songs that explain

Thought Menagerie

2011-07-15T09:01:00.000-07:00

Sixpence None the Richer's new album has been delayed.

This is a sentence that you could write at almost any point in the band's career after about 1995.

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 Sixpence's Facebook page here.

They're beautiful songs, of course (what, you think I'm not 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 Divine Discontent (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.

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.

"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 way up high on the tiny strings by the second half of the chorus.

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.

Paralyzed

2011-03-30T07:00:00.001-07:00

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."

"What about Yugoslavia?" said my friend.

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.

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?

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."

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.

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 Divine Discontent 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:

I breathe in, and breathe out

and go to do an interview

about a song, three minutes long

that will mean nothing to you

especially when your dearest friend was sent to cover Kosovo

his last assignment brought a bullet, and now he's gone

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."

Yet by the time the record was released, the interview has become, from the journalist's perspective, a way to numb the pain:

I breathe in, and breathe out

and go to do an interview

about a song, three minutes long

I just need something to do

especially when my dearest friend was sent to cover Kosovo

his last assignment brought a bullet, and now he's gone

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:

Feels like I'm fiddling while Rome is burning down

Should I lay my fiddle down, take a rifle from the ground?
God give me strength to pray that you will set things right

'Cause I'm paralyzed, I'm paralyzed

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:

Feels like I'm fiddling while Rome is burning down

Should I lay my fiddle down, take a rifle from the ground?

I need the ghost to breathe a northern gale tonight

'Cause I'm paralyzed, I'm paralyzed

That's lame, I thought. Just some throwaway line about a ghost. It was years later that I realized it was the 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.

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.

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.

Loser Like Me

2011-02-22T11:06:00.000-08:00

I'm not a huge fan of the TV show Glee -- 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 Best of) head-bobber "Loser Like Me," I could almost see it.

Almost.

(Apparently, Glee will actually be featuring a song of the same name 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 Dawson's Creek and She's All That? A resurgence of recognition might be nice, but perhaps Sixpence not appearing on Glee is for the best.)

(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. I'll let you decide whether it was a good thing for the band or the show.)

"Loser Like Me" is one of the triumphs of the sugary pop side of the Divine Discontent 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."

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.

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.

Thematically, I'm torn between declaring this a self-deprecating love song, almost reaching back to the mopiness of This Beautiful Mess, and a John 3:30-style psalm on the order of "Don't Pass Me By" or "Dizzy." Like much of Divine Discontent, 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.

Buy the song on Amazon here.

Listen to it on Youtube here.

Northern Lights

2010-12-22T08:32:00.001-08:00

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Moving On

2010-12-21T12:48:00.000-08:00

This post will be written in the style of the late Emotional Karaoke, a Mountain Goats ouevreblog, whose manifesto was: "I 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!

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.

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.

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.

Amen.

Love

2010-06-20T11:24:00.000-07:00

There 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 commands a song.

Seriously, listen to this. Sorry the video doesn't sync up with the sound, but this is a phenomenal performance:

Wasn't that great? 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.

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 "The Wool Gathering" by the Dandelion Method are my feeble attempt to approximate it, in fact.).

As for the words, how straightforward is this chorus?

I need love

It is patience, it is kindness

I need love

It is rain after the dryness

I need love

Sister Wisdom, help me see

It's the one thing that I need

The only thing that I need

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 feeling but to action, even when that action sometimes presents as pain, as a deep cut.

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.

"The Harvester is near/his blade is on your skin/to plant a new beginning/well then let the cut begin."

I really, really love this song.

Kiss Me

2010-06-15T07:00:00.000-07:00

Read my commentary on "Kiss Me" at Good Letters, the blog of Image: A Journal of the Arts and Religion. Visitors from Good Letters: if you're new to Sixpence, try "Love, Salvation, the Fear of Death" or "I've Been Waiting" to start.

Amazing Grace (Give It Back)

2010-03-30T11:48:00.000-07:00

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 Orthoproxy, 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.

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.

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.

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.

Still Burning

2010-02-21T22:27:00.000-08:00

“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

"Extinguish my sight, and I can still see you;

plug up my ears, and I can still hear;

even without feet I can walk toward you,

and without mouth I can still implore.

Break off my arms, and I will hold you

with my heart as if it were a hand;

strangle my heart, and my brain will still throb;

and should you set fire to my brain,

I can still carry you with my blood.

- Ranier Maria Rilke, from The Book of Hours (trans. Annemarie S. Kidder)

"Still Burning" is the best of everything Divine Discontent 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 (read them here). 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."

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 what the heck is really going on here? 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.

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.

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 real, period. As C.S. Lewis wrote in A Grief Observed, "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."

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.

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.

The photo above, by the way, was used without permission. It comes from the Flickr user Tinchika, who I welcome to contact me if she'd like me to remove it. It just fit the song so well.

Eyes Wide Open

2010-02-15T10:00:00.000-08:00

Does Sixpence None the Richer have a sense of humor? Is there anything fun 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 message explaining Sixpence's breakup 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; download here.)

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 actually 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 Divine Discontent (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 -- Bye bye bye -- words that have served other pop songs well.

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 "Brick")? 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.)

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 "El President") -- but as a whole, it's a rather unsettling experience.

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: here.

Down and Out of Time

2009-11-16T13:10:00.000-08:00

Sometimes examining emotional pain through the lens of other peoples' songs is a pretty healthy experience that doesn't actually cause a lot of personal grief. I've had bouts of remarkably detached emotional catharsis listening to "Virtute the Cat Explains Her Departure" by the Weakerthans, for example. (If you don't think a song about a cat can be unbearably sad, I'm afraid you're wrong.)

