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imomusMusic artists often say that -- like the sexist Christian God creating Eve from a single rib of Adam -- they become fascinated by a song from their last album and build the next on it. I've never been quite that tidy an artist -- my albums tend to start with clear intentions, but end up all over the place -- but if there were a song on Ocky Milk (2006) that might predict what its successor (2008) album will sound and feel like, it's probably "the big ballad", Nervous Heartbeat. Not just because of the splash it made -- reaching Stylus' Top 50 Singles of 2006 list without even being issued as a single! -- but because it did something songs do better than anything else I know; it moved people by touching on a universal emotion ("When will I see you again?").
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The different things I do -- blogging, novel-writing, journalism, performance art -- can often do the things I used to do in songs (social commentary, trend-watching, experiment) better than songs ever could. Because I do these other things, my songs are free to do what they do best. And -- the way I see it right now, anyway -- that's to move us with huge, moving melodies and massively obvious, universal human themes. Of love, of tenderness, of longing, of loss, of memory, of emotion. The more different things I do, the more I focus on that aspect of songs -- their most conservative aspect, certainly, but also their most powerful. Hence the enka stuff I was doing on Ocky Milk; for me, always hyper-critical of my own culture and its mainstream, it's much easier to edge into universal themes via someone else's culture, someone else's mainstream.
But, since "the past is a foreign country; they do things differently there", the West's past is also a place I can draw inspiration from. There are songs in the West's past that can move me deeply, songs that touch universal emotions with supreme elegance. Some of them are incredibly mainstream, embarrassingly so. For instance, the song I've been most obsessed by, and listened to the most over the past month, is a very old one (but new to me): "The Next Time", sung by Cliff Richard in the film Summer Holiday. Something about this clip, with Cliff on a solitary walk through Athens, mourning a love affair that's now "ancient history" with the Acropolis behind him, is deeply, divinely compelling for me. Of course it's wrapped up with the fact that I lived in -- and loved -- Athens when I was a kid. But it's also the internal properties of the song; that utterly mysterious thing which makes certain combinations of words and chords so much more affecting than others, and click with us on the deepest level when others don't.
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Another song that does this for me is Harry Belafonte's amazingly haunting reading, in 1966, of "Try To Remember". His phrasing is so out of joint with the chords that it starts to resemble some of the weird trip-ups we edited into the song "Permagasm" on my last album, where we tried to balance emotion and estrangement by laying the vocal in the wrong places and cross-fading between different mixes. But it's the backing vocal in the Belafonte song -- is it a theremin? a sentimental robot? -- that really slays, underpinning the song's spiraling chords and schizoid, spooky morbidity with pure terror-tingle. This wistful tenderness for a distant life can only come from beyond the grave. Beauty's just the first glimpse of terror.
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Finally, here's a video someone's made for one of my favourite Leonard Cohen songs, "Take This Longing". I'll be on a plane later today, crossing the Alps, heading with Hisae to Venice to catch the last few days of the Biennale. I doubt the experience will be quite this lyrical, though.
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The different things I do -- blogging, novel-writing, journalism, performance art -- can often do the things I used to do in songs (social commentary, trend-watching, experiment) better than songs ever could. Because I do these other things, my songs are free to do what they do best. And -- the way I see it right now, anyway -- that's to move us with huge, moving melodies and massively obvious, universal human themes. Of love, of tenderness, of longing, of loss, of memory, of emotion. The more different things I do, the more I focus on that aspect of songs -- their most conservative aspect, certainly, but also their most powerful. Hence the enka stuff I was doing on Ocky Milk; for me, always hyper-critical of my own culture and its mainstream, it's much easier to edge into universal themes via someone else's culture, someone else's mainstream.
But, since "the past is a foreign country; they do things differently there", the West's past is also a place I can draw inspiration from. There are songs in the West's past that can move me deeply, songs that touch universal emotions with supreme elegance. Some of them are incredibly mainstream, embarrassingly so. For instance, the song I've been most obsessed by, and listened to the most over the past month, is a very old one (but new to me): "The Next Time", sung by Cliff Richard in the film Summer Holiday. Something about this clip, with Cliff on a solitary walk through Athens, mourning a love affair that's now "ancient history" with the Acropolis behind him, is deeply, divinely compelling for me. Of course it's wrapped up with the fact that I lived in -- and loved -- Athens when I was a kid. But it's also the internal properties of the song; that utterly mysterious thing which makes certain combinations of words and chords so much more affecting than others, and click with us on the deepest level when others don't.
[Error: unknown template video]
Another song that does this for me is Harry Belafonte's amazingly haunting reading, in 1966, of "Try To Remember". His phrasing is so out of joint with the chords that it starts to resemble some of the weird trip-ups we edited into the song "Permagasm" on my last album, where we tried to balance emotion and estrangement by laying the vocal in the wrong places and cross-fading between different mixes. But it's the backing vocal in the Belafonte song -- is it a theremin? a sentimental robot? -- that really slays, underpinning the song's spiraling chords and schizoid, spooky morbidity with pure terror-tingle. This wistful tenderness for a distant life can only come from beyond the grave. Beauty's just the first glimpse of terror.
[Error: unknown template video]
Finally, here's a video someone's made for one of my favourite Leonard Cohen songs, "Take This Longing". I'll be on a plane later today, crossing the Alps, heading with Hisae to Venice to catch the last few days of the Biennale. I doubt the experience will be quite this lyrical, though.