MUSIC BOX NO. 5
movement, daydreaming, and five favorites of january (again).
By the roots of my hair some god got hold of me. I sizzled in his blue volts like a desert prophet. The night snapped out of sight like a lizard's eyelid: A world of bald white days in a shadeless socket. A vulturous boredom pinned me in this tree. If he were I, he would do what I did. -- The Hanging Man, Sylvia Plath
ONE. WINDHAM BY ALABAMA SACRED HARP SINGERS.
New Year’s Day came and went, then my twentieth birthday, then an insurmountable number of tiny holidays that mean something to someone I don’t know. David Lynch died and I was hit with a sort of spiritual miasma that kept me bedridden. The day after that, my parents officially separated, although we’ll still be living in the same house. I dropped out of college for the second time almost a week later. This means that a lot of things have happened, objectively speaking, even though it doesn’t feel like it.
I did not touch God. I did not change. There are a hundred thousand days in January— they crack down the middle from the cold, fracturing into little ice floes of mini-days— and I felt most of them go right through me. I spend a lot of time sitting in the dark with a guitar. I spend a lot of time lancing the blisters that grow on my fingers because of it. I’m some sort of frightened about some sort of something— my own self-absorption, my blindness to the world, to the people around me, my nonchalance, my willingness to not know and remain unknown to others. I can only half agree with the Sartre quote because I know the second, lesser-spoken part of it. Three cheers for sweet isolation. I spend the rest of my time, the time without a guitar or sewing needles or bandages, wishing that it was possible to remove my soul from my body and scrub it with steel wool and soap until it’s clean and fresh again.
It doesn’t happen. It’s fine. But then it does happen, kind of. It’s not steel wool, probably closer to sandpaper, but it’s something.
I started doing therapy again— art therapy this time, because I’m very good at talking my way around something without people noticing, and having to draw it out might make things more opaque. That’s not the something that happened, but bear with me. We’re in a session. I say that I appreciate the way that having to draw things works as a delinearization of thought. My therapist says what?, and then she makes me draw out what I’m saying. It looks the way a lot of my drawings do— repetitive areas, patterns, abstract geometry, etcetera. It’s effectively a circle with a break in it. When she asks questions, I say that only the cubic centimeter of the drawing where the break sits is “delinearization”, and everything else is the context that exists around it. We talk about it some more, but that’s not important. The point is that, at this time, my “thing” has become creating monoliths with human errors. Big shapes with tiny lines in them. Echoes. I do it over and over.
Let me be more clear. I’ve got a joke for you. A triangle, an oval, a rectangle, and a diamond walk into a bar, and then another bar, and then three more bars after that. Then all the bars turn into a church, or maybe Heaven, or maybe just a place where a gathering of people stand in a circle with open mouths. It’s not a very funny joke, sorry, but it’s the sandpaper.
Let me be a little more clear. Broad is the road that leads to death, and thousands walk together there, but wisdom shows a narrow path with here and there a traveler. You dig?
Sacred Harp is an American choral tradition that originated in New England Protestant churches but gained traction in the South, and was eventually almost solely perpetuated by the South. It has a couple unique features. One of them is shape notation, which is the practice of writing notes as shapes to indicate syllabic and relational output and to make it easier to sight read. The second is that pitch is not absolute, which is why shape notation comes in so handy— it tells you where you should be in relation to the note you just sang and the notes the people around you are singing, instead of just giving you a pitch. It’s easy to variate within the structure. No two versions are the same, if you’re doing it right. The third is that it’s not sung for an audience. Sacred Harp singers are arranged in a circle with loose grouping based on vocal range; the center is a place of honor where the “leader” of the song, who is often chosen randomly, gets to stand. You can participate or you can deal with boring acoustics. But I digress. In the words of a German website that hosts an incredible amount of Sacred Harp music, Sacred Harp is a cappella heavy metal.
Windham is number 38b in the Sacred Harp songbook. I’ve listened to a lot of variations of it— some of them are hideously dull, sung without any imagination around relational notes; some of them, usually older recordings from Sacred Harp conventions, are more interesting. Only one of them scrubbed my soul clean, and it’s the version recorded by Alan Lomax at the 1942 Alabama Sacred Harp Singing Convention in Birmingham.
The first part of the song has no lyrics. What you’re hearing is the shape notes themselves— fa for triangle, sol for oval, la for rectangle, and mi for diamond— as the singers run through what the song will sound like. Even with just the syllables, it sounds downright Old Testament. Vengeful. Vibrant. Visceral. All the good V words you can think of. The second part of the song brings in the actual hymn. I swear to God that my soul shot straight out of my body when it came on. It feels like a very old song. Do you know what I mean? Some songs feel old, like they’ve collected power every time they’ve been sung, and Windham has been sung in congregations for literal centuries. Centuries. And it’s a good hymn, too— blood and doom, none of that modern day “I love Jesus and nothing is wrong” spiel.
