Death Cab for Cutie have married ironic imagery with a love song that is as pure and devoted as anything in Wuthering Heights.  It’s all there in the chorus :

If Heaven and Hell decide / that they both are satisfied /and illuminate the “No”s on their vacancy signs / if there’s no one beside you when your soul embarks / then I will follow you into the dark

It’s so great to do three things all at once:

1. poke fun at the notion of heaven and hell;
2. say that the world should have had just about enough of saints and sinners;
3. invoke the image of going through life as though you were on the lam – eating in bad diners and hiding out in desperate motel rooms.

In the second verse the baladeer ruminates on the strict catholic education which tried to (lovingly) beat into him the notion that “Fear is the heart of love.” He of course rejected it, (and really why did it take so long for people to figure that out?) yet still he holds on to the notion of a soul, but not too seriously; the chorus uses it in the classical sense, but in the last verse he uses its homonym (sole) describing four broken down and travel weary shoes as stand ins for the two aged bodies which he hopes are still very much in love.

He then goes the extra mile to prove the difference between love and fear. He is not afraid of her death, or his, nor is he clinging to something that could one day pass. He is talking instead about the purest manifestation of love: the desire to simply be in the presence of the beloved. Even if there is nothing beyond life but a darkness, the lover pledges to be there too. It is simply, earnestly, beautiful.

Why shouldn’t mothers let their babies grow up to be cowboys? The verses tell the story of conflicted men who love things that don’t appear to have much to do with each other – on the surface anyway. They like things that are aligned with their own natures. Everything about a child or a puppy just is what it is, ditto for ladies of the night (apparently). And smoky pool halls are perfect and pure as clear mountain mornings, in their own way.

Willy spells it out for us:

He ain’t wrong, he’s just different, but his pride won’t let him do things to make you think he’s right

A line as clunky as this can only be telling the truth. A cowboy is caught in the trap of not being able to explain himself, not because he doesn’t understand his own motivations, but because explaining them would diminish something that is important to him. Men of a physical world, construction workers, cops, cowboys, live and die by the clarity of their body language, and the consequences of their actions – explanations are anathema because they undercut the fluidity from which their authority and confidence flow. Men like this are needed, but people don’t like them, and the world, especially the modern world, is hard for them. Willie knows it, and that’s why he tells Mommas to be on the lookout for telltale trucks and twangers. Thank goodness though that there are some good men who don’t listen to their Mommas, and some Mommas who don’t listen to cowboys like Willie.

Smoke
from the sizzling fajita skillets
streaming like vapor trails behind the diligent waitresses

Smoke
billowing up from the house burning on Duke street
trapped and skulking like a cloud of cornered vandals against the north face of Sugarloaf mountain

Smoke
from the mill’s power boiler stack
drifting and tumbling as it mixes with the haze
of the salmon smoking fires on the reserve across the Restigouche

Smoke of pleasure
Smoke of tragedy
Smoke of necessity
Smoke of tradition

It mingles
with the wind
off the bay of Chaleurs
on an evening in July
flavoring the fundamental fluid and rhythm that sustains us.

When we were kids, you could wish on an eyelash, a potato chip with either a bubble or a perfect fold in it, the first star of the evening, or of course, a wish bone. And each of these had a little ceremony or spell you had to invoke in order to release its wish fulfilment magic.

Why would it be wrong to wish on space hardware as Billy Bragg wonders in A New England? Well, first of all, he doesn’t seem to be wondering that hard about it. As political as A New England sounds, it seems to be much more about the age old quest of a young man trying to get laid.

I saw two shooting stars last night
I wished on them but they were only satelites
Is it wrong to wish on space hardware?
I wish I wish I wish you’d care

It’s a great line, and the kind of idea that occur when one is obsessing about something else. When we peer into the night sky at the eternal and patient outpouring of stars, impossibly distant and static, it’s easy to wonder ”How can I matter, let alone what I want?” We hope (or wish) to see a shooting star because it’s so much more immediate and fleeting – more human. It makes our being here with our faces turned to the sky seem significant. And that may be where we’re getting to the heart of it: the things we wish on must be out of the ordinary.

Billy Bragg is looking for one face in the crowd that will lift him up from the life that the Old England is offering him. We reach into a bag of chips hoping not for a regular slice of fried and salted tuber (mmmm salted tuber), but rather a miracle of potato geometry. We live day by day, but on the special day when someone bakes a cake just for us and sets it alight, we get to make a wish.

Special accidents make us think of the desires that lay just beyond our reach, as though they were the hinges to a door about to open onto the next phase of our lives. It’s not wrong, it’s just fun, so long as we don’t wish our lives away.  Is it wrong to wish on space hardware?  Based on the evidence cited above, wishing on a satelite seems to defy the unwritten wish rule regarding randomness, it’s too predictable. 

Sorry Billy. Maybe try your luck with a bag of chips.

It doesn’t seem like too difficult a request does it? But then again it’s a situation that can say so much more than we ever intend.

The line is from Hold On To Me, by the Cowboy Junkies, which is a meditation on the importance of simple things, and how our days are filled with inconsequentialities that we somehow fuck-up.

