Music

…matters. To me anyway and I’d like to think my music taste is pretty eclectic.

Putting my iPod on random now as I started writing this, the first five artists that came up are: Sigur Ros, Dixie Chicks, Ryan Adams, the Foo Fighters and Beriut.

Since I was a young boy I’ve been a music obsessive. I’ve gone through the full gamut of musical interest phases. From general interest in the charts and what’s on the radio, to obsessively listening to lyrics over and over again; to finding bands that no-one else had even heard of and championing them until they became popular, then dropping them for selling out.

From around the age of thirteen, I’d say I could name the tracks and their order, on either side on every album I owned...and there were a lot of them. The obsession with track listings lasted until the arrival of the CD, when ‘sides’ disappeared. The track names have gone too since I got my iPod and the shuffle option arrived. Who can keep track now? The albums don’t even play in the order that the artist intended.

So in a way I’m cured, but not of an interest in lyrics. I’m still fascinated by how a good songwriter can tell a story in three minutes, when it can take a writer 80,000 words or more to do the same, and sometimes not as successfully.

For example when I was fifteen or sixteen I listened to an alternative music radio show every night and one week the DJ, played the same song, at the same time, every night. The song is Levi Stubb's Tears by the singer Billy Bragg,

The song somehow seeped into my soul that week and has been my favourite song of all time since. Not just because it takes me back to that time in the darkened bedroom and the lone electric guitar accompaniment playing loudly through my headphones, but because of the lyrics.

Billy is really a poet at heart and has always had a brilliant turn of phrase, but I don’t think he’s ever bettered this track. The song is about a young woman who runs away from home and marries an abusive man who eventually try’s to kill her. .. Cheery isn’t it.

In the song he perfectly describes the type of man the husband is using just thirty three words:

And her husband was one of those blokes
The sort that only laughs at his own jokes
The sort that war takes away
And when there wasn't a war he left her anyway

Later on he shows the brutality of the husband and the utter helplessness that a woman, with no options, feels:

One dark night he came home from the sea
And put a hole in her body where no hole should be
It hurt her more to see him walking out the door
And though they stitched her back together they left her heart in pieces on the floor

I think these eight lines tell us more about their relationship, than someone else using a thousand words could.

Some day I hope to write something as beautifully heart breaking as this… I’ll probably have to use the full 80,000 words and more though.

Thanks

TF.80

Current Reading: Harlan Coben - No Second Chance
Current Listening: Band of Horses - Cease to Begin