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. 

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.

An Apology

I consider "An Apology" the last song on The Fatherless and the Widow, since it's followed only by a reprise of "Trust" that feels frankly unnecessary, like it's only on there to make sure the record has 10 songs on it. I've said before that the last song on a Sixpence album is the record's thesis statement -- the confusion of "I Can't Explain," the triumphant defiance of "Moving On," the melancholy nostalgia of "A Million Parachutes." If we treat the string-quartet version of "Trust" as the actual last song on the record, I'll buy it -- a dark, melancholy take on a hopeful psalm fits Sixpence and the record.

But what does it mean if "An Apology" is the "last song" on this record? I think it makes the record a little lighter, and maybe that's a good thing.

"An Apology" is one of Sixpence's breezier songs, at least from the early part of their career. It's also their first offense in the" Repeat the Verse 1 Lyrics for Verse 2" category (see also: "Within A Room Somewhere," "Tonight"), and the chorus is simple and airy. In fact, it's just not a particularly mature song, which is maybe why I like it so much, and why I think it's good as a final track: most of the Fatherless and the Widow is really heavy for a record made by teenagers. It has a right to be, but I like the idea that the album starts and ends with jangly songs about feelings -- from the giddy love of "Field of Flowers" to the simple mea culpa of this track.

I messed up, I'm sorry, I shouldn't have said that, can we be friends? It wouldn't be an out-of-place sentiment in the church camp context where Matt & Leigh first met and started playing music together. It feels like very little is at stake in the refrain -- "It was a silly thing to say to you, I know" -- but the more it's repeated, the more it sinks in, and the more you realize that these silly little things matter, whether you're a teenager or not.

Also, that final shift to "we know." It feels meaningful, though I can't put my finger on why. Something about moving from the particular to the universal, the individual to the community.

Field of Flowers

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.

Walt Whitman, Leaves of Grass

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.

Musings

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.

Meaningless / Solomon the Mystic

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).

The Fatherless and the Widow

"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.

Spotlight

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.