the chaos keeps presenting itself -- more and more, it feels the spiritual question most pressing in the world is <i>what the heck is really going on here? </i>There are people telling us that science proves that God not only does not exist, but that anyone who believes so is the worst kind of mentally deranged lunatic, and that therefore the majority of human beings since pretty much the beginning of time have been wrong about almost everything. Yet there are so many things that have no satisfying "rational" explanation, questions cultural, social, linguistic, interpersonal, and so on, which seem to clearly to assert the uselessness of positivism in illuminating those things which seem to truly matter.</span></span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'Times New Roman';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="-webkit-border-horizontal-spacing: 2px; -webkit-border-vertical-spacing: 2px; font-size:medium;"><br /></span></span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'Times New Roman';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="-webkit-border-horizontal-spacing: 2px; -webkit-border-vertical-spacing: 2px; font-size:medium;">I've read recently that in the 21st century, religion is considered "resurgent," that postmodernism has so unmoored whole societies that they/we/some are "returning" to religious belief as a way to make sense of the world. I suppose I'll buy that, because the older and more confused I get, the more I realize that chaos is inevitable, and that one's goal perhaps ought not to be the avoidance of chaos and confusion and pain, but the husbanding of these things (and I use "husband" as a verb here with the knowledge that I can be described by that word as a noun, and wonder how well I have done what I'm trying to describe with that sentence). I also think that religion, far from being an airy-fairy escape, is something that allows us to do this.</span></span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'Times New Roman';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="-webkit-border-horizontal-spacing: 2px; -webkit-border-vertical-spacing: 2px; font-size:medium;"><br /></span></span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'Times New Roman';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="-webkit-border-horizontal-spacing: 2px; -webkit-border-vertical-spacing: 2px; font-size:medium;">On that note, "Still Burning" is not moaning and self-pitying (like, say, "Melting Alone"), but defiantly devotional, like the Rilke poem that inspires it. Pain, sorrow, and brokenness are <i>real</i>, period. As C.S. Lewis wrote in <i>A Grief Observed</i>, "<span class="Apple-style-span" style="-webkit-border-horizontal-spacing: 0px; -webkit-border-vertical-spacing: 0px; font-size:medium;">The tortures occur. If they are unnecessary, then there is no God or a bad one. If there is a good God, then these tortures are necessary. For no even moderately good Being could possibly inflict or permit them if they weren't. Either way, we're for it."</span></span></span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'Times New Roman';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="-webkit-border-horizontal-spacing: 2px; -webkit-border-vertical-spacing: 2px; font-size:medium;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="-webkit-border-horizontal-spacing: 0px; -webkit-border-vertical-spacing: 0px; font-size:medium;"><br /></span></span></span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'Times New Roman';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:medium;">Being alive is weird and confusing, but I really believe, even when I can't see it, that there is something for us to hold on to. If Lent is a time for confronting chaos, I'm glad I've just loaded the Sixpence discography onto my new iPod. They're faithful companions. </span></span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'Times New Roman';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:medium;"><br /></span></span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'Times New Roman';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:medium;">My apologies that this post became Ye Oldetime Amateur Theology Houre with Joel. We're about due for another post about how awesome it is to rock out.</span></span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'Times New Roman';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:medium;"><br /></span></span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'Times New Roman';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:medium;">The photo above, by the way, was used without permission. It comes from the Flickr user <a href="http://www.flickr.com/people/love_as_inspiration/">Tinchika</a>, who I welcome to contact me if she'd like me to remove it. It just fit the song so well.</span></span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'Times New Roman';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="-webkit-border-horizontal-spacing: 2px; -webkit-border-vertical-spacing: 2px; font-size:medium;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="-webkit-border-horizontal-spacing: 0px; -webkit-border-vertical-spacing: 0px; font-size:medium;"><br /></span></span></span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'Times New Roman';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="-webkit-border-horizontal-spacing: 2px; -webkit-border-vertical-spacing: 2px; font-size:medium;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="-webkit-border-horizontal-spacing: 0px; -webkit-border-vertical-spacing: 0px; font-size:medium;"><br /></span></span></span></div>Joelhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10707554930245556019noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3024762414024937723.post-60354405170647062652010-02-15T10:00:00.000-08:002010-02-15T10:04:33.886-08:00Eyes Wide OpenDoes Sixpence None the Richer have a sense of humor? Is there anything <em>fun</em> on their records? Their live shows have shown some signs of mirth. On bootlegs, Leigh Nash comes across as positively goofy, and it's a joy to hear her self-deprecating jokes between the somber moods of their songs. In his <a href="http://sixpencemess.com/news/entry/sayitisntso/">message explaining Sixpence's breakup </a>in 2004, Matt Slocum fondly remembered "Beetle Bob, who showed up...in Austin Powers garb and, no matter what the tempo or feel of the song, kung-fu danced the whole concert." And in one recently unearthed recording from 1996, during the extended jam at the end of "Meaningless," Matt Slocum and J.J. Plasencio find a way to interpolate riffs from Michael Jackson's "Beat It" and War's "Low Rider." (You really have to hear it for yourself; <a href="http://www.sendspace.com/file/grdldi">download here</a>.)<br /><br />In fact, Sixpence's main claim to pop-culture fame is "fun" pop songs -- "Kiss Me" and "There She Goes" are both easy, breezy, light, pleasant -- but I'm not sure if they are <em>actually</em> fun, the former being a rather sincere (and serious?) declaration of love, the latter a cover of a song about heroin. Still, it remains true that Sixpence has a reputation for bouncy, fun, three-minute head-bobbers, and it almost makes you wonder why "Eyes Wide Open," maybe the catchiest track on <em>Divine Discontent </em>(and the closest Sixpence has come to the Beatles, perhaps), wasn't considered as a single. (Then you remember that all the singles were tacked on to the beginning of the album. But I digress.) It's got a huge, driving beat through the verses, and a big Elton John pop chorus with super-simple lyrics -- <em>Bye bye bye -- </em>words that have served other pop songs well.<br /><br />I guess the thing that keeps "Eyes Wide Open" from being the happy-go-lucky singalong it could have been is that it's about a prostitute having an abortion. Leigh Nash, who wrote the song, said in an interview (again, I can't find the citation, but I have been reading magazine articles about this band for fifteen years, so I'm going to ask you to trust me) that she started writing it on an airplane, the paranoid melody and lyrics born from her fear of flying. "I wrote a song about a hooker," I seem to recall her saying. That part is obvious - "she walks the streets at night," "she's one for the money," etc. But am I going out on a limb by suggesting that this song is about an abortion? And if so, is that what really stops it from being a pop hit (recall Ben Folds Five's sad, moving, and surprisingly chart-topping "<a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tP8-1DIAY2o">Brick</a>")? I don't know. But consider the chorus: "She's saving what she kills / she'll build herself a loom / and spin another womb." If you've got another reading of that lyric, I'd like to hear it. (Honestly, I would. Sorry if it sounded sarcastic.)<br /><br />Even though "Eyes Wide Open" is, musically, one of Sixpence's most playful songs -- note also the sly references to one of Nash's favorite bands, Drugstore, in both the opening lyrics and the driving cello (which to my ears recalls Drugstore's "<a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E1azxmzeUhM&feature=related">El President</a>") -- but as a whole, it's a rather unsettling experience.<br /><br />Maybe you'd like to listen to a live version of this song recorded on April 6, 2009, at 3rd and Lindsley in Nashville, Tennessee: <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XAjioQjUSRs">here</a>.Joelhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10707554930245556019noreply@blogger.com2