On Richmond Fontaine's "You Can Move Back Here"

I love this song like I love pressing on a bruise.

(It hurts, it's cool, it hurts, it's cool...)

One of music's greatest joys is the song that comes along at just the right time, that says either just what you need to hear or what circumstance won't allow you to say for yourself. It's both delight and relief and likely makes for some intense, heavy rotation, press REPEAT listening. (Sorry neighbors!)

It's that way for me right now with Richmond Fontaine's latest song, "You Can Move Back Here" the leadoff song on the new record "We Used to Think the Freeway Sounded Like a River" (love that title!) I'd say leadoff single but have they ever had a single? Really? Don't think so.

The lyrics couldn't be any simpler. You know the Robert Frost line about home being the place where they have to take you in? Well, Willy Vlautin and company do him one better-trust a man who writes so convincingly about life at the bottom to know just how to offer absolute acceptance and total support.

"There's so many people there
you quit calling home
and now your voice is shaky and weird

You can move back here
we all miss you
please
you don't have to be anything here
at least you'll have the Western sky
and me on your side

cities and subways that run all night
and everything costs so much
alone with neighbors on every side

you can move back here
we all miss you
please
you don't have to be anything here
at least you'll have the Western sky
the Western sky"

Yeah, the lyrics are simple, they seem even more so after typing them all, but it's the music that drives the message home in this song. The marriage of the tinking piano and the rising-falling-rising-falling chorus of background vocals (neither a Richmond Fontaine staple I should point out, the boys are trying new tricks with this one) makes for some of the most immediate, arresting listening out there. And Willy's delivery of the "please" is just heartbreaking AND HANDS DOWN HIS MOST EVOCATIVE SINGING EVER.. I want to pack my bags just listening to it. And listening to it. And listening to it.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o36gt8t2Mxw Hear it for yourself in this half great, half silly (Don't laugh Willy! And what's Paul doing?) video.

True That

“ Fairy tales, are more than true. Not because they tell us that dragons exist, but because they tell us that dragons can be defeated.
— G.K. Chesterton

Leave It To a Poet

"Love itself is a bit like that: you can describe your beloved until the tongue tires and still, in truth, fail to get at the particular quality that has captured you. We give up, finally, and distill such feelings into single images: the bronzy warmth of one of his glances, or that way of turning the head she has when she's thinking and momentarily stops being aware of other people. That, we tell ourselves, stands for what we love. But it's perfectly clear that such images explain nothing. They serves as signposts for some incommunicable thing. Being in love is our most common version of the unsayable; everyone seems to recognize that you can't experience it from the outside, not quite-you have to feel it from the inside in order to know what it is." -Mark Doty

Puzzling Out the Fake Empire

"Fake Empire" by The National. It's such an odd little song.

It was given to me last year, the last song on an otherwise quiet, contemplative mix. I was laying on my bed in the dark (better for close listening), looking out at the moon rising through the flowers in my windowbox. Listening, wondering-why these songs, why this order-what was the giver trying to say? After 9 songs of still music when this song started I had to get up and move. The whole CD was great but this one, this one stuck-probably, because as Nick Hornby writes in his excellent Songbook, I hadn't solved it yet. I asked other fans of The National, everyone I knew who was familiar with it, why?? Why is the empire fake?

It's such an odd little song.

It starts with a dischordant jangly piano, played in synchopation at both ends, but not in the same rhythm, for an effect that stops just short of cacophony. It jars the ear but also grabs it like music you're not hearing clearly in a dream.

"stay out super late tonight

picking apples, making pies

put a little something in our lemonade

and take it with us

we're half awake

in our fake empire

we're half awake

in our fake empire

tiptoe through our shiny silks

with our diamond slippers on

do our gay ballet at night

bluebirds on our shoulders

Here we really start to build with the foreshadowing of other instruments yet to come.

we're half awake

in our fake empire

we're half awake

in our fake empire

And now, drums. Crisp, almost martial, imposing musical order where there wasn't. Driving, so driving in fact that it's hard to keep still and keep listening. And then other instruments dive in.

turn out the light

say goodnight

stop thinking for a little while

let's not try to figure out

everything at once

it's hard to keep track of you

falling through the sky

we're half awake

in our fake empire

we're half awake

in our fake empire"

The music is faster and louder and faster with horns kicking in, almost frantically in a musical tumble. Frenetic, yet energizing. The order the drums imposed breaks down entirely but the effect is not displeasing.

And why is the empire fake? The emotions seem genuine so why is the empire fake? After a year or more of thought it wasn't until my long distance love was here, in my space and place for the first time, that I think I cracked the mystery.

He makes me laugh, this man (have I ever laughed so hard?) and one night as we were laying together after a party, cracking up till 4am, feeling like the only people on the planet, I thought-with a sudden clarity-this is what The National were singing about. The empire is fake because it is an empire of two. Like the Romantics (movement not the band) and their idea of a world of two-"replete with thee" etc.-the lovely, dreamlike world described in the song is a construct between two lovers. It's wholly real because their feelings are true, but not in any way an actual empire. But, like people in the song I'll too choose to be half awake.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CNQE7-2r3vg

photo by Carrie Radford

God, I Love People Sometimes

Today as I was standing near the registers at one of my stores speaking with another employee I quoted Yoda, as I often do, "Try? Do or not do, there is no try." But I got the wording wrong and was quickly corrected by a customer who pulled up his long sleeve to reveal the quote tattooed on his arm.

Holy crap! What are the chances?

God, I love people sometimes.

To Have Without Holding

Learning to love differently is hard,

love with the hands wide open, love

with the doors banging on their hinges,

the cupboard unlocked, the wind

roaring and whimpering in the rooms

rustling the sheets and snapping the blinds

that thwack like rubber bands

in an open palm.

It hurts to love wide open

stretching the muscles that feel

as if they are made of wet plaster,

then of blunt knives, then

of sharp knives.

It hurts to thwart the reflexes

of grab, of clutch; to love and let

go again and again. It pesters to remember

the lover who is not in the bed,

to hold back what is owed to the work

that gutters like a candle in a cave

without air, to love consciously,

conscientiously, concretely, constructively.

I can't do it, you say it's killing

me, but you thrive, you glow

on the street like a neon raspberry,

You float and sail, a helium balloon

bright batchelor's button blue and bobbing

on the cold and hot winds of our breath,

as we make and unmake in passionate

diastole and systole the rhythm

of our unbound bonding, to have

and not to hold, to love

with minimized malice, hunger

and anger moment by moment balanced.

-Marge Piercy