Songs of Love 18
We’ve dealt a lot with ideas of presence and absence in songs we’ve seen so far. Absent lovers are a constant obsession in B-Sides, but even some A-Sides are built on the anticipation of seeing the lover again (including, in different ways, the first two that I covered here). The presence of the lover might seem the stuff of A-Sides, but as we saw with ‘Last Goodbye,’ sometimes it’s only a way of depicting a parting. Here we have two songs that are very much premised on absence, but as is so often the case, in both songs the lover retains a kind of presence – psychic in one song, ghostly in the other.
A-Side
Performed by Simon and Garfunkel
Written by Paul Simon
Released 1966
Sometimes, we associate love with vigorous activity (steady on). All skipping through meadows and dancing joyously all night long. Other times, though, love is associated with quiet reflection and peace, with achieving a kind of total, holistic comfort in your life. And in some ways, that’s where we are with this song, although whether the singer is entirely at ease is perhaps another story.
At heart, this is a song about missing your lover, who is across an ocean. But it’s not just a case of being lonely. There’s a curious kind of body-mind separation here, where the singer is physically alone, but in spirit, they’re with their lover:
My mind’s distracted and diffused
My thoughts are many miles away
They lie with you when you’re asleep
Kiss you when you start your day
That curious word “diffused” suggests that the singer’s mind is itself divided. There’s a kind of internal struggle here. They want to get on with their day, but they fundamentally can’t, which perhaps accounts for the fact that they don’t seem to leave this one room. It’s easy to imagine them standing at a window and staring out, in the vein of Dylan’s ‘One Too Many Mornings,’ at the rain outside. But even that’s an illusion. They can hear the rain, as the very first line of the song tells us, but they never actually seem to look outside. Instead, they’re imagining, “from the shelter of my mind,” internally closing the distance between them and their lover.
It’s hard to know whether it’s the absence of the lover or of their thoughts/mind that’s to blame for their general indolence, if indeed the two things can be separated. What’s certain is that they’re missing a fundamental part of themself. They can’t even seem to write. Much as (as mentioned last time we talked about them) Simon uses rhymes that don’t quite work as a metaphor for the dying relationship in ‘The Dangling Conversation,’ here the singer finds their joyless state mirrored in lifeless writing: “Songs I can’t believe/With words that tear and strain to rhyme.” It’s an appealing image, suggesting as it does that the lover carries something of the singer’s absence with them when they depart.
And that sense of loneliness isn’t just an effect of the lyrics. This is billed as a Simon and Garfunkel song, appearing on a Simon and Garfunkel album, but it is, in effect, a Paul Simon solo song. He is the only performer on it, singing and playing guitar, without so much as a backing wail from Art Garfunkel. Even in live performances, Simon would generally perform the song solo, cutting an isolated figure on stage [1]. It’s as if this is a song that has to be alone, that is premised entirely on isolation.
At the centre of the song is the rain, mentioned in three of the six verses, the image with which the song begins and ends. And on the one hand, basic pathetic fallacy such as we find in just about every work of art ever made might suggest to us that rain = tears, and so that the “rain-drenched streets” are essentially a tragic image of loneliness. And that resonance is certainly there if you’re looking for it. But fundamentally, this isn’t a sad song, and so this isn’t, to be banal about it, sad rain. Rather, this rain is “soft and warm,” “like a memory” – there’s something comforting about it. This is the rain that brings life to grass and flowers, but more relevantly to the song, it’s the kind of rain that soothes you to sleep, “tapping on my roof and wall.”
That’s not to say the rain is entirely a happy or positive image, though. Each drop of rain is disconnected from the whole, as they “weave their weary paths and die.” That’s why the singer finds themselves staring at it, and thinking “there but for the grace of you go I.” It’s a familiar rhetorical flourish from this kind of song, literally replacing God with the lover and hence elevating them to the level of divinity. But here’s a statement of dependence as much as devotion. The lover adds an extra dimension, of sorts, to the singer’s life; more than that, they have become a guiding philosophy: “I stand alone without beliefs/The only truth I know is you.” The dependence here is more than interpersonal; it takes on a metaphysical dimension. For the singer, their lover is life, and truth. Which makes it all the more of a shame that they’re away.
[1] There are exceptions, where the two perform together, but even at their 2003 reunion, Garfunkel sings solo while Simon plays guitar, walking away from the microphone as if to deny even the possibility that he might sing. Watch to the end of that video, incidentally, to see Simon pointedly not make eye contact with Garfunkel – the anti-Stevie Nicks. Maybe it’s not a shock that they haven’t performed together again since.
B-Side
Performed by Johnny Cash
Written by Gordon Lightfoot
Released 2006
I’ve generally tended to prioritise songs either performed by their composer, or in their best-known form in this project. The former is simply because we tend to make links between composer and performer in terms of the persona at the heart of a song – those links aren’t always necessarily helpful, but they are powerful, and at least acknowledging them tends to work best. The latter is primarily because I have no interest in obscurity for its own sake, but also because I tend to find that the best-known version of a song tends to be that way for a reason – hence Roberta Flack’s version of ‘The First Time Ever I Saw Your Face’ over Peggy Seeger’s, for instance.
