Songs of Love 9
Today we’re in a broadly indie sphere, in a genre sense rather than distribution etc. – the kinds of songs you might hear played on radio stations that devote themselves to the nostalgia of 30- and 40-somethings. Indie is stereotypically associated with sensitive young men (and the occasional woman) subjecting everyone to their feelings in a broadly adolescent manner. That’s not quite how I’d characterise either of these songs, though a sense of immaturity is definitely present in both. The first comes with an implication that it’s a youthful love affair being recalled, while the second revolves around the kind of overwrought reaction that we’ve examined several times here. That sense of youth isn’t necessarily biographical – the first artist was in his early 40s when the song was released, while the band behind the second song were all in about their mid-20s when it came out (which is young - I insist from the decrepitude of my mid-30s - but certainly not adolescent). Then again, immaturity and a sense of youthfulness are not confined to teenagers.
A-Side
Performed by Sufjan Stevens
Written by Sufjan Stevens
Released 2017
For all my general avoidance of gendered pronouns, and whatever the influence of queer artists and songwriters like Cole Porter, the songs in this project to date have generally been, by inference, broadly heterosexual. Some of that comes through specific lyrics – a male singer singing about “she” and “her” – some just through good old-fashioned heteronormativity, where a piece of art, like a person, is in a broader societal sense straight until proven otherwise. Short of conscious and concerted effort, it’s hard to read a Bob Dylan love song as anything other than heterosexual. Here, though, we come to our first overtly queer song by an overtly queer artist.
And immediately the caveats start to pile up. Should we treat Sufjan Stevens, who writes and sings about queer love, as entirely distinct from someone like Dusty Springfield, a lesbian who sang (at least partly) about straight love? For that matter, could Stevens be considered overtly queer at this point, when he had yet to come out (which he wouldn’t do until 2023, in a dedication to his late partner, after a couple of decades of pointed ambiguity)? Does this change his work in retrospect, given that songs like ‘The Predatory Wasp of the Palisades is Out to Get Us’ were already frequently read as queer love stories (in fact, it’s difficult not to read that song as such), or was it a confirmation of what was already widely known? And given his general refusal to comment on his sexuality up to that point, should we regard that coming out as a political act, or a rare peek behind the curtain of his usual zealous privacy (the intensely personal Carrie and Lowell aside)?
That’s a lot of questions, you’ll have noticed. And I have few, if any, answers. Apart from anything else, these are questions that I don’t feel entirely comfortable proposing definitive answers to as a cishet person. Even the wider question of whether we should treat queer love songs, or any other form of art, as distinct from heterosexual ones is thorny, to say the least (leaving aside the question of how far we can queer certain songs that were not intended that way). I bring these questions up primarily to illustrate their existence, rather than answer them.
Anyway, all that hand-wringing and shrugging (a complicated gesture) aside, what about the actual song? For a start, it’s worth pointing out that it was written for the film Call Me By Your Name, but has very much acquired a life outside of that film – I heard it playing in a trendy café the other day in between Phoebe Bridgers and a Taylor Swift album track. Remarkably, it’s Stevens’ most streamed song on Spotify, with just over 600 million plays at time of writing[1]. Call Me By Your Name was certainly a popular film, but this kind of attention suggests an appeal outside of the film.
Way back in the introduction, I referred to the A-sides as broadly “positive” songs. This is one of the entries that threatens to stretch that definition, because this is about as melancholy as positivity gets. Still, I’ve stuck with it here because, for all that it’s founded in heartbreak and even a breaking of faith (“Lord I no longer believe”), ultimately its view of love remains one of beauty and grace, in which love is blessed and a blessing.
Like ‘Palisades,’ ‘Fourth of July’ or ‘Chicago,’ this gives us a story only in fragments, glimpses into a life – a first kiss, a sexual encounter by a river. This has two primary effects: firstly, it makes the story more abstract, and therefore more universal. The great paradox of lyric poetry, which we see in so many of these songs too, is that specificity makes the work more universal – the more we hear about the detail of the felt emotion, the more we feel it. Here we can project ourselves into “the first time that you touched me,” where we become both the singer and their lover, both “you” and “me.”
