MUSIC BOX NO. 1
forests, hungarian folk songs, and five favorites of january. (february 3rd, 2024)
Wait for it patiently — annihilation or metamorphosis. — Marcus Aurelius
Christmas passes, then the new year, then my nineteenth birthday. I pack a bag. I move to Oregon for the month. The days are marked by a collection of migraines and dead animals — first a decomposing orange tabby cat in the barn, then a bird with a removed heart in the garage, followed in quick succession by two birds that froze to death when the cold snap hit. Overnight, we get ten inches of snow so dry and fluffy it could be fake, something made of instant mashed potatoes or shredded polymer. The rain brings ice that glazes the world in cellophane. Walking cracks the ground like crème brûlée; if you tried to run on it, you would surely break your ankle. The day after the ice comes is the one year anniversary of a deadly car crash. The day after that, there’s another dead bird. I feel no grief or remorse and I create nothing. The list of what doesn’t work is longer than the list of what does.
ONE. OU ES-TU, MON AMOUR?, WILLIE NELSON.
Go ahead, though, try them all. Throw yourself prostrate at the feet of your own authorial intent, scream immaculate conception when you carve something out of yourself, journal and write list after list in your notes app, delete all social media, quit smoking just to make yourself sick, bedeck yourself in furs every time you go out walking — blow kisses to the stars in the sky, pray to all your dead friends, epiphanize, philosophize, hypothesize, apologize, prophesize, dramatize, homogenize, fantasize, prioritize — count the hours until your next birthday and read so much Beat poetry that every sentence you write is at least three sentences long — go try dying, go try picking up and abandoning religions like breadcrumb trails, go try wrestling your soul into a bridle and using it to pull the chariot of your desire. Just know that nothing will happen. None of it did a thing, so I didn’t do a thing, either. I sat in bed or I walked into the forest where I lost myself a decade ago and tried to get it back. And I listened to Willie Nelson over and over.
There is no album quite like 1998's Teatro in Nelson’s discography. Even the ones recorded around the same time are completely different, despite having similar instrumentation — in the name of succinctness, there’s this empty quality present; something ephemeral and incredibly difficult to create in a recording. The album was recorded over four days in one room of an abandoned Mexican theater in California (hence the name Teatro), with most of the songs being done in a single live take. Two drummers played the same kit simultaneously, creating a skeletal flamenco-inspired rhythm that clatters along like a horse running on stone. Teatro also saw a shift towards the electric with the introduction of a Wurlitzer electric piano in Nelson’s ensemble. This was all captured by director Wim Wenders — who you might recognize as the director of Paris, Texas (1984) and Wings of Desire (1987), among others — in a 52 minute documentary, featuring live performances and behind the scenes footage of the old theater.
All of that combined — especially everything being recorded at the same time in the same room — makes it an incredibly singular album, with a barren, atmospheric feel to it, a visceral projection of melancholy that is sparse and danceable at the same time. Teatro puts you into a small town dive bar at closing hour as people begin to filter out into the bleak winter night. It smells like bottom-shelf vodka. Your feet hurt and the flashing neon sign makes your eyes ache. You know everyone in the room, know all their secrets and the trials of their lives, but they’re still strangers to you. Outside, in the black-and-white night, the snow stretches for miles and miles, unbroken by trees or hills or houses. Although Teatro is entirely different genre-wise, that emptiness it contains has always reminded me of Modest Mouse.
But I’m not here to discuss an album, I’m here to discuss a song. Ou Es-Tu, Mon Amour? isn’t a Willie Nelson original — the original was by Romani-French jazz guitarist Django Reinhardt, recorded in 1961. The audio has a graininess to it that suggests it was ripped from a vinyl, making the piano-guitar-bass-drum quartet something you would’ve heard in the 1930s while walking the grounds of a circus or drinking at a saloon. It’s beautiful; fast and fluid without losing it’s sense of sorrow. Nelson’s rendition strips Ou Es-Tu Mon Amour? down into an electric piano and guitar duet, turning it into something still and eerie. Instead of feeling like you’re moving in the music, one gets the sense that this is a quiet spot within the movement, the eye of a sound hurricane. You’re not on the circus grounds or in the saloon anymore; you’re in the parking lot or walking home now, walking endlessly across the snowy plains, nobody else in sight. The bar is behind you and nothing is ahead. The guitar is slower than it is in the original, letting the notes linger in the air for a moment before moving on. We follow the crescendos, going up the hopeful peaks and down to the tragedies of the low notes with the guitar, all the while backed by the spectral electric piano. We’re looking for something. We’ve misplaced or forgotten or left something we shouldn’t have left. It’s an instrumental, devoid of any lyrics or vocals, but it still speaks.
