The Soundtrack to my Life: On Existentialism, and Notwantingtoexistentialism
The melancholy runs strong in me, so it's there in the music that flows through me, as well.
If there is one word that I hate more than any other in the English language, it’s emotional. We all have emotions, Janet. Even not showing emotion is an emotion, in its own way. You have to dig deeper than that.
“I’m feeling emotional”. Oh are you now, Janet? Which emotion are you feeling? Because that’s what really matters. Sadness? Anger? Happiness? Fear? Jealousy, or its cousin, Envy? Contempt? Shame?
For me, it’s mostly melancholy. I was once told that I have an “earnest resting face”, a lachrymose demeanour which causes partners to ask me, “What’s the matter?”, and then not believe me when I reply by saying, “What? Nothing.”
There is a seam of sadness that runs through me. I feel regret over the years that I wasted, a lot. I feel alone in the world, a lot. I feel that the number of people who really understand me is both small and diminishing in size. I miss a greater number of people than I know, these days.
***
It remains as staggering to me as ever that Jimmy Webb was no older than 21 years old when he wrote Wichita Lineman, the famously “first existential country song”. To say that there he clearly had wisdom beyond his years feels like something of an understatement.
Wichita Lineman’s beauty is in its simplicity and its stillness. It’s a moment caught in time, but it's neither big nor a showy one. If you close your eyes and visualise it, you can see the wide open vista, the road, and the blue-collar man halfway up a telegraph pole, searching in the sun for another overload as the pulsing of the wire beats in the background.
But of course, Wichita Lineman is really about what’s going on inside the protagonist’s head. Enter stage left Billy Joel, who described in terms as economical as the song itself: “a simple song about an ordinary man thinking extraordinary thoughts.” And of course, it all builds to that one extraordinary line:
And I need you more than want you
And I want you for all time
And straight into that gorgeous Danelectro bass guitar solo.
Through the stillness is the longing. There are plenty of songs which cover the distance between lovers. Some, such as I Drove All Night, I-95, or Radar Love, are about closing that gap. Others, such as Leavin’ On a Jet Plane, are about the dull ache in the pit of your stomach when you are forced by circumstance to be separate, a hug which feels like it might be the last one you ever experience.
***
Everybody knows about the beauty of Wichita Lineman, of course. Songs like this, or The Tracks of my Tears by Smokey Robinson & The Miracles, are part of The Great American Songbook. They have their place in our broader culture. They’re in the Great Song Canon.
But songs, as we’ve already well established, can hit you in very personal and specific ways. Sometimes it feels as though they’re written just for you, often because they’re so specific in how they address a subject as broad as love can be.
I don’t know when my depression first became apparent to me. I know it wasn’t before university, and I think it was almost certainly prior to my brain almost completely giving out altogether for a few months in 1998, but more on that, some other time. Where it came from, I have no idea. All I know that it’s there, and that is has been since some time around the middle of the 1990s.
And the other thing I know for certain is that once in its in you, its in you, and from there on you need to manage it, rather than just hope that it’ll go away. No chance. You’re one of us now, Janet. Best you get used to the idea that the best you’re ever going get from now on is for it to be ‘manageable’.
If anything, I don’t quite know how to write about depression. As regular readers will be already be aware, I tend to be quite confessional, so is definitely isn’t a matter of shame. If anything, it feels like it’s so deeply embedded in me that I can’t even articulate it to myself.
Everybody experiences depression differently; my version is a prison in which I’m trapped, unable to escape my own shortcomings and my own mistakes and trapped in a life that was thrust upon me, and largely without my consent. But even then, it is possible for outsiders to come into your life from out of nowhere and speak to you in such a way that makes you feel as though they’ve known you all along.
***
I don’t quite know how I came to hear City & Colour for the first time, but what I do know for certain is that We Found Each Other In The Dark, I knew I had another song for my internal soundtrack. We Found Each Other is a song about two imperfect people. It’s about love through darkness, about the light that you can see from the presence of that other person.
Black beast, out in the wilderness
We are fighting to survive and convalesce
These days, it increasingly feels as though we need each other more than ever, even though as we continue pushing each other away and talking past each other. The bonds that held us together are fragmenting, and our most anti-social selves are now held up as what we should aspire to.
That, for me, is the most fundamental fracture of the 21st century, that we’ve all become so spiky, cynical and detached, and often while we're preaching some bastardised version of what we claim to be ‘kindness’ at others. In such a space, to hear of love such as this is to feel the warm air on your face on a sunny morning.
We Found Each Other is about two safe spaces colliding, the sort of love that feels like sanctuary rather than combat. It’s a song of belief and love. And it builds to a middle eight to which I simply cannot do justice by simply copying and pasting the words here.