The other, related effect is that the story becomes more intimate through the lack of detail. These are shared memories, which need only be mentioned obliquely to be evoked; there’s no need of further detail. For the singer and their lover, the mention of “fumbling by Rogue River” evokes a whole set of feelings and memories, perhaps of a whole day and a range of experiences therein. The placename here is what really makes it, what ties the memory to a particular location and therefore makes it a specific incident rather than something that may have happened many times.
Of course, all of this is occurring in retrospect, certainly in the latter two verses. The relationship is over, the singer by turns drowning and utterly dry. Even familial love is painful now; they’re so burned, so sensitive that any kind of intimacy feels like a curse. They compare themself to Hephaestion, Alexander’s closest companion and (it is widely theorised) lover. This is actually a slight undercutting of what we might expect – Alexander’s wildly expressive grief over Hephaestion’s early death is widely documented, and we might imagine that a lover grieving their relationship would identify with that. But instead it’s Hephaestion himself who forms the analogy, which is all the starker – they’re not grieving, but dead. There is no future beyond this.
Again, this is certainly straining the definition of “positive.” But the song retains its belief, even if that belief is strained. The version of the chorus repeated after the first and last verses, refers to love and its infinite mystery – “will wonders ever cease?” This is reminiscent of the language of the sublime, last encountered in the entry on ‘Sunrise;’ something powerful and magnificent, which provokes awe. Typically of Stevens, it’s also reminiscent of the language of devotion and worship, which is reinforced in the final line: “blessed be the mystery of love.” To bless something is to apply an element of divinity, of God’s grace, to it, even where, as in this instance, it already seems to have something of that about it.
So this is a song of fortitude, of holding onto beliefs despite all else, like a martyr. There’s no trace of bitterness here; the singer seems to want their lover back (“shall I sleep within your bed?”), but only vaguely and dimly. Elsewhere there’s an air of resignation and inevitability (“when this love is over,” “Shall I find no other?”), but also of searching. There are a total of five questions in the song, all of them broadly rhetorical (as arguably any question in a single-voiced lyric is – there’s no answer within the text). This is love as spiritual quest, probing for answers while resigning oneself to the fact that they may never be accessible. The mystery itself is blessed.
[1] Some 50 million more than the second-most streamed, the melancholy elegy ‘Fourth of July,’ with its “we’re all gonna die” refrain, making for quite a contrast. ‘Fourth of July’ and ‘Mystery of Love’ are also generally among the first songs to come up as a suggestion if you type Stevens’ name into the YouTube search bar (an imperfect measure at the best of times, but a telling one).
B-Side
Performed by Pearl Jam
Written by Stone Gossard and Eddie Vedder
Released 1991
Most songs rhyme, at least in part. That’s generally part of what makes a song, in fact – the mellifluous aural quality of rhyme, the way it catches the ear and leads the listener on. As we’ve seen previously, some songwriters construct an entire song around a single rhyme, while others, especially in the world of rap, use it as a structuring feature, sometimes a way to demonstrate their own competence by building on a single rhyme throughout. Any songwriter with an ounce of comedic skill can pull off the old trick of teasing the ear with a rhyme that isn’t fulfilled, usually suggesting a crude word. Even something like ‘We Didn’t Start the Fire,’ whose lyrics are mostly a list of historical events, coheres through rhyme, even if some of those rhymes are a little tortured – “Hemingway, Eichmann/Stranger in a Strange Land.”
It's quite rare to find a song with little or no rhyme. It feels wrong, somehow, like something is fundamentally broken. Even if you don’t notice the lack of rhyme, it may well feel that something is fundamentally off, as in Gilbert O’Sullivan’s ‘Nothing Rhymed,’ a song which does feature rhyme, but uses it as a central image as well as a formal feature, a way of indicating how all order has been lost[1].