Where are you, my love? Where did you go?
TWO. I’LL NEVER LEARN, THE SHANGRI-LAS.
I go where I please when I please— I know this place like the back of my hand. This is the place where I would sit on the back of a motorcycle and hang onto a boy as he floored it 80 miles an hour downhill. This is the place I went deaf in one ear for a week after I set a firework off next to my head on a dare. This is the place where I learned how to shoot a gun. Of course, that was all years ago, and in the summer no less. The fruit trees are leafless and the barley fields are barren. I am taking a month-long break from society on the farmland of a family friend, and as I walk through the woods in the middle of the night, I fear no evil because I am the meanest son of a bitch here. Including the coyotes and pumas. And besides, what did I tell you? I know this place like the back of my hand.
The forest has changed since I was a kid. It started small, with the owners bringing in goats to clear up the poison oak, and then the changes got much more dramatic — they cut down some of the smaller trees, built a path through the middle of it for mountain biking, etcetera, etcetera. Unnecessary things. It’s a second home, so none of it has been maintained and all that change was for nothing. All of the landmarks I discovered as a child have been demolished or have rotted away; the rocks have shifted or been covered in soil. I navigate the forest purely through muscle memory. To my dismay, the path I followed so many times as a child is overgrown with brambles, so I veer left into the sparser, low hanging pines, towards the orchard on the other side of the woods.
It’s not being lost. I wouldn’t call it being lost. I know vaguely where I am, and I know how to get back, so I’m not lost. I’m just in a section of the orchard I’ve never been in before, a place where the fog is purplish and low and thick against the grass and the sky is yellowed with weak moonlight. I sit down on a fallen log and, like a miracle emerging from the darkness, the Shangri-Las begin playing.
I don’t know much about them beyond what their Wikipedia page says, in all honesty. What I do know, though, is that I’ve never come across a song quite like I’ll Never Learn. The beginning note already had me hooked — I played cello for six years (a third of my life!), so now any cello or orchestral arrangement in a song is a cause for unreasonable excitement. Over the strings comes the plaintive, haunting voice of Mary Weiss, reminiscing about the past. And then, I’ll Never Learn takes a left turn and goes somewhere rhythmically that I didn’t think it would, which surprises me just enough for me to go, “Oh!” out loud. The strings are slow enough that you think it’ll be a ballad, but acoustic guitar comes in with the verse and suddenly there’s two separate rhythms in the song — the vocals and guitar are almost twice as fast as the strings, creating a tone that is both dreamlike and urgent, lurching ahead and slouching all at once. I’m viscerally reminded of the end of Les Yeux Sans Visage (1960), of the way Edith Scob’s Christianne just drifts away with the doves. Then it slows down again, syncing up with the strings, and Weiss’s mournful cry becomes clear again.
Lyrics aren’t of great importance to me. I think that one of the biggest issues of modern music, especially pop, is that musicians are so focused on writing something relatable or poetic that the overall quality of the song is neglected. The song becomes a vehicle for a clever metaphor, instead of a vehicle for beauty or an interesting sound. In my eyes, it ties into our societal obsession with glory — we’ve been conditioned by social media to think we matter so much and that the whole world should know whatever message we’re trying to push, and then we make podcasts or try to become influencers or whatever because we are The Chosen Ones. This focus on lyricism to the point where the rest of the song is abandoned implies, to me, that the artist thinks I give a shit about their break up or their personal life, which I don’t. And since I don’t care, the one redeeming quality of the song falls totally flat, and then where does that leave us? With a mediocre song, which is worse than a bad song.