We like that songs reflect life, or that in the particularity of the songwriter's own pain and hope and sadness and joy, we can locate ourselves -- as Neko Case says, it can be comforting to hear "someone singing my life back to me." But when your life is being sung back to you and it is something you wish was not happening, when you are in the middle of the kind of thing that Leigh Nash wrote this song about, you don't want to hear it. It's like the chorus says -- "you're gonna feel my pain / like it or not."

Well, I don't like it. Yes, of course pain is real - but one person's pain cannot always be another's. I have seen too many times how genuine hurt turns into twisted bitterness, and how that emanates from one person and is absorbed into others. It should not happen, but it does.

The last line of the song is "your mystery is not worth being solved."

I don't want to hear this. I don't want to believe it. But sometimes I do.

Anything

2009-10-14T09:07:00.000-07:00

But we're sealing our lips for the someday

When the needle and the vinyl play

All the songs of our pain

Songs that explain

All our circles and strains

Which begs the question: "What the heck are circles and strains?"

One John Adams, who named his blog after a line "Anything" (as I did this one) answered this question better than I could. Though his blog "Circles and Strains" has since been abandoned to the wilderness of the internet, here's what he had to say, way back whenever.

" The song is about their band being down in the dumps, haggard with the writing and recording process. They're tired, depressed, sick of seeing each other, sick of singing the same songs over and over, sick of hearing their songs over and over, sick of wondering whether or not they still have it, etc. The only thing that keeps them together, ironically, is pain. The pain inside them that fueled the creativity to write those songs in the first place. The pain that is reflected in every melancholy note the guitar plays. The pain in every percussive note missed due to sheer exhaustion. The pain that drove the pen to write words that sear the conscience with their honesty. The pain in taking the risk to bare their souls in order to record an hour's worth of music. Most of all, the pain transmitted in every breath the singer breathes, struggling to relay with honesty and conviction the battle going on inside her. Those feelings that drive us to our wit's end—seemingly on a quest to be exorcised—are our circles and strains. "

Man, I wish I had written that.

And it's an interesting comment on what, exactly, is the "essence" of Sixpence, of what they are as a band. I've brought up certain repeated motifs -- being trapped, being weary, longing, and the big dumb obvious divine discontent itself -- each of which suggests flux, a temporary state that always involves hope and change even if it is rooted in pain. Adams, however, places pain itself at the center of Sixpence's work. It's hard to argue with that -- even if pain is a catalyst, if tension really is a passing note, pain may just be the first and most immediate force driving the songs of Sixpence.

"Anything" is a song about wanting to give up, wanting a sign that it's time to quit, a sign the band wouldn't get for years after "Anything" was written. One wonders, then, what sign, burning-bush-type or otherwise, they got when they decided to regroup and start the band again. Surely, it is not only pain that compels the two principal members of Sixpence None the Richer to continue their partnership -- joy and beauty are there, undeniably, if subtler.

But watch, just watch Leigh singing one of the band's new songs earlier this year at the Greenbelt festival , as she repeats "I've failed to make it...I've failed to make it..." The guitar shrieking, her body twisting and swaying -- circles and strains here become present tense verbs, not abstract ideas. The song circles, the singer strains, and more than a decade after "Anything," Sixpence is still making songs that explain.

Watch a performance of "Anything" here.

I Can't Explain

2009-10-13T08:55:00.000-07:00

Here are some phrases people have Googled in order to arrive at this blog:

"songs that explain love"

"i need songs that explain my life for a cd"

"songs that explain life" (many times)

"songs that explain to a person your love for them"

"songs that can explain who a person is"

"songs that explain someone"

"songs to explain hate"

"songs that explain everything"

"songs that explain things"

"songs that explain your first love"

"songs that explain everyone being alike"
"songs that explain someone not feeling like they are enough"

"songs that explain how beautiful how someone is"

To those people, well:

Sorry to disappoint you.

"I Can't Explain" is one of Sixpence's most important songs, but it's easy to ignore, buried all the way at track 12 of This Beautiful Mess. It begins (and remains) anxious, frantic, searching -- Baker's 16th-notes on the high-hat push the song forward, and Slocum plays a variation on only two chords during the verses, making for a kind of paranoid rush (and it ends with a positively spooky pedal-trickery riff, an echo into an abyss of confusion). And although Sixpence songs frequently unearth hope from the soil of despair, "I Can't Explain" never moves further than its title, repeated again and again in the song's chorus and its end. The song frequently asserts that there must be answers, there must be an end to pain, redemption has got to come, Roxy Music was wrong when they said there is nothing "More Than This," this cannot be all there is -- yet "I Can't Explain" stops short, way short, of any other Christian rock of this era, which almost always, in the last verse -- a shiny happy final couplet to the 4 miserable quats of an Elizabethan sonnet -- turns the tables and makes sure we know that Jesus Makes Everything OK.

If you consider that Sixpence emerged from a Christian culture where there are always answers, no matter how ill-suited they are to the questions, the chorus of "I Can't Explain" is positively aggressive in its refusal: "I can't / I can't explain" -- an extra "can't" for emphasis that this record, even as it asserts God watching over "this beautiful mess," will not reach a conclusion about how or why there can be such a mess, such beauty, such a God.

Because sometimes, songs do not explain anything.

Art: "Beautiful Mess" by Howard Finster, from the This Beautiful Mess liner notes.

Hear the song at YouTube, here (start at 3:43).

