The Soundtrack to my Life: The Soundtrack of my Inner Monologue

Why words mean a lot to me, and why I've had to shift my music listening habits over the years.

I started writing about single parenthood with the express desire not to turn it into a form of cheap therapy, but the point in my life at which to do so is starting to feel necessary. Those among you who know me will know the extent my life has been thrown upside down, and at the exact time of writing I’m still not prepared to talk about that in full.

But at the same time, my patience became exhausted and I starting to turn into someone that I don’t want to be, so maybe it’s time for me to be considering other options of expressing myself. So let’s start by easing ourselves in gently and talk about something that has been a feature of my life for thirty-odd years now, and I don’t know whether it’s exclusive to me, or something that we all have within us.

Everybody knows what an inner monologue is, and there are occasionally reminders on social media that not everybody has one. But what about a soundtrack? A musical inner monologue? Because there’s a piece of music that starts to play in my head, and has for decades, at any moment of significance, like a soap opera leading into a commercial break.

If I ever directed a movie–and to be clear, I am never going to direct a movie–it is the piece that I would use at such moments. If I ever produced a TV show–and to be clear, I am never going to produce a TV show–it would at least be on the soundtrack, and might well be the theme tune. It’s a song called Going Places by the Scottish band Teenage Fanclub, and it’s been lodged in my head for more than a quarter of a century.

I have conflicting feelings about Teenage Fanclub. On the one hand, there is something distinctly lush about them, a yearning sound which appeals to my inner romantic. But on the other hand, I can find them infuriating at times. Many of their songs feel par-boiled to me, as though they got three-quarters of the way through writing them and just decided yeah, that’ll do.

Consider, for example, What You Do To Me, from their second album Bandwagonesque. There’s an enormous glam rock stomper going on in the middle of this song, but it also feels as though they… pull their punches a little. There’s no middle eight and no soloing, and the whole thing clocks in at less than two minutes. It feels like it’s 80% one of my favourite songs, but that missing fifth completely hollows it out. Close, but no cigar.

But that song isn’t my soundtrack, while Going Places is. From their 1995 album Grand Prix, where it occupied a fairly anonymous place on side two, it’s a lovely piece of music, semi-acoustic with mandolins laid over the top of it. Two verses, two choruses, an extended break in the middle. It’s melancholy without being maudlin.

But in many respects, I don’t understand quite why it has taken up such an over-sized place in my inner monologue. It’s not a song I’ve listened to more than any others. That honour would probably belong to something like Tears of a Clown by Smokey Robinson & The Miracles (and if you don’t understand why I love that song so much, you really don’t know me as well as you think you do), a song that feels particularly familiar to me at this moment in time.

And yes indeed, it does press another of the buttons which mildly disrupts my love of TFC. It’s the lyrics. I’ve long felt that this is my issue, but I’ve always interpreted pop music, at its best, as a marriage of music and literature (music without lyrics is a different matter, and subject to different conditions for me). The words are as important as the sounds that come underneath them. And I'm not looking for high art. I'm looking for effort.

This is one of the reasons why one of my actual all-time favourite bands is the American power pop (a genre about which I’m struck by the adage that ‘power pop’ is music that is ‘neither powerful enough nor popular enough’) band Fountains of Wayne. A majority of their songs are little self-contained stories, with characters, a plot arc, and often some form of resolution at the end.

The most obvious example is Stacy’s Mom, the song which both made them and, in a sense, broke them, resulting in the curious situation of a band who’d just recorded their third album being nominated for Best New Artist at the 2003 Grammys and a reputation as a “one-hit wonder” despite a back catalogue which stretches over a decade and a half. Is Stacy’s Mom a novelty record? Well, that’s a matter for the individual, but it does contain one glorious line which really elevates it:

“And I know that you think it’s just a fantasy/But since your dad walked out your mom could use a guy like me.”

Could there be a more perfect summation of the wilder fantasies of a 13-year-old boy’s crush on his girlfriend’s mother? Of the hopeless and limitless ambition of youth, and the absolute certainty that we can feel about things even at a time when we don’t even know who we are? This is a constant theme throughout their work. Each song a little story, a moment frozen in time. They are, at their heart, a people-watcher’s band.

Far from every band can hit those peaks. Being a musician is different to being a writer, and there are no guarantees that people who can play musical instruments should also be brilliant lyricists. From my own personal experience, the ultimate example of that is Led Zeppelin. When I was 17, I lurrrved Led Zeppelin. I was a drummer–still am, at heart– and my pathetic teenage hormones needed that primordial stomp.

But when I got to about twenty years old, something started to feel off. What the hell were those words about? It wasn’t that they were particularly mystical or that I didn’t have it about me to understand their complexity, nuance, or anything like that. It was that they were bullshit, that they didn’t make much sense, and that it felt as though they were just shunted in because they needed to be.

From about the age of 21 I didn’t listen to them for a good twenty years, but in middle age I realised that I needed to go back and revisit the music of my youth, and when I went back to Led Zeppelin I realised that the only way in which they could make sense to me was if I treated Robert Plant’s voice as effectively a musical instrument in itself. Stop worrying about the content and just enjoy the lion’s mane roar and the silliness of it all. As a result of this, Led Zeppelin are back in my musical world, albeit on different terms to when I was a spotty teenager with a dreadful haircut.

Teenage Fanclub haven’t quite reached that point yet. There’s a big part of me which still says, “if you’re going to listen to this, you might as well just listen to Big Star instead.” But Going Places still exists in my head, living there rent-free. If I had to pay royalties every time it suddenly started playing in my head, they’d be billionaires by now. Yet there it still lives, with its words that barely mean anything and its lovely, melancholy air, its little pauses and moments of emptiness. One day it might even be played at my funeral, and my biggest disappointment about that is that I won’t be there to hear it.

Image by dlohner from Pixabay