I’ll Never Learn is undeniably a lyrical song. Weiss’s voice is present for the entire thing, audible in the chorus but borderline incomprehensible in the verses, due to how rapidly she’s speaking and the rhythmic variation. I only catch about half of the lyrics when I’m listening to it, though, and decided to check the lyrics. Thankfully, they didn’t disappoint. I’ll Never Learn is chock full of fantastical pastel imagery, with mentions of purple mists, clouds of blue, and most notably, a liquid sea of love with shivering rainbow bubbles. The best part is that the instrumentation, rhythm, and lyrics of the song cohere — they work together to create a vision of the happy, beautiful dreams the narrator experiences and the contrast of the narrator’s somber waking moments.
You know, I lost myself in these woods when I was nine. I don’t know what happened. I was walking alone through the trees and when I left the woods, I had a terrible feeling. Like I left something behind. I went back in the morning to try and find it, but it was gone. I still haven’t figured out what part of me never left the woods that day. I like to imagine that my younger self is haunting this forest, running through underbrush with scraped knees and a dirty face, though. I’d like to think that there’s a part of me out there that the city didn’t hold onto for long enough to pollute.
I take out my headphones and play I’ll Never Learn on full volume to the empty orchard. I hope she heard it. I hope she never comes back.
THREE. DAY AFTER TOMORROW, TOM WAITS.
I don’t know what I’m looking for, but I know I haven’t found it yet. Everything is in its right place, all of my dead and my clothes and my stuffed animals, but something is still missing. I know where God is — I am not missing God. I know where God is because God is a tree that dies in the winter and resurrects as the seasons change, following an infinite cycle of growth and decay. I know where God is because I sit in the belly of the beast, because Heaven is a stomach and I am the happiest motherfucker alive. God is dead right now, obviously, but I have constructed God’s death mask out of angelic plaster and am worshiping that instead, so it’s fine.
(When constructing God, the first step one must take is to define God. My God, for example, is as good as it is evil, as empty as it is full, as dirty as it is clean — it is capable of not only oscillating between these axes but occupying both of them at once. When my God reaches for my face, I am never sure if it is going to hit me or stroke my cheek. The second step one must take in constructing God is to know that God is always a self-portrait. The death mask could be mine.)
I take meandering walks. I resolve to grow my natural hair out. I try to watch one movie every day, which turns out to be more difficult than it sounds. I drop out of college on the advice of a tarot reading. These are the things we do to regain control. This is the way we play a shit hand. And if we’re talking about playing a shit hand, there’s no one better than Tom Waits.
Close your eyes. Shut them tight. You’ll smell it before anything else — cigarettes, gasoline, sweat, gunpowder, formaldehyde, cheap alcohol and absinthe, stale coffee, wind that passed through a corn field, a metallic hint of blood, the saccharine ethylene of rotting flowers, phosphorus from a dozen matches, hot metal, and the woody-sweet aroma of decomposing floorboards. This is the smell of the average Tom Waits song. Since we’re focusing on 2004’s Real Gone, when you open your eyes, you’re in a pasture, staking down a tent. Ostriches and camels and orangutans lumber about, led by a one-eyed woman. A barn with padlocked doors looms over the campground. Somewhere, a janky melody is being played on a fiddle, accompanied by a clattering guitar, a dented trombone, and a piano that’s missing keys. A man, flushed with a high fever, stumbles out of a wagon, followed by a man with two faces. You can smell your father’s aftershave like you’re being haunted by it. In the distance, people are working to set up a massive striped tent. You’re with the circus, and it’s almost time for the show to begin.
Day After Tomorrow is much more delicate than Real Gone’s assortment of barroom foot-stoppers. It’s the only song with a folk-blues sound, akin to much of his early work — the rest of the album is a delightful collection of wailing horns, bursting guitars, plucked strings, and massive, echoing drums, all with Waits’ signature rasp scraping and howling over it, but Tomorrow is a simple two-guitar, one bass terzetto with softer vocals, something we don’t see much of from post-1980s Waits. It is, at it’s core, a weary song. The protagonist sounds absolutely exhausted, quietly crooning with a voice that rumbles like an old engine. That’s part of what endeared it to me. Where the rest of Real Gone is pouring another drink and shouting and roughhousing, Tomorrow is the one that holds your hair back when you’re throwing up in the bathroom.