Brighten My Heart

2009-08-15T23:33:00.000-07:00

In the course of doing archival research on myself, which is a somewhat distressing enterprise if only for the amount of sheer earnest emo-style songs I wrote between the ages of sixteen and nineteen, I came across a tape of myself singing "Brighten My Heart," a Sixpence song from a worship compilation called Exodus which I have never owned. I must have heard the song on Christian radio, or maybe gotten it on a compilation CD with one of the music magazines I was in the habit of reading.

The reason it felt significant -- to come across a recording of myself singing the song, I mean -- is because it is the pretty much the only song on hours of tapes I have listened to that actually still means something to me, with a sentiment that matters to the person I am ten years later. (With the possible exception of "Sucked Out" by Superdrag. But all the other songs are essentially improvised punk rock or emo numbers about a handful of girls, and most of them contain either the words "girl," "school," and "cool" in rapid succession.)

"Brighten My Heart" is a simple four chords, and the lyrics have a lovely clarity bemoaning (as usual) an undesirable state of heart/mind/body/soul. The second verse repeats the first, a sneaky tactic I don't like to let this band get away with, though they do it once in a while, but it's the prayer-response to the malady-call that makes the song work: brighten my heart, lighten my soul, still my thoughts...and ultimately, "help me open my heart to you / O Jesus, it's what I long to do."

This is a prayer I needed ten years ago, and one I need now, and one I think I will always need.

Here is a link where you can listen to this lovely song -- one of very few that Sixpence recorded which can accurately be called a "worship song."

Field of Flowers

2009-08-12T22:44:00.000-07:00

O YOU whom I often and silently come where you are, that I may be with you;
As I walk by your side, or sit near, or remain in the same room with you,
Little you know the subtle electric fire that for your sake is playing within me.

I will tell you something I have not been telling anybody: I am writing a book. When I was 27 years old, I was floating some paper boats down a canal with a group of Chinese college students and we were writing our hopes and dreams on the boats and sending them off, wishing them well. I wrote "to publish a book before I am 30." It seems like maybe it's going to happen.

The scary thing, though, is that this book is almost -- not exactly, but almost -- a memoir, a book about my own experience, and so I am faced with a task that is actually not really easy at all: to come up with a narrative shape for pretty much my entire life and who I am.

I kind of have no idea how I am going to do this, because all I can remember about my life are little random things that seem to have no bearing on anything. One thing I remember is that The Fatherless and the Widow, by Sixpence None the Richer, was the first CD I ever bought. I had just read about Sixpence in a magazine called Breakaway, which is (or was, actually -- I think it's been a casualty of the recession) published by Focus on the Family and which probably bills itself as a magazine for "teen guys." I find it pretty amusing that this magazine -- which regularly ran articles on stuff like mountain biking, rock climbing, what to do about "zits," dating, etc. -- ran an article about a band with a girl singer who sang songs about feeling lonely and sad and spinning around in fields of flowers.

But I'm really glad they did, because I was at a phase in my life where I was looking for something in the way of guidance re what was cool and what was worth my time and what was, in a sense, "OK" music for me to listen to as a Christian teenager. I'm not sure what it was about Sixpence that made me want to buy their record -- I guess it was because they were called "alternative" music and I was 13 years old and thought maybe I was "alternative."

I am glad that I bought the CD and I am glad that "Field of Flowers" is the first Sixpence song I heard. There are things about it I didn't understand at the time -- like how influenced by the Smiths and the Cure it was, or what Slocum meant when he wrote about Whitman's "subtle electric fire" -- but I did understand the most important thing, which was this is a song about love, by somebody who knows about love. Really, it's a remarkably mature love song for such a young band, mature and knowing in its simplicity: let me know what makes you happy and I'll do it over and over and over again. Something must have stirred in my brain, an alert to the potentially erotic sentiment.

Do I have to keep using that word, erotic, to describe what Sixpence has done? If I do, it is only because so very few Christian bands have ever even dared approach the sensual, and Sixpence does so even here, on the very first song on their very first album. Nearly everything worth loving about Sixpence, the bright melodies and poetic lyrics and Leigh's paperthin voice and Matt's nimble solos and the clear, focused tightness of the pop form, is present on "Field of Flowers," with one notable exception being the song's lack of spiritual angst. That will come later, and plenty of it. So for now, let's just spin around.

Also: I could write what I've written about nearly every other song and say that "Field of Flowers" has a truly excellent guitar solo, but I'll just assume that's a given.

Sister, Mother

2009-08-11T21:43:00.000-07:00

One thing you have to remember: even though a girl is singing it, a dude wrote it. Usually. So things get a little confused about "Kiss Me" -- not sure who is wearing the flowered hat and/or the dress, but I think it's the same person, though the "bearded barley" I'm pretty sure is just barley -- and some other Sixpence tracks. This is something I've come to appreciate about the band; not that the sentiments are necessarily somehow ungendered by virtue of being a male songwriter channelled through a female singer, but that notions of femininity and masculinity and personhood seem rather tied up in each other, like both are needed to fully realize the third.

"Sister, Mother" is one of those tracks where all the genders and family relationships are rather blended up, and (spiritual) (or any kind of) wisdom/love is somehow a picture of relationships rather than an abstract idea. "Hug him like a brother / kiss her like a sister / let it be my mother" -- is that hug him like he is your bother, or like you are his brother? Like she is your sister, or you are hers? And what is "it" and how is "it" your mother? Somewhere Slocum's liner notes for this song explain that the "Sister" here is wisdom -- Sophia -- and my money is on God being the Mother - and the Father.