It’s the sandpaper. Like getting cleansed with pain. Like finding absolution in a wound. Their voices are colossal. If you listen hard enough, you can pick out and follow individual people, but it’s still a monolith. It’s bigger than the sky. Windham stands over you, 50 feet tall, and promises the demise of your soul if you forget to bleed for it.
Are you going to touch God? Are you going to change? Are you going to bleed for it?
TWO. VACILLATOR BY ETHEL CAIN.
No. No, I probably won’t bleed for it, because I’m a little bored with my pain. I can work with other people’s pain, though. When I say that I swing both ways, I’m talking about sadomasochism. If I’m impressed with you, I’ll let you rough me up a bit. It’s a privilege. I’m the prize. Pull my hair. Tackle me. Bite me. Try and break my heart, I dare you. I’ll only let you do me if I can do you, though— you’re going to get exactly how much you’ve given, and that’s a promise. That’s a fucking promise.
The quick of it is that I never really got the vampire hype. From a cultural perspective, it makes perfect sense— the AIDS metaphor, the fashion, the blessing and the curse— but it never touched me the way it touched so many others. Don’t get me wrong, I can dig a good vampire story (and I’ve read my fair share of vampiric bodice-rippers). I just didn’t get it.
Not until I looked at it a different way, at least, which is when I realized that the idea of loving a vampire never appealed to me because I’m the vampire. I’m always the vampire. This isn’t me trying to be edgy; it’s me realizing that I’ll drain the blood right out of someone without hesitating, if they’ve offered. It turns out that giving as good as you get isn’t really an effective way of opening up. Some part of me is always holding back, keeping myself to myself, taking from others without genuine reciprocation. I answer the questions I’ve been given and only the questions I’ve been given. That’s all you get. It causes me no anguish to know this. I’m sure it’s caused plenty of anguish to anyone who’s ever seriously tried to love me, though. Mea culpa.
It’s the sadomasochism again— not in a sexual sense, necessarily, but that pretty line between torturing someone and self-flagellation. I keep having dreams about playing sick maid for my elementary school playground boyfriends, nursing them back to health Phantom Thread-style. I kind of get a kick out of seeing people weakened like that and then being very, very nice to them. My own little perversion of kindness; devotion with an end date. Maybe it’s a savior complex thing. I don’t like thinking too hard about the why. But there’s a word for me, now. Vacillator. Indecisive, sporadic, stuck. Baby, I don’t want to know.
Perverts, Ethel Cain’s sophomore album, was released three days after my birthday. I’ve been listening to it like it’s my job. While not everyone’s cup of tea— can’t fault them for that, not everyone is into that kind of ambient— it is most certainly my cup of tea, especially Vacillator, which is the type of song that I would’ve gotten very precious about if it had come out when I was in my mid-teens. With sparse instrumentation, the ghostly atmosphere of the song seems to reflect the bleakness of oscillation. I often find myself rolling my head in a circle to the beat of the drums. It moves very slowly and very sinuously between casually-expressed sentiments of extremes. House cat love, you know? Touch me, touch me, don’t you dare fucking touch me.
What more can I say? The narrator of the song might be hot-wired into my head, which really sucks for everyone I’ve dated. Close the door. Let me in. I don’t want to see you like that, but I want your emotional submission. Do you like that, baby? Watch me disappear in crowded rooms. Most importantly, the repeated sentiment of if you love me, keep it to yourself— something I’ve wanted to say for my entire life but could never find the words for, because how do you tell people that you prefer ambivalence to certainty?
You don’t. I haven’t dated anyone in a long time, I don’t plan on dating any time soon, and that’s a good chunk of why. I’ll just stay in tonight, in my self-made lack of direction. I like it in here. It’s fun in here. I promise I like it this extreme. I promise.
THREE. THE PILLS WON’T HELP YOU NOW BY THE CHEMICAL BROTHERS.
This is a song for a fishbowl. This is a song for standing in the corner of a house party you no longer want to be at. This is a song for me, at any point in my life, sitting on a mostly-empty public bus and staring expressionlessly out the window at nothing in particular, because nothing in particular is much easier and more placating to occupy myself with than whatever is going on in my head. Disappointments. Let downs. Without people, within people, thinking you might go somewhere with people but backing out last minute for reasons you can’t articulate. Breathing something between a sigh and a release of air; closing your eyes to a slow suicide.
