And the Worlds Got Me Dizzy Again

The world'south got me silly again

A honey letter to the lyrics of Landlocked Blues by Brilliant Eyes.

A totalitarian rabbit regime. Art Garfunkel'due south plaintive vocalisation. "Burning like fire."

A year ago these would take been my only musical associations with the notion of Bright Optics. The theme to the movie version of Watership Downward past Richard Adams.

Then, via a convoluted Spotify radio station rabbit hole, I stumbled upon Bright Eyes the band.

To be precise I stumbled across the vocal Start Twenty-four hours Of My Life, from the album I'm Wide Awake, Information technology's Morning.

First Day Of My Life is a love vocal about finding and falling in love with your soul-mate; the kind of honey where your lover is also your best friend.

Remember the time yous collection all night
Just to come across me in the morning
And I thought information technology was foreign
You said everything inverse
You lot felt as if y'all'd merely woke upwardly

And yous said, "This is the first day of my life
I'm glad I didn't die before I met you
Merely, now I don't intendance, I could go anywhere with yous
And I'd probably be happy"

I was falling in love with Claire at the fourth dimension and it struck all kinds of soppy, sentimental chords. I bought the album for her.

The video for the vocal is similarly sentimental but information technology's difficult not to similar even if you're not in that doe-eyed frame of mind. The ideal is simple. A locked off photographic camera records the reactions of people who dearest each other listening to the song together on separate sets of headphones.

The film is an apt visual metaphor for this post.

This is a beloved letter to the lyrics of Bright Eyes. And it is a celebration of how shared music brought my eldest daughter and I closer together simply as she was flying the nest.

Molly discovered Bright Optics (the band) at about the same time every bit me. She was not long at Glasgow Academy and her convoluted rabbit hole was somewhat unlike to mine. You don't need Spotify radio to observe new music when you share a student residence with thirty 5 eighteen year-olds.

Spotify does come in handy, yet, when you desire to relieve, segment and savour said music at your leisure.

So, before she left for university, Molly and I made a kind of musical pre-nup agreement regarding custody of and access to my Spotify Premium account.

Its terms are thus. I retain custody but she gets admission.

Spotify quite reasonably limits the number of devices that tin access a premium account at whatever given time. It doesn't allow two people to simultaneously listen to different playlists on different devices.

Molly's time-shifted, 20 four hour party lifestyle ways that such clashes are less common than I expected. And when they do occur Molly is a good girl and a dutiful daughter. She logs off and makes mode with the minimum of fuss. I must have washed something correct.

It is an elegant, mutually beneficial system. We both get lots of win. I provide the hive and she makes the honey, in the form of playlists sourced from dozens of music-mad friends and curated by Molly.

It is a uncomplicated symbiosis. Information technology reminds me of these lyrics from Mr Wendal by Arrested Development.

Now that I know him, to give him money isn't charity
He gives me some noesis, I buy him some shoes

To requite her my Spotify login credentials isn't clemency. She gives me some musical knowledge, I purchase her ad-free, offline access to songs.

By some happy accident Molly and I have avoided that cliche whereby each generation fails to comprehend the music of the next. She gets no "turn that horrible noise down" from me. Quite the opposite. I can't have any credit, only I tin can take plenty of pleasure from the fact that her cosmic gustatory modality in music matches mine sufficiently for us to accept plenty in common, whilst varying enough for me to be surprised and delighted by additions to her playlists.

When it comes to expertly curated playlists, our roles are reversed. Molly is custodian and I am granted access. The largest and most fertile of these collections are her Chill listing (which brilliantly does exactly what it says on the tin can), and her Showtime Year At Glasgow list, home to near eight hundred tracks, the diverseness of which frequently prompts a mental double-accept on my part. From The Arctic Monkeys to Ella Fitzgerald. From The Blackness Keys to Bob Marley. From Vampire Weekend to David Essex. I echo, David Essex, the sleeping room pivot-upwards of girls I knew at junior school xl years agone, who is apparently enjoying a modicum of renewed 21st Century credibility in certain quarters of Glasgow University. From The Smiths to The Kinks. From Bowie to Vivid Eyes.