Or, it could be that wisdom is just an articulate lady with a bottle of cheap blush on the corner. Sounds good, either way.

This live version of the song has a truly tasty guitar solo.

My Dear Machine

2009-08-08T22:19:00.000-07:00

If you give up a lot, you get to come back a lot, too, and every comeback, even if you know things are never going to turn out the way you want them to, is a blessing and a promise. From the first few dirty notes on that Rhodes piano to the horns (must be John Painter on those, no?), Sixpence announces its intent to kick ass. Sixpence is not a band that does a lot of ass-kicking, as a rule, but they can when they want to, though not so much with distortion and anger as with melody and arrangement. The fist-pumping energy of "My Dear Machine" doesn't come from shouted self-righteousness -- not even from an encouraging declaration like, say "Moving On" with its "I will not let them ruin me" refrain. It's the energy of the earth and the spirit, the shoots ascending for the rebirth, the careful husbanding of a craft left to rust.

It was LL Cool J, Google tells me, who said "Don't call it a comeback." But I say, always call it a comeback. Always come back.

Healer

2009-04-21T21:44:00.000-07:00

"Healer," recorded during the sessions for This Beautiful Mess, was just way too perky to be anywhere near that record, and the band was right to leave it off. It's a kind of proto-"Kiss Me," jangly as all-get-out, but with a clear brightness, a crispness, I guess, that is pretty absent from any other Sixpence guitar work pre-1997. It's effortlessly complicated and beautiful, and subtly peaking at the moment when the backwards guitar and Nash's pre-chorus "hey-ey" crescendo.

I'm not really sure what it's about -- "Healer" isn't a mishmash of imagery like "Musings," or a collage of depression like a lot of the songs on This Beautiful Mess -- it's more like an oil painting of a scene in a city park. Those backward loops sound like bees to me. The song's central couplet: "Today, Beauty is my Healer / Today, I'm gonna steal Her." These words are wide open to interpretation, as far as I'm concerned. I have no idea what they mean, yet on a day like today, when the sun makes my skin feel warm, trees seem greener, and life seem bearable, I know exactly what they're talking about.

Musings

2009-02-04T20:50:00.000-08:00

The Fatherless and the Widow was the first compact disc (or "CD," if you remember those) I ever purchased. It was all cassettes before that, and I still remember how I felt walking out of Evangel Books and Gifts that day, the way the sun was shining, the exciting plastic square in my hands, the weirdly liberating feeling. I had just made a decision to pay for a piece of music I liked -- it wasn't a birthday present, it wasn't something my parents listened to, it was mine, and I could play it whenever I wanted.

I was thirteen years old and mostly listened to Christian rock music. Sort of a naive kid, maybe -- to quote Morrissey, "I never even knew what drugs were." Fifteen years later I have still never taken anything stronger than vicodin for back pain, but I will say this: "Musings" sounds like drug music. The way those notes swell and fade (not unlike those mentioned in the previous post), the hazy trance of the essentially one-chord vamp, and the lyrics:

Mysteries unfolding quickly before my eyes
In a way, I saw the world in one night
Without even leaving the room
Golden cymbals catching light
The flowing veils of dancers in the night
Put me in a swoon
Beating drums and violins, so mystical and freeing
These things that I'm seeing
They're so wonderful

The song is about the mystery that God somehow created and sustains all of creation, I think --but isn't it also kind of, like, a psychedelic spirit quest? This song works as either a seriously mystical spritual-ecstacy prayer-trip, or a musical version of those basement scenes from That 70's Show. Also, the song is called "Musings," which is way Livejournal, but they did write this album while they were both still teenagers.

Love, Salvation, the Fear of Death

2009-02-02T21:50:00.001-08:00

If I had to choose any song to represent Sixpence's entire oeuvre, it would probably be LStfoD (awkward acryonym? secret LSD reference?). It's so complex and pretty, so full of musical ideas that converge so subtly. That first clump of bass notes blows my mind -- not being an expert, I cannot tell which are the real notes and which are the digital ghosts, and I imagine something like a 20-string bass played by 10 nimble fingers. Baker again sounds like he is playing a thousand-piece drumset with the restraint of a guy playing washtub, only using each cymbal when absolutely necessary, and I love the way Slocum backs off during the verses, just allowing the notes to build and swell.

The guitar solo (this was back when those still existed) is beautiful, as Slocum's work on the Fender 12-string almost always is. In interviews during this period, he'd mention the Smashing Pumpkins as an influence, and although I don't hear any James Iha in this (or the other songs on tracks 1-4, which seem to be generally considered the best on the record - I'd agree), I certainly hear the thickness and depth the Pumpkins acheived on Siamese Dream and Mellon Collie (and which they completely lost by the end of their career and their "reunion"). The Pumpkins knew how to wring emotional depth out of the guitar tropes of grunge, and Sixpence manages to do it, too (especially on "Bleeding," but more on that later), though with considerably less distortion.

Love is explicitly mentioned in the lyrics (which awkwardly ask "come and save my soul / before it's not too late" - what is the not doing there?), salvation indirectly, and the fear of death not at all, yet all three together articulate a certain "I Still Haven't Found What I'm Looking For" restlessness (a divine discontent?): acknowledging the first two does not diminish the third.