The song deserves that delicacy, as it almost veers into protest song territory. “It seems to me that protest songs are like throwing peanuts at a gorilla. It’s hard to believe that a song like that is gonna make any difference in the course we’re on,” Waits said in a 2004 interview with Harp Magazine. “I don’t want to contribute to the rhetoric, or even assume I have the ability to speak about these things on an intelligent level… but I also know that everybody feels like we’re going 90 miles an hour down a dead-end street, and we didn’t make that feeling up.” Day After Tomorrow is told from the perspective of a soldier wishing to go home while dealing with the knowledge of their insignificance and a small crisis of faith. We’ve discussed that I don’t pay much attention to lyrics, but Waits consistently has a wistfulness to his voice that makes you want to listen. Even when I listen to Tomorrow just because his voice sounds like tires over gravel, my ears still snag on some of the lyrics: “What I miss you won’t believe / shoveling snow and raking leaves”, “they fill us full of lies / everyone buys / about what it means / to be a soldier”, “don’t they pray / to the same God / that we do? / tell me how does God choose / whose prayers does he refuse?”, and “I’ll be twenty one today” in particular. The soldier is young. The soldier wants to go home. The soldier is no longer fighting for what everyone is telling him to fight for, freedom or justice; he’s fighting to get through it so he can go home. The soldier has no faith that he’ll live through it, but he hopes he will. He hopes he gets to rake leaves again. He hopes that hoping is enough.
My mother makes me shovel the stairs to the house and the resulting flare up puts me in bed for the next three days. I can’t say I’ve ever been to war — God knows I’d rather die than be in the military — but I’m also hoping that I get a day after tomorrow. And hope can’t bring back the dead, but I hope the day after tomorrow sees all my ghosts laid to rest.
Is hope enough?
FOUR. ANATHEA, ODETTA.
What might have been and what has been
Point to one end, which is always present.
Footfalls echo in the memory
Down the passage which we did not take
Towards the door we never opened
Into the rose-garden….
Go, go, go, said the bird: human kind
Cannot bear very much reality. — T.S. Eliot
Imagine yourself in the middle of a forest. Here are the trees, the road snaking on ahead, the night-dark against the headlights. Dream girl passenger princess. Consider the hairpin turn, there we go, hands run smooth over the steering wheel, wrong lane — here is the semi truck — what a goddamn shame. DOA. Here is the body and here is the white horse in the field. You look for him and then you wake up — different forest, different year, same dreams. Happy fucking anniversary, baby. Revelations 6:2 and we never moved on from the Antichrist or Las Vegas chapels. I’m the bow, he’s the crown. It’s no more incestuous than Disco 2000. The chronology of events is uncertain, impossible to separate into a before and after; sanity is even more uncertain. And I can’t speak about any of it concisely or in a straightforward manner because I’ve learned that it’s really just best to keep your mouth shut about some things, especially when they involve eyes following you constantly or someone behind you that you can never turn around fast enough to see or mirages or dreams. If people think you’re crazy, they’ll stop listening, and I can’t afford that. Psychosis be damned, it’s a hell of a haunting to endure, considering it started before he even died. And because I was right. Isn’t the whole point of craziness that you’re never right? But I was.
I wear the ring. I carry the weight. I don’t like to talk about it. Three cheers for the apocalypse, say HALLELUJAH, here’s the angels, now. Blam. Raptured.
Here’s what I’m sure of: I am high out of my fucking mind right now. I am in a forest in Oregon. I am in someone else’s house; I go to sleep in another girl’s bed and I clean another girl’s room and her bedspread and walls are pink, baby pink, rouge, flamingo, mulberry, coral. It’s cold outside. Six degrees. Snow on the ground. Four dead birds and I’m waiting on a fifth. Etcetera, etcetera. Oh, damn it all. Let’s go back to the other forest.