Molly and her friends are respectful students of musical history. They clothing Beatles t-shirts. They listen to The Rolling Stones and The Doors and The Who. Information technology makes me laugh in my day task when young, thrusting brand managers and hopelessly by-it marketing directors akin insist on appealing to teenagers by trying clumsily difficult, far also hard as it turns out, to appropriate the very latest musical thing into ad audio tracks. Their miss is worse than a mile considering they were aiming in the wrong direction to offset with.

By dissimilarity, the I'm Broad Awake It'south Morn album is a direct, bulls-center hit for both Molly and I.

Molly took her audio-visual guitar to Glasgow and left the electric at home. I'1000 not surprised that she was drawn to the unplugged, i-have vibe of this album. It is folky in places, bluesy in others and intelligent throughout. In fact it is intensely intelligent.

It is likewise intelligently intense.

The lyrics for Lua, for instance, are and so authentic and raw that they almost scald your consciousness. You tin can hold your caput under cold running water for 5 minutes after listening just the pain won't go away. In that location will be emotional blisters. In that location will be a psychic scar.

I got a flask within my pocket, we can share it on the railroad train
And if y'all hope to stay conscious I volition attempt and practice the same
We may dice from medication, but nosotros sure killed all the pain
Just what was normal in the evening by the morning seems insane

All too oft lyrics that sound deep and meaningful when performed in the context of a song are revealed as shallow and vapid when the music is stripped away and the words are laid bare. Which is non to say that lyrics have to make perfect sense to accept meaning. Fine art that leaves no room for interpretation is neither fit for purpose nor worthy of the proper name.

Conor Oberst has naught to fear from such analysis. His lyrics are thoughtful, opinionated, provocative. Every vocal on the album is underpinned by a high concept idea, filtered through allusions and wrapped in a complementary vibe.

At The Bottom Of Everything is a prime case. It is a song about a vocal.

It is a vocal nigh a song which is sung past 1 stranger to another as their lives flash before them during a plane crash. And the candid, urgent lyrics are juxtaposed with a jaunty melody, the incongruity of which just adds to the unsettling mood.

The slightly surreal feeling is amplified in the video by deliberately lo-fi animation and a cameo advent by Terence Stamp as one of the strangers.

Nosotros must talk in every phone
Get eaten off the spider web
We must rip out all the epilogues in the books that we have read
And in the confront of every criminal
Strapped firmly to a chair
We must stare, we must stare, we must stare

Molly is fifty miles abroad on the other side of Scotland. Simply music brings usa together almost days and gives usa, well me at least, an ever deepening sense of kinship.

So information technology is either entirely fitting or perversely ironic that my favourite song on this anthology, which epitomises our musical bonding, is nearly parting and separation. That song is Landlocked Blues.

If yous walk away I'll walk away
Commencement tell me which road you volition take
I don't want to risk our paths crossing some twenty-four hour period
And so you walk that manner I'll walk this way

And the future hangs over our heads
And it moves with each current event
Until it falls all around like a common cold steady pelting
Just stay in when it's lookin' this way

There is an intense resignation to this vocal. The lyrics smoulder and spit like wet wood on a camp fire. And they are delivered past a male person/female person duet whose resonant voices are slightly out of sync, as if they are telling the same story to sympathetic friends in dissimilar places at roughly the aforementioned time.

And the globe's got me dizzy again
You'd think later on twenty-two years I'd be used to the spin
And information technology merely feels worse when I stay in ane place
Then I'm ever pacing around or walking abroad

I keep drinking the ink from my pen
And I'm balancing history books up on my caput
But it all boils downward to ane quotable phrase
If you love something give it away

Oberst flirts with that corny cliché of an acid test; setting someone gratis to run across if they love you enough to come back.

Just there's nothing mawkish about this song.

And, in any case, what was once corny becomes something to hold on to when your daughter leaves habitation.

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Source: https://medium.com/a-longing-look/the-world-s-got-me-dizzy-again-e24356ba20c6

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