Unalone. What do you know about being unalone? Autocorrect tells me it’s not a word— the part of my brain I refer to as my heart tells me it is, that it has to be, because there’s no other word out there for it. It’s in the privative prefix, the fact that the “alone” is negated but still present. Because your lonesome is still present. There’s a little melancholy in there, but not enough to push it into the territory of sadness. There’s a little bit of loneliness, but not enough to make you want company. There’s a little numbness, too, but it’s closer to nothingness than an apathetic presence. It’s not alienation or isolation or even necessarily feeling alone in a crowd. You can feel unalone in your own head if your psyches are contradictory enough, even in a completely solitary setting. Cognisant fugue. Good old-fashioned, blue-kerneled, white-noised fishbowling. What do you know about being in a fishbowl? Have you ever tried to listen to or see something through a thick, warped pane of glass? Tell me if that works out for you. Tell me if you ever figure it out.
In 2007, The Chemical Brothers released their sixth album, We Are The Night. Amongst fans, it’s considered to be one of their worst albums, despite it having won the Grammy for Best Electronic/Dance album in 2008— clearly, The Chemical Brothers’ worst is still better than most artists’ bests. I can’t say that I’ve listened to a whole lot of their discography, to be frank. The extent of my knowledge is Setting Sun, which features vocals from Noel Gallagher, and a couple listen-throughs of We Are The Night, which I spent most of just waiting to get to the final track, The Pills Won’t Help You Now.
It’s not a surprise to me. When I look at Pills on paper, it’s obvious that it’s a song I would be into— I shan’t divulge why, if only for the sake of maintaining what’s left of my mystique, but it was obvious. I don’t remember where I found it. I don’t remember when I listened to it first, although I do have a distinct memory of listening to it on New Years’ Eve in 2022 while writing this. Nonetheless, it’s become permanently enshrined in my mental list of songs that can convey unaloneness.
There are sad songs you move to. There are sad songs you tear at your clothes or run through a field or spin on a carnival ride until you get sick to, songs that make you hurtle through space like a comet about to burn up. This is not one of them. I would even argue that the feeling of unaloneness automatically implies some sort of stillness or stuckness, of being trapped in amber but not quite in the dark, not yet. Quiet, complacent dispiritedness. Bus songs. Corner of a house party songs. Fishbowl songs. The list is eternal. Backed by booming, dull drums and the type of synthetic organ that brings a funeral to mind, Pills is an oscillating digital music box. Despite lyrics recalling fear, disappointments, and poisoning your body, it remains surprisingly light; the soft-spoken vocals of then-Midlake vocalist Tim Smith likely has something to do with that. No one is entirely sure of the intended meaning— it could be about cancer or drugs or some other staticky, dissociative malady, meaning that it pairs very well with any situation where you feel staticky and dissociative. Dealer’s choice on situations requiring medication. It’s applicable as long as the pills won’t help you.
I can go look at a whole bag of failures, do you know that? There’s a drawer in the basement, three feet wide and almost as long, filled with every pill I’ve been put on and then taken off when the intended effect didn’t happen. I’m not crying about it— no use in wasting tears. I’m just sitting still. Very, very still.
FOUR. UNFINISHED SYMPATHY BY MASSIVE ATTACK.
You want to talk about movement, though? Let’s talk about movement. Let’s talk about Los Angeles, which receives undue hatred for things that really only happen in very specific parts of the city. I’m biased, of course. Why wouldn’t I be? I’ve been going in and out of Los Angeles for most of my life— watching people joke about how the fires are actually a good thing disgusts me to a degree that I can’t even voice. God knows I’m not a fan of the fame culture Los Angeles has become notorious for, but it’s a big city. There are people besides influencers. There are places other than Hollywood and Disney.
There’s West Pico Boulevard, for example. It was 2019. A friend and I had gone out for dinner and had to abandon our Uber once we realized that the driver was going the wrong direction due to being borderline delirious. After some negotiations— meaning that we promised to still rate him highly, even though we didn’t complete the ride— he dropped us off on the corner of West Pico and Dewey Avenue. Dios te salve, María! The sun was on its way to setting. Everything, from the palm trees to the painted concrete buildings, was blushing in the heat of the late light. There’s a perpetual layer of smog over the city from millions of people living in the same air; when I tell you that everything was blushing, I mean that it was blushing the way light blushes during wildfire season. Pink and orange and syrupy. Heavy enough that even the most vibrant of blue goes green. Do you know what I mean when I say that I feel it?