The really remarkable thing is that Sixpence takes one of the New Testament's most often repeated passages, Paul's description of love in the first book of Corinthians, and puts a negative spin on it -- so often these words are recited at weddings to remind us what love should be, that we are nothing without love, and so it makes us feel better that we have found it, or are working toward it. "Love, Salvation, the Fear of Death" starts with lack of love as a given. The resulting lyrics carry the if...then of the passage to their natural conclusion: I don't have love. Therefore I have nothing. The final line of the chorus, "I'm not afraid to admit / how much I hate myself" is simply brutal. Thank God the music is bouyant enough not to make this song suicidal; like the rest of This Beautiful Mess, it drives, pushes forward, looks for answers -- which are lacking, the final track being "I Can't Explain" -- but it is in the looking, in the forward motion, that something begins to happen.

Pictured: the Fender Electric XII, presumably the guitar heard here.

Download: Dale Baker offers an mp3 of this song performed live at Flevo Fest in 1996. The quality isn't great, but this is the only live version with the Plasencio bassline I know of.

Postscript: An inexplicable "dance mix" of this song is featured on Tickets for a Prayer Wheel. The first thirty seconds of it are cool and creepy and sound like David Bowie during his industrial period. The rest is simply bizarre. Can you imagine dancing to this song?

Don't Pass Me By

2009-01-21T20:22:00.000-08:00

One of the many tracks that was cut from Divine Discontent, "Don't Pass Me By" was relegated to the b-side of "Don't Dream It's Over," the note-for-note Crowded House cover that acted as a kind of "There She Goes II" for the band. The guitars on this song are a great acheivement, the crisp staccato chords of the chorus and the sneaky near-surf riff introduced in the second chorus. It took me a couple of years to realize that the whole song switches to a swing feel on the bridge, because it's done so subtly. Once you notice that, it's like, damn, that is a groove. The shift back into the driving rock beat is so seamless that I can almost forgive myself for never noticing the whole thing before. I believe this is only the second Sixpence song to feature trumpet ("The Lines of My Earth" being the first), and it works really well, setting the stage for the in-your-face horn section that would emerge on "My Dear Machine."

Other highlights: what sounds like the world's tiniest snare drum, messy ugly chords on the verses, and rhyming "clean" with "clean."

Speaking of grooves, give me a minute to find mine. I'm just getting back into this.

Sad But True

2009-01-18T06:27:00.000-08:00

Sixpence None the Richer is a band named for an economic metaphor describing a religious concept about art. And their work, especially around the time of their self-titled record, is usually about that same three-way collison: art, faith, and money. "Sad But True" most directly addresses this pileup, but it was left off the record, relegated to the b-side of an obscure "Kiss Me" single few people bought, as it was released before the song was actually a "hit single."

And so the irony of the hit single being b/w a song that essentially presaged the untenable position the band would find itself in due to "Kiss Me" -- a moody, sacramental rock band being cast as a breezy teen pop group -- went largely unnoticed. For a long time, this song could be read as a statement about the band's demise:

Beauty never sells. Money makes the rules.

Artsy band fails to capitalize on one-hit wonder status and breaks up.

But they came back! And for the first time in years, they're where they need to be: an independent band, beholden to no corporatations, in a world where radio singles aren't such a big deal. Releasing My Dear Machine on on a pay-what-you-will-or-not scheme (NoiseTrade) was a refreshing and smart move for Sixpence. What better way to exorcise the economic demons of the past than by giving away songs for free? Their Christmas album (which I will not be writing about here as I cannot bring myself to listen to Christmas music when it isn't Christmas) was released through Nettwerk, a company known for giving artists a huge degree of control over their rights to publishing and recordings. I'm not sure if Sixpence ever played this song live-- but ideologically at least, I hope they don't need to play it again for a long time.

For those of you following along at home with your Bibles, the first line of the chorus ("I need to strengthen the thing that remains" -- also rendered as "the things that remain") comes from the third chapter of the book of Revelation.

You can listen to "Sad But True" on Youtube here.

Angeltread

2008-11-23T15:30:00.000-08:00

You figure the album is going to sound like the last one, but maybe with better production, as the first few chords kicks things off and other instruments tentatively enter. Then -- badadada! (Baker and his four snare hits again)-- the bombast, the anguish, the distortion! The first magazine article I ever read about Sixpence was in, believe it or not, a Focus on the Family magazine aimed at teenaged boys, and in it, this album's producer, Armand John Petri (what a name), said that the first four songs on the record were meant to cement Sixpence's signature sound. While this didn't actually happen -- maybe the band didn't truly "find their sound" until the s/t record -- "Angeltread" is a template for the whole of This Beautiful Mess: dark, moody, questioning, and, frankly, erotic. This is a song about being in bed, alone, without a recently departed lover ("hands rhthmically grope the sheets again for you"), sexually and spiritually frustrated. The moon painting the walls white, the silk sheets, the crickets outside, it's supposed to be romantic, perfect, it's one Marvin Gaye track short of a seduction, but... you're not there.

The perennial problem with religious pop music is whether we are dealing with God or (Wo)Man -- whether the love, lost or found or longed for, comes from a romantic impulse or a spiritual one, and perhaps the most interesting is that which blurs the disinction, Julian of Norwich-style. Judee Sill's "The Kiss" comes to mind. So does this song.

DISCUSSION QUESTIONS ABOUT THE ANGELTREAD VIDEO (below)

1. How painfully 1995 is this video? Notice, for example, the unironic presence of doll parts; yes, DOLL PARTS.

2. What's up with Jude 1:6? Does that mean this song is about scary evil angels, and if so are you a little creeped out?

Love is Blindness

2008-11-05T04:09:00.000-08:00

One of U2's saddiest sexy songs, or sexiest sad songs, and I'm still not sure that Sixpence brings anything vital to its interpretation, but I do want to say one thing, which is did you notice that the riff Slocum uses in the song is exactly the same as Radiohead's "Street Spirit" save for one note?And so Sixpence does what Coldplay tried to do but couldn't on their first couple of records: successfully marries U2 and Radiohead in a single song.