I have a complex relationship with fairy tales. Somewhere during my childhood, fantasy and all of it’s rules became more important to me than reality, and I’m not yet sure if that’s a good or a bad thing. The intention of fairy tales were to pass down moral lessons and warnings in a way that was engaging (or frightening) to children, and for the most part, it’s solid advice — always read the fine print, trust your gut, don’t judge others based on their appearances, the easy route is the one that fucks you over, be charitable and kind, and sometimes you might know better than your parents but you shouldn’t be a dick about it. I picked up the other behaviors too, like never owing people debts or telling them your full name and remembering to leave trinkets and treats for any of the wee folk that might stop by, as you should always be in their good graces. I don’t even believe in the Fae anymore, not like I did when I was a child, but I’d still rather die than accidentally invoke their wrath by harming an animal or trespassing on their land. Maybe I’m strange. But it’s not strange in the Other Forest, so that’s where I stay.
The core struggle of my life has always revolved around the existence of myth. Logic tells me to accept the world the way it is in the way it’s been presented to me; survival necessitates that magic, in some way, must exist because I can’t bear a reality without it. I am caught between the side of me that feels things because I know they’re true and the side of me that knows things are true because I feel them, and neither of them win because ultimately, I don’t trust my perception of the world enough to say for sure whether anything is real. The Other Forest has become my way of balancing the scales in my mind — by creating a sort of fantasy world, one that doesn’t affect my actions in the real world but satisfies the need for something greater, I keep myself alive. Isn’t that the whole point? To live?
The Other Forest does require a support system to maintain, though, things that can hold my hand through a leap of faith. They don’t have to be big, I just need a scrap of the divine to stay soft. I need tension. I need something that grips me. I need a story to tell myself. I need duende. Folk songs — true folk songs, oral traditions and rallying cries, things that harmonize the circumstances with the reaction — are possibly the quickest way to have that. And we simply cannot talk about folk without talking about Odetta, because we wouldn’t have the music we love so much without her. Her 1956 record Odetta Sings Ballads and Blues was the one that convinced Bob Dylan to pick up an acoustic guitar; her other disciples include the likes of Joan Baez, Harry Belafonte, Janis Joplin, Rosa Parks, Mavis Staples, Maya Angelou, Carly Simon, Martin Luther King Jr., and even John Waters, whose original screenplay for his 1988 film Hairspray mentions her influence. She was considered the voice of the civil rights movement. I mean, just looking at that list of people and trying to imagine a world without their influence is near impossible, but one thing is for sure — the world would be a much, much worse place.
Going back a bit, let’s talk about the story of Anathea. The original is a Hungarian folk song called Fehér László lovat lopott or “László Fehér stole a horse” (recorded in original form by ethnomusicologist Zoltán Kodály) that composer Béla Bartók used in his 1904–1905 adaptations of Hungarian folk songs for voice and piano, which was then translated into English sometime between 1940 and 1960 by British folklorist and singer A.L. Lloyd and renamed Anathea. There are no recordings of Lloyd singing it, but the “misty mountains” of his translation have stayed present through almost all following renditions. The first recorded version is by Judy Collins on her 1963 album 3 — since then, Bob Dylan turned the story into his song Seven Curses, and several more renditions by a variety of artists have been made.
Anathea follows the story of a brother and sister, László and Anathea Fehér, after László is arrested and sentenced to death for stealing a stallion. Despite people being able to avoid the gallows through sufficient compensation, the judge refuses all of the money and horses Anathea offers him, but tells her he will release László in exchange for a night with her. László pleads with her not to do it, saying that the judge will “rob [her] of [her] flower/and hang [him] from the gallows”. Needless to say, she doesn’t listen, and László is hanged the very night she goes to the judge. She curses him when she discovers his betrayal. The curses differ from version to version — as we’re discussing Odetta’s rendition, that would be “thirteen years may he lie bleeding/thirteen barrels of drugs can’t heal him/thirteen daughters cannot save him”. The original English version ends with a solemn warning to not go into the forest lest Anathea see her brother hanging, but Odetta ends the song repeating the refrain László asked Anathea — “Anathea, oh my sister/are you mad with grief and sorrow?”
