(If you haven’t read Part 1, go here.)
OK, we’ve hit the bottom of the proverbial bucket with the last song. We’re King Lear stripped of his clothes in the rain in the middle of Act III. (I have to employ my education every once in a while here, my folks paid quite a bit for it.) Now, it’s time to build our protagonist back up. Not an easy journey, however. There are fairy tale romances such as the ones in “Love Actually” which are nice and fun and warm the heart, but exist as fantasy more than something that holds up the mirror to reality. I realize this is all a bit pretentious in discussing a musical compilation, but then again, this is me we’re dealing with.
Onwards and upwards…
“Deathly”, Aimee Mann
This song, in addition to being the best Mann ever wrote, has possibly the greatest first line of any song ever: “Now that I’ve met you, would you object to never seeing each other again?” Just classic. So good that PT Anderson constructed his entire movie “Magnolia” around it.
I’m putting this song here to represent the moment of meeting someone and not feeling prepared to deal with the potential positive outcomes. Whether that be bad timing, or personal insecurities, or you’re trapped under a bookshelf. Whatever the case may be, you instinctively push this person away from you for fear you’re at best damaged goods, at worse the antithesis of what you feel they want or deserve. In addition, you’re at the point where any perceived affection towards your person feels like some sick joke: “No, don’t pick on me/When one act of kindness could be/Deathly…”
Plus, this song has one killer guitar solo, and that never ever hurts.
“Fear”, Sarah McLachlan
Some of you may not remember, but before aliens came down and kidnapped Sarah McLachlan, leaving us an inferior clone to fool the masses, she wrote and produced some of the more interesting music of the 90’s. Neither her voice nor her music sounded like much of anything that was going on, except for people like Kate Bush and Peter Gabriel.
This choice furthers the thematic content of “Deathly”, though musically veers waaaay off to the left. Ethereal keyboards envelop the high-range of her soprano voice, seemingly shielding her from the pain of the outside world. She’s at “winter’s end” where “promises of a long lost friend/Speak to me of comfort.” Still, she can’t let the cold go:
But I fear
I have nothing to give
I have so much to lose
Here in this lonely place
Tangled up in our embrace
There’s nothing I’d like
Better than to fall
But I fear I have nothing to give
So we’re left with someone who actually has established some sort of contact, is contemplating a new life beyond that she’s been living, but feels neither able nor worthy to move forward. A fairly common perception, it seems, for those in the months following an intense and/or emotionally damaging relationship. Your emotions in a way don’t feel like yours…yours to own, or yours to give. They belong elsewhere, even if you intuitively know they are rightfully yours.
“Skin”, Madonna
One of the great “songs you don’t know by an artist you know” ever. I can’t believe this was never released as a single. Off the very, very good album “Ray of Light”, it’s the perfect segue from “Fear” in that it shows someone more willing to break through the self-imposed boundaries listed in the past two songs. Just check out the lyrics to the first verse:
Kiss me, I’m dying
Put your hand on my skin
I close my eyes
I need to make a connection
I’m walking on a thin line
Later, she sings that, “I’ve got this thing/I want to make a correction/I’m not like this all the time…” Finally, an acknowledgement of the inadequacies in the protagonist’s life, and the stated attempt to correct them.
(Some might be tempted to note that the three songs of attempted redemption are all by female artists, whereas all the songs of despair were by male artists. To which I say: Yo, you’ve been at Berkeley too long.)
“Red Rain”, Peter Gabriel
To represent the initial tumbling down of the protagonist’s defenses, I chose this song. This is one of those choices that makes more sense musically than lyrically, and I’ll be the first to admit that. It’s hard to not feel emotionally cleansed after listening to this track. I myself prefer many of the live versions of this song versus the one featured as the initial track in “So”, but I abhor live tracks on a compilation mix. Always feels terrifically jarring.
(OK, so funny story as an aside…back in college, we’d do the “Dark Side of the Moon” over “Wizard of Oz” about once a month. On one occasion, instead of looping the CD over and over, it skipped to the next CD, which was Disc 1 of Peter Gabriel’s “Secret World Live” CD. I stopped the CD after a few seconds, said, “Bugger it”, and let it play through. And damn, it worked amazing. “Red Rain” came on as the red sands in the hourglass were falling. “Solsbury Hill” started the second Dorothy woke up. Unbelievable. Through sheer stupidity, we had debunked the entire “Dark Side”/”Dark Side” myth. Thank you, cases and cases of Bud Ice.)