And of course, that’s what’s happening here, in the form rather than the content. Everything has gone wrong, broken down – so much so that the form of the song itself is broken. What better way to reflect a world from which all colour has faded?
Here we have no full rhymes at all. A few half-rhymes (“sun/turn,” “laughter/sear”) and one word rhyming with itself – that word being “everything,” just to underline the degree to which the sense of disorder has pervaded the entire world[2] – but no full rhyme. This leaves the listener perpetually on edge, waiting for a sound that will complete the cycle and satisfy the ear, but it never comes. And the half-rhymes do no more than tease the ear, drawing attention to the incompleteness. Once you notice it, it’s a profoundly discomfiting experience (as with the next song on the album, ‘Jeremy,’ albeit to quite different effect there).
And this sense of form breaking down extends beyond the lack of rhyme. Eddie Vedder, in both his writing and his delivery, has a tenuous relationship to meter as a rule. Take, as example, the third line of the first verse: “All five horizons revolved around her soul, as the earth to the sun.” I’m treating this as one line rather than two because the structure of the verse makes more sense that way, but there’s a noticeable break after the word “soul,” and the second half is half-spoken in a way that doesn’t obviously correspond to the rhythm of the music. I say “spoken;” in fact it’s almost mumbled, as if the singer doesn’t want to or can’t expend too much energy on it. The line itself seems to be breaking apart, at war with itself. Across the song more generally, there’s a lack of even structure to how long each line is, with emphasis distributed seemingly at random across each.
And that’s before we start thinking about the kind of imagery at play here. Leaving aside the question of what “five horizons” means[3], we’ve got cosmic imagery going on here, the singer’s relationship to the lover likened to the earth and the sun, in constant orbit, one giving life to the other. In fact the sun is mentioned twice in the song (“how quick the sun can drop away”), both times likened to the lover, which contributes to the sense that the whole world has gone wrong. The world of this song is one of permanent eclipse, and hence of darkness.
As may already be clear if you didn’t already know it, this is quite a wordy song, brimming with emotion so much that those words threaten to spill out from the bounds of a strict rhythm. But it builds to a point, beyond the second chorus, where the more elaborate imagery largely breaks down:
I know someday you’ll have a beautiful life
I know you’ll be a star in somebody else’s sky
But why, why, why can’t it be
Oh can’t it be mine?
I’ve transcribed this more or less as I hear it and as I think makes most sense; Vedder takes a break after the word “star” but not “life,” so there’s an argument for a line break there, but this way preserves the half-rhyme of “life” and “sky.” Transcribing it like this, though, fails to convey the delivery of the latter two lines in particular, or even the time they take up – Vedder spends almost as long on the word “mine” as he does on the first two lines in total. But these are also the final lyrics of the song, more than a minute and a half from its end. The vocals, however, remain omnipresent, either following the main guitar melody are providing a shouted, inarticulate countermelody, which mostly consists of nonsense vocalisations alongside the odd “why.” Because words have now conclusively failed. All that’s left is raw emotion, expressed in shouts and in the music itself. Having broken its form, the song has now broken language itself, such is the force of the emotion involved. Everything has indeed now turned to black.
[1] I’d like to think I have just become the first critic ever to compare Gilbert O’Sullivan to Pearl Jam and suggest that they’re doing essentially the same thing. Stay tuned for my sixteen-part series comparing Waterford to Seattle.
[2] Christopher Ricks writes of a similar non-rhyme in Dylan’s ‘One Too Many Mornings’ that it is “A rhyme to nullify a state of affairs or a marriage; it is blankness itself.” This idea of “blankness” is to be found throughout ‘Black.’
[3] Fan interpretations range from the plausible – the five senses – to the tenuous – the five members of the band. None are entirely satisfying, and I tend to suspect the point of the phrase is mostly just to pick out the assonance in “five horizons.”