Odetta’s version is vastly different from Judy Collins’, in my opinion. They might have the basic similarities of genre, lyrics, and vocal strength, but Odetta has a much darker tone — the guitar is played in small, tight motions with a rhythm that almost emulates flamenco, frequently making use of strategic muting, while Collins uses large strums, which lends the song a certain open-feeling airiness. Collins' rendition is undeniably beautiful, but there’s a tension and tragedy in the claustrophobia of Odetta’s version that I can’t help but be more attracted to. It puts you somewhere; it viscerally changes your mood to feeling like you’re standing guard at a campfire, waiting for bandits to emerge from the woods. It’s the call of the Other Forest.
Once upon a time, I had a brother, too. If I go deep enough into the green pines, I think I’ll find him. Or at least his body.
On the never-ending plains, the white horse runs on.
FIVE. SIGNIFICANT OTHER, STEVEN WILSON.
In all of it’s mysterious ways, the universe sends me a doctor who prescribes me just enough Benadryl to get high. The latest hypothesis from a conglomerate of comorbid symptoms is Mast Cell Activation Syndrome due to mycotoxin infection. The doctor describes it to me as my body being an apartment building with only one room smoking but all of the alarms going off. I barely hear her because at that point into the phone call, maybe half an hour in, the noise of the feedback and my mother’s voice overwhelms me to the point where I have to strip off most of my clothes and sit outside in the snow to cool down. Light is pain. Sunglasses are for both inside and outside this week. I’m losing weight I can’t afford to lose. I can’t stay awake through the day and I don’t sleep through the night, continually getting woken up by dreams filled with an oddity store’s assortment of clutter — landmines, vintage swimsuits, bulletproof glass, poisoned martinis, racks of antlers, train stations, and sex doll abominations are sugarplum waltzing through this burning apartment building. I reckon if I could muster up the budget and permits, I could make a critically acclaimed surrealist film just by trying to recreate one of them.
Relentlessly, I am trying to get out. Of what, I don’t know. My body, maybe, which can hardly support the weight of my soul. My mind. My future, which is either getting sicker, or being healthy and forced to comply with the routes one simply must take to be a member of society — college, retail work, a long term job that you hate, bills. I hold no illusions that I stand out enough to not have to follow that path. I refuse to let myself be pacified by the idea of destined glory. And maybe I’ll be less resistant to the idea when I’m better (because I am going to get better, if only since I can’t bear to live like this for much longer), but even when I was a child, I hated the idea of it all, even more glamorous work like being a musician or royalty. I could never see past the bureaucracy.
Those are ultimately inescapable, though, so for now I’m just trying to get to a place where I can move out of my parents’ house. A friend and I make a pact that we’ll move to the middle of nowhere together; I start job searching for something I can do from home. In the meantime, though, I take copious amounts of Benadryl and try to find a song or album that can remove me from reality for a few minutes. I spend hours and hours digging through playlist after playlist and I don’t tell anyone that I’m looking for something that my brain will latch onto. My entire life has been spent fixation-hopping (cough syrup, pain killers, cocaine on the gums; cigarettes, sleeping pills, yum yum yum) and I’m starting to come up empty. I don’t like the empty. Eventually, after spending some quality time with a playlist aforementioned friend made, I remember that he recommended an album to me a while ago: Insurgentes, the 2008 debut solo album of Porcupine Tree’s Steven Wilson. The playlist has two songs from that album on it. I start with Significant Other and immediately fall in love.
My first impression is that it’s like if Chino Moreno covered a Cocteau Twins song, then followed by a vague reminder of Radiohead’s Subterranean Homesick Alien, which was my favorite song ever at age 14 and my favorite Radiohead song for a long time. The rhythm guitar on Significant Other mirrors the dreamy chords of Subterranean — although they’re in different keys, with S.O. being in D major and Subterranean being in C major, the chord progression of the interlude between S.O.'s verses is similar to the progression of Subterranean’s and the styling of the chords have the same open, drifting qualities. Significant Other is significantly more distorted, using that openness to create a structure that supports the wall of noise it builds up to where Subterranean uses it to contrast against the closed aggression of the chorus, but it has a similar dissociated, echoing effect. Objectively, S.O. is a loud song, but the slow wandering of the tempo almost makes it feel sleepy. It’s lyrically reminiscent of Subterranean, too, with similar themes of isolation and cosmic insignificance, as well as the insinuation of borderline insanity.