I've Been Waiting

2008-11-03T03:54:00.000-08:00

In the earliest apocryphal scribblings about Divine Discontent, this song was called "I Don't See Why." The record that was released nudges the mood by moving from a negative-positive (that is, "you love me," but "I don't see why") to a positive-negative one (a deadly silence after an argument, but still, hopefully, "I'm waiting by a phone for the blessed ring..."). The waiting, Tom Petty says, is the hardest part, and the blessed ring never really comes in the song's lyric. No deus ex payphone, just the hope for change as Nash breathes life into Slocum's head-just-barely-above-water optimism: "I'm changing who I am / 'cause what I am's not good."

"I've Been Waiting" is probably the best song on the album (or at least a tie with "Still Burning"), and the most equisitely crafted. Slocum's introductory riff is instantly memorable, and the way he flips and echoes it during the verses is just so damned pretty. The lack of acoustic guitar doesn't hurt the song's texture, thanks to the gorgeous chords ringing out from what I believe is the Fender 12-string. The orchestra pad begins to swell at the halfway point, just after we arrive in "the land of waits."

Digression, by the way: what is the "land of waits?" Thematic resonance with the song's title, of course, but why the awkward syntax? The part of me that reads Divine Discontent as autobiography makes me want this to be a reference to Tom Waits, thereby placing Slocum in Northern California ("the land of Waits," where the man lives) as in "A Million Parachutes," and thereby placing the song later on the grim timeline of divorce at which the album subtly hints. It's hard to say.

My favorite moment in the song is the tiny, tiny explosion of a fill that Dale Baker bursts out with to kick off the final reprise of the chorus. Baker's playing on all post-TBM Sixpence songs is a study in tasteful restraint, but the way he manages to make a meaningful cresecendo out of four notes on the snare drum (after building up with a couple of -- tasteful, of course -- tom hits) leaves me in awe every time.

Finally, it's Jerry Dale McFadden's crystalline keyboard runs that provide the blessed ring, note-by-note chords that chime out throughout the chorus, wavering and lingering as Nash's last words underline the self-doubt: "No, I don't see why you should."

Art: "The Waiting is the Hardest Part," photo by Chris Osburn, from London Daily Photo blog.

Dresses

2008-10-22T06:04:00.000-07:00

in the middle of my mourning

The year my grandmother died, I had two dreams about her. One before and one after.

In the first dream she was in a nursing home. I don't know if it bears any resemblance to the home she was actually in because I'm sorry to say I never saw it. In the dream, people were pushing carts around, not simply using walkers or wheelchairs but pushing metal carts, like the kind you seem in dim sum restaurants, on which their own internal organs, grotesquely outside their bodies, were stored, livers, hearts, small intestines. They wandered hallways pushing their own insides around, eyes like black holes.

In the second dream she was on a gravel road outside a church with a group of other older people. They wore purple choral robes and seemed restless in the way a group of people always are before a performance. Her hair was white, eyes blue, and she was smiling. It's time to go inside, someone said. It's time to go inside and sing, Rosie.

sits joy like a happy child

I Won't Stay Long

2008-10-15T00:36:00.000-07:00

Of course, dear reader, I lied about "Waiting On the Sun" being the only song not written by a member of Sixpence -- Sam Ashworth wasn't a member of the band when he wrote this song, although he is now ("membership" in the band being the tentative thing it is). Unlike the previous Song that Must Not Be Named, "I Won't Stay Long" blends seamlessly into the story of the album it's on, sandwiched by Slocum's "Sister, Mother" and "Love."

I saw Mr. Ashworth perform this song on an acoustic tour he did with Slocum. They played at a now long-gone "tea bar" in Seattle run by some friends of mine. Ashworth sang "still I don't know what to do" both times in the chorus, omitting the "sister, show me what to do" which provides a thematic link (songs about "Sister Wisdom") on the Sixpence record. Also, after the song, Slocum spoke -- the only time he did so during the concert. Ashworth explained that he'd written the song for a Sixpence record which ended up (as we know) being quite successful, selling over a million copies.

"So Sam made some money," Matt said, glancing upward. Which, if you consider that the entire self-titled record is pretty much about the battle between art and commerce, is a pretty funny thing for him to say.

Here is a video recording of that performance, which took place in June of 2005. Visually unappealing, but the sound quality isn't bad considering that it was just a regular digital camera.

Meaningless / Solomon the Mystic

2008-10-10T00:45:00.000-07:00

There's a certain bleakness to The Fatherless and the Widow that's absent from Sixpence's other records, however dark those do, indeed, get. It may be the simplicity of the instrumentation, since nothing is more prominent than Slocum's guitar (from the sound of it, he hadn't acquired the electric twelve-string that's become one of his signatures) and he rarely plays, to get technical about it, way up high on the tiny strings. It's not the only plodding, meditative track of the bunch ("Musings" is almost a straight-up drug trip) but "Meaningless" is simply hypnotic, from the first plunked notes cascading off each other to the arpeggiated acoustic hook that starts just as the song fades out*.