I have no time for love letters and I couldn’t describe the feeling of the city to you if I tried, but it’s something I’ve only ever found in there. You feel like you could be as much of someone as anyone. Promises and California dreaming will turn two gawky teenage girls in jean shorts and crop tops into Something, a symbol or a thought form or the sort of Something you can’t quite name, almost veering into the territory of Something Else. You walk down a street with your hair down in 90 degree heat, past people staging a photoshoot on construction equipment and people shooting up and people shooting the shit, and being part of that burning hot bustle and grime and sex makes you feel like you’re Something Else. Superstar. Ultranormal. We were on the corner of West Pico and Dewey and, lacking sufficient funds to get another Uber, started the thirty-something minute schlep home down the Boulevard, giggling nervously whenever someone looked at us too long. Past Catalina Street. Past Berendo Street. Past New Hampshire Avenue. Remember those names. Remember being the most anything you’ve ever been.
In 1991, Massive Attack— temporarily renamed Massive for the duration of the Gulf War, thanks to their name being declared “unpatriotic” by the BBC— released Unfinished Sympathy as the second single for their debut album, Blue Lines, to widespread critical acclaim. The title was a joking reference to composer Franz Schubert’s Unfinished Symphony.1 The song itself, which rides an incredibly delicate line between tragedy and immense grandeur, is anything but a joke. A good chunk of this is due to singer Shara Nelson, who cries her lines out with a frightening degree of sincerity. You really hurt me, baby. You really cut me, baby. It’s a rare feat to sound like you’re emphasizing every single word in a sentence without it landing weird— Nelson does it with the sort of expert anxiety that can’t be taught. Suffice to say, you don’t sit still to this song. You move.
I ended up pacing around my bedroom the first time I heard this song. No one was home; I was free to make as much noise as I wanted, thankfully, because the floorboards of my room are creaky enough that it would’ve drawn questions. I didn’t need to move the second time I heard this song— Nelson was moving for me in the music video. Half-giddy with recognition, I watched as she strode gracefully down South New Hampshire Avenue onto West Pico Boulevard, passing Berendo and Catalina, until she finally vanished down Dewey Avenue. Her coat was flapping behind her. She looked like the eye of a living hurricane, moving purposefully through the golden light as the world swirled around her. Nelson was even on the same side of the street that we would walk down in the opposite direction, almost thirty years later. Isn’t it funny how life works out?
Los Angeles nights are just as potent as Los Angeles days. Back at the house, sun having set a long time ago, I was bedded down on a daybed in the living room with the window open. I wanted cool air— that was an impossibility, but the movement of the air coming in was fulfilling that desire well enough. I had propped myself up on the sill like Juliet waiting for Romeo, dangling an arm outside to run my fingers across the still-warm wood. But soft, what light through yonder window breaks? Streetlights. Windows across the street lit up in orange. The feeling of ecstatic sadness, a sadness that was more beautiful and glamorous and poetic than your typical garden variety sadness, inflated by circumstance and environment and the amount of narrative tropes that could be applied. Nocturnes for half-imagining love to. The melancholy of the potential of romance, which one waits for like a dog. It always happens. It’s happening to everybody. How can you have a day without a night?
Ay, me. I didn’t know the song yet, didn’t have the phrase of unfinished sympathy in my vocabulary, but I could’ve used the whirl and gravitas of it in that moment. I would’ve reached for it if I had known to. I would’ve opened the book. Instead, I daydreamed.
FIVE. I DON’T WANT TO HAVE TO WAIT BY BARBARA & THE BROWNS.
Oh, lighten up. Let’s have some fun, yeah? Let’s keep daydreaming. I’m a big fan of daydreaming, you know— I spend a substantial amount of my day sitting at my window or laying on the floor, staring at nothing while I imagine myself a different life. I suppose it’s a bad habit of mine. I should get a little more into reality. But we’re having fun, so I’ll hold off on that until we’re done with fun. It’ll happen eventually. It always does.
Music for daydreaming is a big question. I’ve got a whole range of genres in mind. It really depends on the type of daydreaming you’re after, doesn’t it? I’ve always found that if I’m really trying to get lost in it, just taken down the river without any interruptions from the director, I need ambient or very polite instrumentals. When we’re thinking up scenarios, there’s more options. Folk can be fun. I can go for Chopin’s Nocturnes, depending on the scene I’m setting myself. Anything sort of mellow works, really, but soul has always been my daydreaming soundtrack of choice. It’s about variation— you need a crescendo in the song to keep your head exciting, yeah? Articulation and swing. Very important elements.