Possibly the best part of this song lies not in the gorgeous, larger-than-life choruses, but in the quiet, shaky ending, which has Gabriel trying to maintain his voice as the instruments get stripped away, layer by layer. Which leads us right into…
“Green Eyes”, Coldplay
OK, you knew Coldplay would be on here somewhere.
So we’ve made the breakthrough. In “Red Rain”, our protagonists states that, “I come to you defenses down/With the trust of a child…” Well, in “Green Eyes”, we have a childlike worship of the newly beloved. I myself remember very clearly hearing this song for the first time and looking for someone with green eyes so I could have this be our song. The reaction for me was that visceral, and here I am, 8 months or so later, throwing it on the compilation.
I mean, how can you hate on any song that has a chorus like this:
I came here with a load
And it feels so much lighter
Now I met you
If that don’t make you well up a bit, well then, you’re taking up some of my valuable oxygen. And I need all I can get, as evidenced by my less-than-stellar performance on the treadmill yesterday.
“Sick of Myself”, Matthew Sweet
OK, I love Coldplay as much as the next mildly wimpy Caucasian, but let’s face it, you’re not gonna hum “The Scientist” in a dark alley and expect to not have your lunch money stolen. So we need to crank this up a bit, because while the initial forays into a new relationship are puppy-dog eyes and a fair bit of trepidation, at some point the honeymoon is over, and seeds of doubt start to slip in.
So let’s crank up some Matthew Sweet here to rock out our newly found frustrations. Power chords for those who can’t stay happy for very long. You’re still into the person you’ve found, but now you’re worthiness is once again called into question. Could take a few weeks, maybe a few months. Always different. But at some point, a lot of people end up like the chorus:
But I'm sick of myself when I look at you
Something is beautiful and true
In a world that's ugly and a lie
It's hard to even want to try
And I'm beginning to think Baby you don't know
The imperfection lies not in this new person, but in you, and the sheer fact of living in a world where keeping a relationship going seems a Sisyphean struggle. You’re at a point where backing out would suck, but in the end, better than stretching it out longer. But you can’t jump ship, because, “There's something in your eyes that is keeping my hope alive…”
Hoping against hope, that’s what you’re doing.
“We’re In This Together Now”, Nine Inch Nails
And in hoping, what you do is hold out so tight you sometimes threaten to suffocate the object of your affection.
NIN’s album “The Fragile” in a lot of ways is, for lack of a better phrase, frickin’ awful. However, a handful of songs, such as this one, ranks up with Reznor’s best work. It’s a song that, when taken just as lyrics, often could be mistaken for any other “typical” love song, but when actually heard, sounds like a terrifying howl, a desperate cry for salvation that could be mistaken as a guttural cry of violence.
It’s almost a modern day “Romeo and Juliet”, taking the “us against them” of that play to a frightening extreme:
Awake to the sound as they peel apart the skin
They pick and they pull
Trying to get their fingers in
Well they’ve got to kill what we found
Well they’ve got to hate what they fear
Well they’ve got to make it go away
Well they’ve got to make it disappear
An attempt here is made to eliminate all external forces and focus on that which you know: your beloved. The problem of course being that both of you live within the world, and as such cannot extract yourself from that you feel is bringing you down. IN trying to deny the enemy, you instead let him or her in through the front door..
Because we’ve all been there…those moments/day/weeks where you feel something slipping through your fingers and every time you increase your grip, the thing you’re clutching just slips that much more out of your hands. And worse, in hindsight, you yourself caused the angst in question. Things weren’t nearly as bad as you thought, but your neuroses increased the tension to the point of making it unbearable for the both of you. And then you wake up and look at yourself in the mirror and see your true enemy.
So how do we get out ourselves out of that? Well, I’ve got an idea for our compilation protagonist, and those who might be in similar situations.
But we’ll deal with that next time.