The words, borrowed from everybody's favorite bummer of a book in the Old Testament, Ecclesiastes, are much more of an existential downer than the rest of the record, which itself is mostly about death. But "Meaningless" transcends the mourning of individual loss because it's about how life is pointless to begin with. "It's all meaningless," goes the cheerful hook. The CCM-approved bridge goes on to say "Fear your God / This is all I know," but that hardly brings more comfort**, what with the connotations of fear in our language. The other dramatic breakdown, with Leigh and Matt singing in grave unison a riff on Robert Herricks's "To the Virgins to Make Much of Time," urging us to "gather ye rosebuds while ye may/tomorrow you could lie in a silent grave/pawing the dust and awaiting the end of time."

"Solomon the Mystic" is an excerpt from the live digital-delay-fest that is the jam at the end of "Meaningless," and it's the most dynamic instrumental performance Sixpence has put on a record. Slocum slices and dices the song's mesmerizing riff, moves it way up the neck, and utliizes his delay pedal in a way that would make the Edge jealous. This is a jam that moves, deteriorates into sound and fury, as Plascencio detunes his bass strings so that in the end they're merely rattling, croaking, signifying nothing.

*This is also perhaps the only Sixpence mystery I've never solved: somebody says something, very very quietly, right at this moment. It's almost imperceptible, but it's there. What is it?

UPDATE: "Read Psalm 39, rather than listening to this backwards message."

**Incidentally, "Fear your God" is skipped over in live performances like this one (you have to become a member of the Sixpence discussion list The Vine to download it).

Waiting on the Sun

2008-10-08T05:36:00.000-07:00

You go to war with the copy Divine Discontent you have, not the one you want. And the one we have is heavy on potential singles -- the excellent "Breathe Your Name," the solid and pleasant (and of course record-company mandated) cover of "Don't Dream It's Over," even the nearly mindless but catchy "Tonight" -- none of these are particularly offensive. (Didn't Nash once refer to Sixpence singles as "harmless?) But if there is one song I could just wish away from the Sixpence discography, a song I could cause to cease to exist by an act of sheer will, it would, without question, be "Waiting on the Sun," which is the only song not written by a member of Sixpence for a Sixpence record. That is, it's not a cover, but a song written for the record by Ron Aniello -- who produced Lifehouse's albums and also this track, the only one on DD he did -- and Jason Wade, that band's singer.

I'm a terrible songwriter. I've written about five songs in my life, and they all have the same chords, but even I would be offended if somebody made me record a song by the guy from Lifehouse. And it's not that Lifehouse is bad -- they're just so earnestly mediocre, such a simulacra of sincerity and passion, and such, to my ears and gut, the opposite of a band like Sixpence. "Waiting on the Sun" is blustery about its nothingness, it announces its go-nowhereness, and perhaps that's the intention, given its subject matter. "I'm going nowhere and I'm going to take my time" is the song's most memorable line (certainly moreso than"I'm waiting on the sunshine," the most repeated lyric), and nowhere, indeed, it goes.

"Tonight" ought to have made this song redudant, both as second single material and as a thematic thread: it goes nowhere ("It's hard to know/where I'm supposed to go") in a much peppier way, and, despite being almost a minute longer, feels shorter. "Waiting on the Sun" is a toe-tapper. I'll give it that. But it's empty. And it is not a Sixpence None the Richer song.

Disconnect

2008-10-05T06:32:00.000-07:00

A lot of people (at least I assume "a lot" of people -- I don't know how many of us there are) see Sixpence's This Beautiful Mess-era-lineup as definitive, and it's hard to argue. Tess Wiley is the only woman who has been a "permanent" member of the band, and as a harmonist, her throaty alto was a perfect foil for Leigh Nash's high coo, especially on "Within a Room" and "Circle of Error."

Wiley, who has lived in Germany for some years now, recently rejoined Sixpence for handful of tour dates in Europe, where she played and sang on some songs that were written long after she left the band. The only recordings we have of songs Wiley wrote for Sixpence are "Rainy Day Assembly," which was recorded during the same sessions as TBM and which she sings (it didn't appear on the album), and "Disconnect," which Wiley wrote but which Nash sings.

"Disconnect" is a perfect fit for the record, and it's hard to tell someone other than Slocum wrote it -- "a room to keep my rage away from you," eh? -- every bit as weary and impotent (I keep coming back to this word, though I don't mean to) as most of the other songs. It's surely one of the best choruses on the record, especially those staccatto acoustic guitar strums on the final go-round, and there is a cello solo instead of a guitar solo, which is lovely.

This was my favorite Sixpence song when I was sixteen years old, and the first one I learned to play on the guitar. I don't have a lot of other revelatory things to say, but I do think it holds up pretty well.

The Fatherless and the Widow

2008-10-01T08:43:00.000-07:00

"Pure and undefiled religion before God and the Father is this: to visit orphans and widows in their trouble, and to keep oneself unspotted from the world." James 1:27

Most of the talk about orphans and widows from the Bible gets thrown around in a real Social Gospely way today, and there's nothing wrong with that. We like having a God who throws in with the underdog, anyway.The Fatherless and the Widow are more than talking points for social justice on this song, though, and from the first slow notes of that drop-D guitar riff -- which is much more persistent and in-your-face than you'd expect on a song like this -- we're drawn intimately not into poverty or weakness, but spare and stark grief. A mother and child who aren't being visited in their trouble, no recipients of this pure and undefiled religion, and horribly spotted by this world if anyone is.

"Behind closed doors/they cry their tears/and behind closed doors/they reveal their fears/to the God in Heaven above." Leigh Bingham hadn't yet come into that effortless, airy voice she's now known for. There's an earnestness and heft to her vocals here, even at seventeen years old, surely too young to feel a lyric like "stricken down by the hand of death."