Here, though, we have an exception to both those cases. Lightfoot’s version of this song is almost certainly the most popular [1] – it’s perhaps his best-known song – as well as being written by him. But at a time of life when Cash (a fine songwriter himself) was really excelling at performing other people’s work, I think this might be the crowning glory of his late career [2].
Really, you have to start with his voice. As with many of the other highlights of the American albums, most famously ‘Hurt,’ part of the emotional appeal of this song comes from hearing that chasmic, hickory-grained voice of his sounding cracked and strained. Cash never exactly sounded youthful, even when he was, but there was a steadiness to his voice that seems absent here. It sounds as though he’s on the verge of breaking down constantly. And while that’s more down to the quality of his illness-ravaged voice (astonishingly, he was only 71 at the time – he sounds about 150) than anything, it’s next to impossible not to read other elements of biography into it.
American V: A Hundred Highways, from which this is taken, was released posthumously, and seems to have been recorded between May and August 2003[2], shortly before Cash’s death in September of that year. There’s a poignancy to that latter fact for sure, knowing that we’re hearing a man in his final months, but what adds an extra edge is the fact that June Carter, his wife of 35 years, died quite suddenly in May. It’s hard to know if this particular recording was done before or after her death, but given just how battered his voice sounds here (and, frankly, because it makes for a better story), I’m inclined to guess at the latter.
As a rule, as I’ve mentioned before, I try to avoid reading these songs through biography too much, largely because I think that kind of reading is oversaturated in popular music criticism. But, as mentioned already, you can’t avoid it entirely, and it’s just too tempting to interpret this song about a heartbreak and an absence that seems utterly unfathomable (“I’ve got to say that I just don’t get it”) through the lens of an ill man struggling to cope with the death of his beloved wife, especially given how open the couple were about their devotion to each other. It remains next to impossible to write about Cash in any depth without Carter, or Carter without Cash.
So taking all of this into account what we have here is someone who’s been shorn of something, someone, who is a fundamental part of their being. And unlike the singer of ‘Kathy’s Song,’ it seems that that loss is to be permanent. So how does one understand a loss like that?
Well, one way that we all cope with setbacks and heartbreaks is to look to media and art. And so that’s what’s happening here. The singer’s thoughts are “an old-time movie” or “a paperback novel” – by implication, something cheap and everyday. Even the singer is “like a movie star,” with the lover “a movie queen,” their love affair itself a “three-way script” – the only real hint in the song of anything concrete that may have happened. And for all that the movie to which the singer’s thoughts are likened is vaguely Gothic – “a ghost from a wishing well,” “a castle dark,” “chains around my feet” – there’s a sense that this is a pretence, that they’re trying a little too hard to get away from the mundane reality. The second time this image comes up, it’s dismissed with “but stories always end.” What’s going on here is deeper and stranger, and ultimately art can only go so far as analogy. And yet they singer keeps returning to it – midway through the song, we get the line “but for now, love, let’s be real,” and yet they end up right back at that old-time movie for the final verse.
The singer is a “hero” in this story – at least in “the part/Where the heartaches come” - but that’s already a treacherous word. A hero may be someone who is remarkable or admirable – a Superman or a Heracles – or it may simply be the protagonist of a story. And as the singer is happy to remind us, “heroes often fail.” There’s more than a hint here of self-recrimination; the singer may claim “I don’t know where we went wrong,” but they still seem to blame themself, and their failings. Not that there isn’t blame set aside for the former lover too, though:
If you read between the lines
You’ll know that I’m just trying to understand
The feelings that you lack.
Like many other songs that we’ve seen, there seems to be plenty of blame here to go around, swinging back and forth between the two lovers. But what’s clear is that this is an ending, a concept to which the song keeps returning. The book to which their relationship is likened has a tragic ending, “just too hard to take.” There’s a sense of helplessness in the face of the inevitable, in the repeated lines which ultimately form the ending of the song itself:
I don’t know where we went wrong
But the feeling’s gone
And I just can’t get it back.
Which makes it all the more fitting to read this song through endings in Cash’s own life – his own looming death, and that of June. That’s why I’ve long thought of this as one of the most tragic songs I’ve ever heard, one I simply couldn’t listen to at times. There’s a burden of unbearable sadness that comes through in every note of this recording, in the sheer weight of Cash’s voice. It’s a song about making heartbreak into art, at least through analogy, but doing so only makes the heartbreak all the more palpable.
[1] To give about the most anecdotal data possible, at the time of writing, I’ve heard it twice on the radio, played by different DJs on different stations, in the last five days or so. On Spotify, it’s Lightfoot’s second-most played song after ‘Sundown,’ with 192 million plays at time of writing (‘Sundown,’ a song I couldn’t swear to having heard before, has a whopping 230 million, while ‘The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald,’ which I thought might be a contender, is his third-most played at 113 million). For contrast, the Cash version has 8.3 million (interestingly (well, to me), the third-most played song on its album after ‘God’s Gonna Cut You Down’ (253 million) and ‘Further On Up the Road’ (26 million), with the next-most played being ‘Rose of my Heart’ on 5 million).
[2] Or so Wikipedia tells me; I can’t find a better source, but Rick Rubin’s liner notes on the album say that they were working on it just after finishing American IV (released November 2002), and were on the finishing touches for it when Cash died, so early- to mid-2003 makes sense to me. Any biography I’ve read of Cash seems to agree that he was recording through much of his final months, at least.
