Too Far Gone

I am tempted often to speak of the desperation I hear in the songs of this band. Yet as much as they express frustrated human longing, what else is remarkable about the songs of Sixpence -- and perhaps of any compentent pop band -- is their formal elegance. Theodor Adorno once denegrated popular music as lacking "concrete totality" when compared to classical music, which was allegedly more cohesive due to the relationship of its constituent parts of the whole. Pop songs, I suppose, were seen more like a clumsily pasted-together collage than, say, the thoughtfully balanced composition of a painting.

There is a sense in which Adorno was right: while a classical piece may follow its compositional threads multifariously, a pop song is math and psychology. Intro + Verse + Chorus + Verse  + Bridge +  Chorus + Outro, mostly in 8- or 16-bar subdivisions. Chords and melodies are easily manipulated in order to evoke in us certain predictable reactions.

But is the skillful manipulation of these things not, to most of our ears, utterly satisfying? And can a pop song not, whether at three minutes or stretched nearly to seven, as in the case of "Too Far Gone," surprise and delight? And cannot guitar solos do totally bad-ass stuff which, using the magic pixie dust of improvisation, move a pop song from the realm of the regiment and structure to that of imagination and possibility?

Before we consider the structure of "Too Far Gone," let me mention another seemingly unrelated pop song I love:  Weezer's "Undone (the Sweater Song)." It was said by Jim deRogatis to "have at least three distinct movements." I assume he refers to the spoken-word sections, the chorus, and the frantic crescendo of the conclusion (probably?), but whatever he meant, it's clear that the song includes several very simple sections, smushed together, which, when following one after the other, lead to something spectacular. The end of the song, in fact, I'd argue, is impossible without the parts that come before it, and its impact is also imposible without the wailing guitar solo, which breaks the song out of its incredibly simple three-chord beginnings to a a twisting bridge and a frenzied, joyous end.

So: "Too Far Gone." A simple Casio beat and a four-chord piano sequence that rewinds itself every four bars unfolds into a pre-chorus carried by a mellotron to the chorus and its three-part harmony payoff: "Am I just too far gone to be saved?" After only one minute, the song's structure has been wholly revealed, and it will essentially repeat itself for the next six. Organ and guitar are added, and at nearly three minutes in, when the pre-chorus starts to come back, one starts to feel cheated. Two short verses? A plodding vamp that simply repeats itself? No bridge?

But here is where the song, using no more than the building blocks already provided, takes a turn: the two pre-choruses are stacked one after the other, the metaphors of self-sabotage piling up till hope seems lost ("I'm shut out, I'm shut in ... I'm tied up, I'm tied down"), and then, the final twist: "You'll never be too far gone to be saved." This seems too pat, though -- too obvious, right? What's that, Christian rock band? You did a song about how things seem bad, but in the end, they're all going to be OK?

In the hands of another band, this would ring hollow. But remember this: Matt Slocum can say things with his guitar. Did you not know this? I remind you of a sentence from the liner notes to the song "Big Reconstruction" on Soul Rash, the first record by Slocum's pre-Sixpence band Love Coma:

If you listen closely, Matt's guitar speaks:

Yes -- that is what I've been trying to say each time I mention a Slocum guitar solo, and on "Too Far Gone," after the lyrical shift to hope, we get almost three more minutes of guitar work -- way more than on "Within a Room Somewhere," the band's previous guitar masterpiece. What Slocum's guitar is saying at any moment is difficult to translate, but it is always couched within the sentiment already created by the music and lyrics of the present song (how's that for totality, Adorno?). What seems to be happening here is a meandering, a twisting back, and a questioning that rises and rises as the notes of the solo climb higher.

Within the song's final minute things reach a much more fevered pitch than the lyrics could have suggested. There is a hard-won victory in that final high, repeated riff that ends around 5:58, a suggestion of existential triumph -- yet as the solo continues and the song fades out, I'm left with a distinct "I Still Haven't Found What I'm Looking For" vibe. Guitar solos are hard work, and they shape a void into something real, if only momentarily. This one gives glimpses of awful clarity, but it never ends -- it makes beautiful shapes before diving back into the fray (I accidentally typed gray there, which seems appropriate). Nash's vocal gives "Too Far Gone" an answer, but Slocum's guitar lives the questions.

PS: here is a copy of the song on YouTube, just so you can listen if you like.

Us

I've got this theory. A lot of people have theories about stuff -- people who normally seem to be within the pale of conventional wisdom in whatever intellectual tradition or community or belief system you'd expect, but then you suddenly hear them casually mention something you'd never have guessed someone like them -- whoever you believe them to be -- to think; like maybe "I believe in past lives," or "Satan makes people do things" or "bad things happen in threes" or "I don't see what the big deal is about illegal immigration" or "evolutionary theory should be applied to every aspect of human culture" or "I think unicorns really used to exist" or "I think everyone should try LSD at least once" or whatever.

So here's mine: I believe that music and love are the same thing.

That sounds really sentimental and cheesy and stupid and I've got almost nothing to back it up with. But I believe it. I feel it in my bones so obviously. I literally, actually believe that to play or sing music in a certain way is to actually, literally express love.

My friend Matt wrote a master's thesis about the way that musicality and lyrics interact to create meaning in pop music (I haven't read it, I'm sorry to say), and that might be kind of what I'm getting at here; if I actually knew more about music I might be able to make a more intellectual, Pythaogorean argument about music and math and how certain ratios of things resonate deeply within us because they're somehow built into the fabric of the universe.

But I don't even really know what the circle of fifths is, so how am I supposed to explain this? How am I supposed to explain that even though the chorus of "Us," one of the more cerebral pop songs of Sixpence's career, is simply one word -- you guessed it, "us" -- that the whole song, from the strings to the castanets to (especially) the bendy, zig-zagging guitar line, is an affirmation of love?

Maybe it's like this. Maybe "us" is a mantra. Maybe we start out believing that this song is just about the love between two people which it obviously is, on the surface. It's relationshippy and romantic in the verses, so there's no reason to believe the choral "us" is anything more than a couple. Yet as the song progresses, as the repeated "us" of the chorus seeps out and bleeds into the music, so the "us" of the song begins its semantic -- maybe even mystical -- shift from the particular to the universal (and, one hopes, back to the particular): Suppose, one thinks, suppose I were to live like "you're the only thing that matters" (repeated three times at the close of the song's bridge). Suppose I were to give warmth to the cold. Suppose I really do "sacrifice myself."

Suppose, as Tim Winton writes in his lovely novel Cloudstreet, " it's not us and them anymore. It's us and us and us. It's always us."

Suppose "Us" is not a silly love song. Suppose "Us" is the central fact of existence, the mystery that it is not good for man to be alone, that the two will become one flesh, that the unmanifested divine, in fact, will become flesh, that the kingdom of God is within/among us.

Suppose that it takes you repeated listens to a four-minute pop-song to figure all this out, and that when you finally figure it out it's not only because the singer kept repeating that one word, but because the guitars were somehow echoing with questions, the chords somehow were tugging your mind toward revelation, the harmonies and strings were somehow pulling you out of yourself, and the drums were backing off to give you space to think.

I say "suppose" because I can't be sure you're feeling that. But human subjectivity being what it is, I'm going to go with it. I don't suppose I've explained how music is love, here, exactly, but in the end I guess I can't. Fides quarens intellectum and all that.

Today's the twelfth anniversary of our first date, by the way, me and my wife --  from whom I have learned a lot about what really matters.

Loser Like Me

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

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."

Brighten My Heart

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."

Don't Pass Me By

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

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.

Love is Blindness

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.