Through the black soulless water
And the cold lonely air
On the rock restless sea
The vessel in deep disrepair
And the swans they started singing
But then oh, rejoice!
I can still hear your voice
Oh, rejoice. I can still hear your voice. If We Found Each Other is its own way melancholic, it’s because of what I fill the gaps with. I know the struggle and the inertia. I know the emptiness. I know the loneliness. I’ve seen that void. I’ve felt the ice-chill of sudden silence when what I needed was an arm around my shoulder and an encouraging word in my ear.
But I also know what a safe harbour love can be when everything is closing in around you. I know how it can act like a beacon, steering you away from the rocks and choppy waters of recklessness and bad decisions. I know that love feels like coming home when it’s done right, but that it feels like being locked outside when it isn’t.
There’s a vulnerability to Dallas Green’s vocal which only adds to the atmosphere, but above all else, We Found Each Other is a song of hope, in which the ultimate crescendo is the simple act of still being able to hear another person’s voice.
It’s a song that you can transpose onto yourself, should you wish, or one that you can wish onto others. It is one of many new songs I’ve taken onboard over the last few years or so, and it’s one of two that probably resonates with me the most at this exact moment in time, though my feelings on that are mixed. The other one, I can’t quite bring myself to play again, just yet.
***
What is immediately noticeable about the above is that these two featured songs are both country songs. There are other songs in other genres that can have a similar effect upon me. A Kiss to Build a Dream On, We Have All The Time in The World, or Wonderful World by Louis Armstrong, a jazz man who didn’t always play jazz. Northern Sky, by Nick Drake. She’s a Rainbow, by the Rolling Stones.
There are genres of music that I do not like. If I never go to an opera, it will still have been every opera ever produced too many. I can’t think of much folk music that I like and a lot what I don’t like. EDM is for a specific state of mind. I'd say that I wouldn’t listen to it recreationally, but there’s recreationally and there’s recreationally.
But country is such a broad genre, it seems ridiculous to just write it off with one dismissive gesture. I’d say the same for heavy metal, as it goes. From Gram Parsons and Emmylou Harris singing Love Hurts to Willie Nelson and Johnny Cash, country music is an infinitely broader church than the Grand Ole Opry would have you believe.
***
I've been thinking about vulnerability a lot recently. At a point in the past, I made a conscious decision to break from this idea that you need to seem impervious to others. I would be as soft and gentle as I feel as though I ought to be, rather than hide behind a wall of semi-detachment. I would put myself out there, effectively saying, “This is who I am. Can you love this?”
The answers I've received to this question thus far have not been encouraging. I've tried to be respectful and do the right thing, only to have it thrown back in my face. I've been made to feel as though I'm a problem, or that I'm not ‘compatible’ and that I'm simultaneously too much and not enough.
In the broader world of “dating”, I already know that I'll be essentially invisible, should I ever try to dip my toe back in again. My nature has been taken advantage of, and to see these failings and realise that actually, everyone's only ever really out for themselves, has shaken both my faith in myself and my faith in humanity in a broader sense, in recent years.
It doesn't take much detachment from it all to understand what a huge shame it is that my worldview, to want to give your best for someone and to want them to give their best for you, is almost hopelessly naive.
But I will continue. I will persevere. And I will do so both because I know how love can feel, and because I don't feel as though can be any different, these days. I've long believed that I'm ‘not enough’ and my experience of the last few years has been that no, no I'm not, and that I may well never be. But perhaps the trick there is to find someone who doesn't think that.
***
The worlds of Wichita Lineman and We Found Each Other In The Dark are very, very different. For one thing, they're separated by more than forty years, and a lot has changed over those years. The lineman of 1968 may not have carried much shrift for depression or your fee-fees. He's too occupied with what might happen should it snow. He's got too much to get on with.
And the protagonist of We Found Each Other In The Dark feels like my inner voice, at times, or at least the voice that I want to have because someone loves me and mine. I don't feel envy for material reasons. I feel it for emotional ones instead. I get particularly jealous when I see happy couples together.
I'm jealous of their emotional solidity, of the inner calm they have from knowing that their person that has got them should they stumble, no matter what. I wish I'd paid more attention and had more belief in myself when I was younger. I wish I believed more in myself now. And I wish that someone else did too.
Frozen in this moment in time, Janet, sure I'm feeling emotional. Frozen in this moment in time, the loneliness of an otherwise empty room is as much as I have. And what's going on inside my head almost feels like it doesn't matter, when there's so little going on outside it. At least someone understands this, even if I’ve never even met them.