Barbara and the Browns, a group consisting of the Brown siblings (Barbara, Roberta, Betty, Maurice, Walter, and Richard), were a soul group out of Memphis. Although they originally intended to sing gospel, producer Chips Moman convinced them to sing his secular song Big Party,2 which became a local hit. They recorded a handful of singles beginning in 1963— most of them flopped commercially, despite being praised by critics, and the Browns tragically stopped recording in 1972. With Barbara on lead vocals, they were an absolute powerhouse group. I haven’t heard a song of theirs that I didn’t like.
I Don’t Want To Have To Wait is, in my opinion, a perfect song. It scratches an itch in me. Nothing intrudes on the sound. Don’t get me wrong— intrusions can be fun sometimes, but they would be out of place here and so they don’t appear. Barbara hits the runs before the chorus perfectly on beat. Her voice has a perfect amount of rasp in it; the horns have a bit of grit without outright squealing, the way some brass sections do. It does exactly what it aims to with the composition, and it does it gracefully. On top of that, it’s a bit of a heartbreak song, but you’d never know it unless you were looking at the lyrics. That’s a rare talent. God, what a song.
I was thinking about it earlier tonight. I had taken a break from writing, debating which song I wanted to do next, and I Don’t… came into mind, so I found myself humming along. There are smarter things to do when you’re sitting in front of a mirror with scissors in hand, especially if you’re not good at sitting still while humming. I guess what I’m trying to say is that I fucked up while trimming my bangs because my head was in the clouds.
Oh, well. They’ll be fine in a week. I’ll dream the time away.
BONUS TRACK. PAWN SHOP BLUES BY LANA DEL REY.
Yeah, yeah, I know. Mea culpa. My sincere apologies for violating the sanctity of amateur music journalism with something as uncouth and gauche as a Lana Del Rey song, and an unreleased one at that— God, the absolute horror of it all. Have we abandoned all moral fortitude in these trying times? I should be launched into the sun for even daring to write this. Shame. Shame on me, who will meet God when I die and have to answer for this heinous crime. The fires of Hell grow hungry for my flesh. Beat me! Take my blood! But I digress.
As far as unreleased Lana songs go (and I’d like to say that I don’t like all of them, because some of them are unreleased for a reason), Pawn Shop Blues is my favorite. Maybe that’s a safe choice, but honestly, who gives a damn? It’s acoustic guitar with some synth, harmonies, and very faint percussion— not at all on the experimental side of her discography, and absolutely better for it. Simple is effective. Anything more flashy or excessive would’ve only served as a contradiction to the story, which revolves around pawning a gifted pair of earrings to afford moving forwards.
In all honesty, I don’t have much to say here. I listened to this song almost obsessively when I got an iPod for the first time. On the school bus. Walking the dog. Semi-awake in a tent outside a graveyard. There was an almost Ouroboric relationship of relating to it and then modelling myself after it, after the idea I had of myself in relation to it, the lyrics and sentiment behind them. I feel like that might make sense if you’ve heard enough from me. My “it is what it is”-ness. My willingness to abandon material possessions. Obviously, not all of that came from a Lana Del Rey song, but Pawn Shop Blues definitely contributed to bringing those traits to the forefront of my mind. This sometimes happens when a song slots into your life so perfectly.
That’s not the point— the point is that when I think of songs that could act as some sort of thesis to my life, Pawn Shop Blues does come to mind. For better or worse, I’ve been known to eschew relationships in favor of chasing some intangible idea of a God, one that may or may not exist. I’ve had my own pawn shop blues. I’ve been down on my luck. I’ve fucked up, especially when other people are involved. None of that defines me— I’m doing my best to not let it— but yeah, it’s at the forefront of my mind, because it’s all happened enough times that it’s no longer a fluke. I’m choosing it, in some way.
Imagine me as a tween. Do you know what I was like, back then? I’m sure you could put together a decent picture just by digging through my archive. Look at the second verse. Can you understand why this was like crack to me?
In the name of higher consciousness I let the best man I knew go 'Cause it's nice to love and be loved But I'd rather know all you can know Said it's nice to love and be loved But I'd rather know what God knows
Maybe I do. Maybe I don’t. Probably not. I won’t get too bogged down in theological arguments, but God is omniscient and would therefore know everything that I know, so technically I do know what God knows. Not all of it, but some of it. Hopefully I’ll know more. I’m working towards it.
While that happens, I’m living with a certain kind of self-knowledge, the kind that feels a little bit like being doomed— no amount of love can hold me down if I see some sort of light. There’s not enough love in the world to keep me together. There won’t ever be. We continue regardless.
Schubert’s eighth symphony was dubbed “unfinished” as he only wrote two movements before the project was abandoned, despite him living six more years after he put it aside. See the first two tracks on this album.