My second impression is that it reminds me of what heroin feels like.
Each time you hit the chorus, Significant Other opens up a little more, eventually becoming a crescendo of glorious static with arpeggiated falsetto vocals putting you right on the stairway to Heaven. It could be ascension. It could be the Rapture in the flesh. Either way, it sat in my ribs and expanded into something so massive I thought my chest was going to crack open and give birth to a little cherub, Alien (1979) style. I’m picky about distortion, as it can end up in a congealed mess when badly produced, but Significant Other never even thinks about congealment. The bass line is crisp, the rhythm guitar is distinctly playing those dreamlike chords, the drums are a perfect combination of these dusty hi-hat beats, snare, and kick, and the lead guitar swoops in and out of the song like a bird of prey. It layers together perfectly, creating a soundscape that’s dense without choking or overwhelming the listener, leaving you a place to sit right between the rhythm section and the whirls of guitar. This is the flaky pastry of distortion; when done well, distortion should dance on the line between ethereal and heavy, something Significant Other does with effortless grace.
Then, just when the song gets so massive it’s almost terrifying to think of it getting any bigger, all the noise cuts off. The listener is left with a music box melody. The only comparable thing is the end of a children’s fantasy movie when the protagonists return to real life and exchange coy little smiles in class, knowing something that their peers could never even dream of. The we know something you don’t look. The music box winks at you, slips you a piece of candy, and tells you to keep it on the down low. And, in a daze, you comply, wandering away like a zombie.
Lost in a Benadryl high, I come down the stairs in the morning — sunglasses on — to my mother pulling me outside. Sitting on a bank of snow, presented like a diamond ring, is dead bird number five.
BONUS TRACK. UNRAVEL, RADIOHEAD.
I will try to be brief. Bjork is one of my all-time favorite artists. Unsurprisingly, I’m sure, Radiohead is also on that list. They both contain a certain resinosity — and yes, I’m aware that isn’t a word, but how else do you describe that resinous stickiness that their voices have? Anne Carson says that a good flamenco singer has a throat full of needles; all organic instruments, made of strings and wood and leather, require something’s death and bring an awareness of that death with them into the song. Nobody fucking sings like Bjork or Thom Yorke. They access control in the process of losing control.
Radiohead covering my second-favorite non-remix Bjork song will always have a special place in my heart. It’s just not being alone in bed at 3 a.m. without this cover. Transposed into a simple piano-focused piece, Yorke stresses the most important part of any Bjork song: inflection. Some words come out forcefully, like they’re being ripped from his throat. Others are airy, soft murmurs. Although it could be considered an impressive vocal display — Yorke has some of the most consistent, even vibrato I’ve ever heard, falsetto or chest voice be damned — it never feels like he’s showing off or that they’ve done multiple takes or even that they’re trying to perfect the track. Studio-itis is entirely absent. If you told me that the band had just figured out their arrangement of Unravel a few moments earlier and were now doing the first full run through, I would believe you. It doesn’t hurt that Unravel is supposedly Thom Yorke’s favorite song of all time; you can tell he adores the song. Radiohead’s rendition walks the line between delicate and insistent with marvelous grace.
Also, if I was making a list of the most beautiful songs of all time, Unravel would be near the top. It’s one of my favorite pieces of songwriting ever — what a succinct and vivid way to communicate something both so simple and so enormous. There’s only eleven lines in the song. Every single one of them is perfect, rife with intention and imagery that’s simultaneously fantastical and perfectly sensible. Yes, the Devil is collecting our love in a ball of yarn and he’ll never return it, so when you come back, we’ll have to make new love. Obviously.
In the end, that’s pretty much the whole point of all this, is it not? We have to keep making new love.
Obviously.