One ought to hesitate before reading a songwriter's autobiography into his material (just ask Matthew Perpetua after Michael Stipe gave him a stern talking-to). But it is worth noting that The Fatherless and the Widow is dedicated to Slocum's (deceased) father, Joseph Thornton Slocum.

Within a Room Somewhere

2008-09-30T06:44:00.000-07:00

I am reluctant to tell people that Sixpence None the Richer (aren't they that band from Dawson's Creek?) is my favorite band. From a broad cultural perspective this is tantamount to admitting something like maybe you subscribe to Cat Fancy magazine.

[Which I don't, by the way. I'm just saying.]

Anyone who thinks of Sixpence (aren't they that band from She's All That?) as a namby-pamby soundtrack band needs to be subjected to 3:50 - 5:03 of "Within a Room Somewhere" and you need to turn up the volume a little at 4:22 and then you really need to turn up the volume at 4:44 and then if that person is not willing to reevaluate things you are going to have to punch him in the face.

The word "rage" seems inappropriate to the casual Sixpence listener. Being stuck and unable to get out (or in) is a pretty persistent Sixpence motif, but Nash is not Zack de la Rocha. Her instrument wrings all kinds of longing and despair and desire out of Slocum's lyrics, but it never rages. The guitars -- and I am counting at least three, one of them very low in the mix singing all kinds of agony -- do all the emotional work here, straining to escape and maybe, maybe breaking free during that last notebend before it all breaks down and we get ready to move back into some serious doldrums on a vaugely gothic love song ("Melting Alone") about drinking alone.

Melody of You

2008-09-27T22:01:00.000-07:00

Mark Joseph, in a commentary on "Melody of You" which appeared in the National Review in 2003, writes:

Together on "Melody of You," Slocum and Nash have done nothing short of making a mockery of both modern pop music and the worship-music business — for they have managed to prove, in the course of another "song, three minutes long," that pop music can indeed talk intelligently and succinctly about important and transcendent things, and remind the entire worship-music industry that the Author of the snowflake and the butterfly likely values creative expression over vain repetition.

It's hard to put it much better than that. "Melody of You" stands out -- modestly, quietly -- as just maybe the highlight of the band's career. Underneath all the doubt, darkness, and despair, this proclamation of surrender: "I can do nothing else."Like the band's name, which as you may recall is based on the idea that we can only offer God things that are already God's to begin with, "Melody of You" suggests a certain worthlessness to human endeavors; God is a tune "I only write variations to." But oh, those variations. That exquisite gather-round-the-campfire* fingerpicking and that delicate string arrangement. Why bother? Why make music for God if God made music? Because you can do nothing else. And sometimes you come up with songs like this. Slocum's almost ironically understated one-sentence commentary on the song tells us that "Melody" is "an attempt to describe God in a poetic manner similar to the Psalms." Mission accomplished, I think. I'd like to see any "worship band" write as convincingly about God not only as draught beer, but also as pint glass and barman.

By the way, I'm glad they didn't call the band Sixpence to the Good, which is how C.S. Lewis originally put it.

(*I guarantee I stole the adjective campfire re: this song from somewhere else, but I can't remember where.)

Spotlight

2008-09-25T18:27:00.000-07:00

This song was written ten years too early. It's one of the few times in their career that Sixpence actually followed a trope of Christian rock -- they wrote a song about how you shouldn't worship them, you should worship God instead. This almost always rings false, especially if it's being said/sung by Christian bands playing huge arenas with big light shows, so Sixpence may have done right by pre-empting their fame. Then again, I have never once seen Matt Slocum, a true shoegazer if ever there was one, look at the audience during a Sixpence show. He doesn't strike me as a guy who's up there to bask in his own glory -- he's too busy getting the digital delay just right. Which he does masterfully on this recording, by the way. The main riff for "Spotlight" is a clean, nimble hook straight from the Johnny Marr playbook, and guitar work like it almost disappears from Sixpence's recorded ouevre until "Love" from the self-titled album. (Feel free to disagree -- perhaps J.J. Plasencio's delicious bass intro on "Love, Salvation, the Fear of Death" picks up this thread sooner.)

"Spotlight, get me out of this spotlight," Bingham sings. "It looked OK but somehow it doesn't feel right." Well, it doesn't feel right for her to be singing that in 1993, anyway. To the best of my knowledge, Sixpence has rarely, if ever, performed this song, but it would have been all the more appropriate post-"Kiss Me."

EDIT: By the way, I just noticed that "Spotlight" is the only song on The Fatherless and the Widow that wasn't written by Matt Slocum -- it was written by T.J. Behling, who may have been a member of Sixpence at a very early stage. My history on this point is a bit fuzzy.

The Lines of My Earth

2008-09-24T05:57:00.001-07:00

Giving up, or at least making songs about giving up, is what they do best. So when Sixpence None the Richer starts making records again after four years of silence, when they start over with a fresh canvas, optimism even, it feels weird. "The Lines of My Earth" is one of many Sixpence songs about not having the will to carry on -- not surprising considering the "issues" the band was plagued by for most of their career. "This is the last song that I write / till you tell me otherwise" the chorus begins. Of course, it's the eigth song on a 12-song LP, so somebody told Matt Slocum otherwise. Thankfully. There's a slinky AM-radio blues thing going on -- it's almost sexy (even moreso live, lately) even as it's a song about apathy. As is par for this record, drummer Dale Baker does so much with so little, and Leigh Nash sounds exhausted when she breathes out the words "I just don't feel it any more."

This is music to squeeze blood from rocks by; something Sixpence None the Richer does with grace.