8/26/2005
you are the light
I’m sitting at the pickup curb in SFO, earphones in. The song is You’re Gone by Marillion, a swirling epic of a pop tune, and I’m grinning wide at the world as it swims by me to the soundtrack of Steve Rothery’s guitar. The harried travelers around me are giving me funny looks, a twentysomething girl bopping to an invisible beat, smiling and nodding at them as they drag their luggage onto the crosswalks.
For months now I’ve had a love affair with this song, for reasons both rational and visceral. Our relationship unfolded in stages. The first was pure superficiality: it was catchy, I could groove to it and sing along with the chorus. In my playlist it landed in heavy rotation just because it felt good to listen to. I didn’t really know why. Then I realized that I couldn’t identify offhand what the chord progressions were. This is unusual for a pop song; they tend to string the same five chords in predictable sequences. Calling the changes in the average pop-rock tune is a piece of cake. This had me stumped.
The music student in me can’t resist a good puzzle, so I sat down at the piano one night with the CD player and took to pressing rewind. What’s this, D to A minor to E7sus4? Bizarre. Then the chorus changes key entirely to G, but with weird choices like Bb thrown in at certain moments. A bridge midway through changes key again to C. What’s most impressive was that the song manages to shift seamlessly between these different sections, so that initially I hadn’t even noticed anything peculiar. The verse is in a particular key, yes, but it flirts with chords outside its proper realm just enough so that when the chorus comes along, it seems as though we’ve been in that key the whole time — like watching an adjacent train moving backward, only to realize that in fact you’re moving forward. I was delighted with this clandestine bit of sophistication, hidden in plain sight, an inside joke of sorts. (I was aiming for something similar with Harbor, and its many odd meters.)
So…a tune with hooks, and a brain teaser to boot. But what was it about? Usually I come to lyrics late, only noticing a phrase here and there, and it’s rare that I care enough about a song to sit down and transcribe the words in order to interpret them. Maybe this is why they’re hard for me to write; they’re inseparable from the music, but I’m keenly aware of how secondary they often are to me as a listener. Sometimes all lyrics need to do is pass the “don’t-suck” test. If the music is compelling enough to carry the song on its own, and the words aren’t inane (or they’re incomprehensible anyway), that’s enough. Better, though, to discover something of substance in lyrics. If music is the body and production the clothing, words are the mind.
As it turns out, this is a song worth falling in love with for real. Lyrically it’s not a song for bopping in airports at all. Steve Hogarth sings cryptically of reeling loss — of a woman he loves? inspiration? the dream of how life might be? — and the words rush towards me like dark birds:
a thunderstorm breaks from the northern sky
chasing you back to the daily grind
you’re gone
and where am I
a haunted life, the ghost of your laughter,
the half-empty glass
Here’sthe thing though: the music doesn’t match. It soars and dances, grabbing me by the hand and pulling me skyward, where the sun glints off black feathers and turns them iridescent. This is hope, in all its glorious oblivion to the facts.
And strangely enough the incongruity works — H’s voice reaches out, finds the grief tucked away in me, and dissolves it. I know, the song says. Come with me. It’ll be all right. Come see for yourself. The effect is Radiohead turned inside out: Thom Yorke utters platitudes over music so unsettling, I begin to grasp the madness of so-called normalcy. In You’re Gone, Marillion lays heartbroken words against a sonic landscape so full of beauty and optimism, I understand not only that healing is possible, but why it would be worth trying.
All this analysis is personal. You may listen to the song and find that it leaves you cold. But I’m in love with it, and the final reason is this: it makes me fall in love with everybody else too. Sitting at the pickup curb with earphones in I suddenly know, with an almost painful immediacy, my connection with each one of these people rushing past: their memories and talents and addictions and small triumphs and nagging regrets, and the way we collectively mess each other up and help each other out and change our world irreparably, exhilaratingly, one moment at a time. “You have the day/I have the night/But we have the early hours together” — each of us is ultimately alone, and yet there is that slim margin…I find myself on the verge of tears, and of bursting into laughter.
Was this the meaning the band was trying to convey in making this song? Probably not. Once it came to live with me it became something new, something other than what its creators intended. But the truth at the core of it, pulsing through the notes, is the same.
This is why I love music. This is what I hope my own music will do for someone else.
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