musical interlude #02

something for the waiting

hello! i hope you’ve been well. how’s the weather where you are?

i always feel so strange asking that question, coming from a place where there’s nothing but the heat and therefore no change to speak of. every day will be exactly the same as the one that came before. it makes me a little sad sometimes, really, like i’ve been locked out of understanding the openings of spring, or the tender bite of cooler weather approaching. that’s changed recently, though. for once - for the first time in two years - i’m writing to you from somewhere other than my room, other than the place i’m from. in a new city (temporarily), i’ve experienced fall. i’m starting to understand why you all like this so much.

most of the time, i walk around alone. or i go into bookshops and cafes, almost perpetually rummaging around the mess of receipts and crinkled paperbacks for enough change to buy another ill-advised iced coffee. and then i sit, setting the inevitably-spilled coffee alongside a stained book and a pen, angling myself towards the pavement so i can watch people pass me by. the freedom of being amongst people and entirely alone. i know this isn’t a new sensation, but i can’t help but want to tell you about it. i’ve been waiting to launch myself out of the grimy window of my life for years, growing ever more sick beneath the skin, itching and scrabbling to get out — and it’s all amounted to walking down a leaf-strewn street, or drinking a coffee and reading a book alone. i think i’m grateful that all of the burning has resulted in this. This, in the eternal words of marie howe. i think it’s shown me how little i need to be (momentarily?) happy. my murderously simple desires. at home, the same thought would’ve made me cry. how little i want and how i could never have it in the place where i’m from. i can acknowledge i’m being dramatic about this, but it doesn’t make it any less true.

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but anyway. being away from home so soon after the detritus of the truly chaotic finals season of my senior year of college means i’ve brought dangerously low levels of mental energy and none of the books that i wanted to write to you about. so that will have to wait. in the meantime, i did want to tell you about a song that swirled around my head for most of march. it was entirely accidental, like most things i find myself pulled to. i spent a lot of february and march drifting around spotify, procrastinating on researching and writing the 10000 essays i had due throughout the semester. in this instance, it involved poking my nose into other people’s playlists in a desperate attempt to inject some change into the soundtrack of my life (which, at the time, involved a lot of the smiths’ i know it’s over, but we won’t get into that). eventually, i landed on nick cave’s album, Skeleton Tree. going into it, i only really knew of nick cave from the peaky blinders soundtrack and the b-side, cassiel’s song (which is brilliant and bruising and we also can’t get into, but i do hope you listen to it).

i do really like stumbling into music this way, though. accidental and without expectations is perhaps the most accurate way to describe my recent forays into enjoying it again. i do think that i often forget how much i like music. it feels like an insane thing to say, that i’ve forgotten something that’s arguably formed the spine of my life, but i had. i lose myself with startling regularity when it comes to work and school. i can’t say i don’t enjoy it sometimes, the freedom of sinking entirely into a project until i am nowhere to be found. but some way or other, i stumble back to myself. it’s never when i expect it, and though i’ve lived most of my life with the echoing refrain of ‘no surprises’, i’ve also come to realise that i do enjoy being surprised. if surprised is another word for affected. the moment of being made to stop, to surrender to the feeling in an otherwise impermissible landscape.

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so, the song: Girl in Amber, by Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds. it’s the last song on Skeleton Tree. i’ve refused to google the song or try to mine the internet for context, because i like that it still belongs to me. the title, of course, makes me imagine a bug trapped in amber.

don’t even know if this is amber, but this is what i’m imagining.

the song itself is surprisingly delicate. i don’t know why i expected something more oppressive, maybe the connotation of the word ‘trapped’ implanted an assumption in my mind such that the expectation i had was entirely different from what i received. this too, the privilege of a surprise. so i’ve been disarmed. now i can be splayed open.

the song immortalises a single moment. girl in amber, trapped forever. a single instant, stretched forever. when i was at my most overwhelmed, scribbling in notebooks or typing frantically at all hours of the day and night, it was this song that stopped me in my tracks. made me lay my hands down, put my forehead to the desk. everything about me was swirling so fast i’d hardly stopped to look around or even gasp in an unsteady breath. i was moving so quickly everything had slipped out of my grasp. i wasn’t even there.

my favourite part of the song comes at its close. as the instrumental and choral voices grow steadily louder in their lamentations, nick cave pleads: don’t touch me. don’t touch me. don’t touch me. by the end of this, his voice has been swallowed by the vibrating shard of sound that closes the album. this is the moment i put my head into my hands. try to feel the breath in my lungs, my own skin against itself. don’t touch me. something about being so far away from myself, and yet pressed close to the moment i could not escape. the thing i had to live through, that which i had to pass through and come out the other side of. writing about it now, almost a month later, is so strange. it’s difficult to recall the quiet desperation of the moment. the song puts me back. the same instant, returned, stretched into perpetuity. there is a version of me still there, somewhere. i’m not sure that i’ll ever be anywhere else, in any way that matters.

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i’m sorry i’ve been gone so long. i won’t bore you with further tiresome explanation, but i will leave you with some more music, if you’d like:

my lovely tumblr mutual (edit: i did in fact put the wrong name down + forget who recommended this bc i didn’t take down the usernames in my notes app. sorry love u) recommended the album hats by the blue nile to me the other day, and i fell in love with the song let’s go out tonight. listened to it again on the way home from dinner tonight, watching the train go past in a city i will soon be leaving.

another mutual @ charlestrask also mentioned aimee mann to me a couple of months ago, and in the midst of a list of neverending chores found myself listening to one of her slightly older albums. philly sinks is what i listen to as i pull the clothes off the line, make coffee, clean the kitchen.

while stuck in the essay-writing trenches + also being unable to bear writing in silence, i used this playlist as background a lot, which led me to blue nudes (i-iv). i associate it with 3am, furious typing, cramped shoulders. it’s what holds the last few moments of my undergraduate degree.