Melting Alone

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

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

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

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

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

Falling Leaves

 "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.") 

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.

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 The Fatherless and the Widow 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. 

I Can't Catch You

Look how young and sexy this band was 22 years ago.

Q: Why is this not the third single from the self-titled album? 

A: Technically, it is.

Q:What do you mean? I never heard this song on the radio.

A: I think I did, once, actually, but it might have been in the "Case of the Missing Hit" 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.

Q: What do you mean by "support," exactly? 

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.

Q: You know that apocryphal-sounding story about the online chat Rivers Cuomo had with Weezer fans years ago, where someone asked him why Songs from the Black Hole never came out, and he replied simply "rotr," which allegedly implies that Matt Sharp's Return of the Rentals 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)?

A: Yes, but I don't see what that has to do with this.

Q: Well, you have several times compared Sixpence's relationship with "Kiss Me" to Radiohead's with "Creep," so I thought maybe you'd get the analogy.

A: That's not a question. 

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 (in Australia at the very least) 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?

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 that band? Did you know they broke up in 1997, the year Sixpence None the Richer was originally released?

Q: Yes, because I am you and I also just read that on Wikipedia. But who's asking the questions here, anyway?

A: I'm sorry.

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?

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 enough 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 great, but it's just another layer of stuff 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*

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?

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. 

Q: It's 2022. Why on earth are you still talking about the radio?

A: You might have a point there. 

Soul

This 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' The Great Divorce 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?"

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. 

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 Balthazarian hope in the bridge: "mother and I pray/ that it would happen someday."

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":

I rest in the hope that one bright day
Sunshine will burst to these prisons of clay,
And old Gabriel's trumpet and voice of the Lord
Will wake up the dead in the old churchyard.

Puedo Escribir

 Oír la noche inmensa,
más inmensa sin ella.
Y el verso cae al alma como pasto el rocío.
Pablo Neruda

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 song itself is absent from the actual LP release.)

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 This Beautiful Mess, 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.

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.

The Waiting Room

"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, The Prolific and the Devourer 

"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."  - Matt Slocum

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 subtitled the opening trio "Exploring the Crisis," and "The Waiting Room" does the most direct grappling with the crisis.

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.

Tension is a Passing Note

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

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

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

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

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

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