It’s a bizarre paradox that humans will be laissez faire about the biggest political decisions, yet we’ll place the most absurd significance on the tiniest things. Don’t believe me? What is it that will piss you off about a friend? It’s usually some stupid little thing isn’t it? And what about the attitude we give our kids or partners when they ask for something? I’d put less thought into giving them a kidney than I’ll spend discussing why they can’t have the seat I want in a restaurant (sometimes when I don’t even really want it)

It makes me think of the phrase about swallowing the camel but choking on the flea and maybe that’s it; so much of life can seem like it’s out of our control as the result of decisions made by strangers. Perhaps we drag our heels in everyday relations with the people who are closest to us, making points we don’t even really understand, to feel a small measure of control?

I had a conversation with my son about it. It’s hard to explain to a 9 year old the importance of simple generosity of spirit, or even how it is best manifested by the willingness to do simple things for the people we care about, and who care about us. Or why that matters. But it does. And it’s the foundation of being a happy person, or one of the cornerstones anyway. And the funny thing is, that as tough as that is to explain, he got it, because it’s so damn simple: don’t bust people’s chops over bullshit.

There’s a great bit of wisdom which says – when you give quickly, you give twice. The second gift is what Margot and the Junkies are talking about. It’s the most valuable. For both the receiver, and the giver.

Thunderheart

Ray: Maggie, this evidence is the only power we have to build a case.

Maggie Eagle Bear: That’s not power Ray, that’s paper.

Ray: Christ!

Maggie: Ray! Power is a rainstorm. Power is that river, right there. And that’s what I have to protect, not the white law. If Jimmy goes to prison for being a warrior, that is something he accepts. That’s his way; that’s our way.

It’s not the paper Maggie disdains, it’s the words on it.  This is a line that puts a word-lover back on his heels.  Words can release power, paper can direct power but you only have to think of the power in the Assiniboine, or the Saint Lawrence river, or in a single cloud for that matter to know that they are completely different things.  And yet something as trivial as a piece of paper that swears to proven lies can keep a man in prison for most of his life

Maggie is telling Ray to pay attention to the laws of nature, not the laws of words.  Words manifest in the mind, they can’t be proven like a law of nature, they prove themselves in how they work on our hearts, on our lives, but unfortunately so many lives are motivated by the wrong kind of power.  Words aren’t Power.  Paper isn’t power.  The closest either can come, is authority.

Say it again Maggie:

That’s not power Ray, that’s paper.

The guy has got so many killer lines.  This one is from Independence Day, the song which brings the first side of The River’s two albums to such a haunting close.  He’s working some of his favorite themes: war, rural decay, but mostly it’s about father-son tension:

Now I don’t know what it always was with us/ We chose the words and yah we drew the lines / There’s just no way this house could hold the two of us / I guess that we were just too much of the same kind

 The sick joke of life is of course that it can only be understood by looking backwards.  In this song, the son, seems to making a kind of confession to his aged father, who may or may not be asleep at the time.  In the second chorus he sings these Great Lines:

All boys must run away come Independence Day… All men must make their way come Independence Day.

And there it is.  Leaving home is the closest thing western culture has to a male rite of passage ritual, like the village boy who must grab the lion’s tail so he can be considered a man.  The phrasing of this makes it clear that the boy is not moving towards the challenge that’s ahead, but rather he’s got to run away, from many things, not the least of which is the influence of the father.

What he escapes into is the lonely responsibility of having to make his own way.  It’s only when he feels the full sucking void of life’s heartlessness that he understands the extent to which he was sheltered from it, just as he will eventually come to know the price he will pay to provide the same shelter for his own family.  That realization is where the song resolves:

Papa, now I know those things you wanted that you could not say / Won’t you say Goodbye, it’s Independence Day / I swear I never meant to ever take those things away.

Really – what in the hell else is a fella going to say about that?  Except Bra-fucking-vo Bruce.  And perhaps Thanks Dad.

The throw away scene in which this line occurs is perfect as part of an all too lucid workplace allegory.

To frame the metaphor, imagine you’re at your job, and you’ve just been told to handle The Big Emergency.  You‘ve got to chase the Giant up the Cliffs of Insanity and rescue the princess.

You jump right on it.  You use all of your strength and skill to climb the impossibly high cliff.  Just when you’re almost at the top, your only tool – the rope, or your laptop, or the purchasing database – fails.  A lesser person would say Fuck It and fall into the the sea.  But not you.  You resolve to keep working, with your bare hands.  It’s torturous, but you’re making headway.  You’re going to save the Princess!

And then the Spaniard (the Boss) pops-in.  He knows you’re busy.  He’s the one who sent you up the cliff in the first place.  He pretends to make a little casual conversation but you both know he is actually asking for an update.  Wouldn’t it be great to be able to reply as the Man in Black does:

Look,  I don’t mean to be rude, but this [climbing a cliff without a rope]  is not as easy as it looks, so I’d appreciate it if you wouldn’t distract me.  (Again, that British gift for understatement)

The Spaniard leaves, but like many Bosses,  he has the bizarrely alchemical notion that just by  inserting himself into the situation, shit will somehow transmute magically into success.  When the Spaniard returns,  he actually asks if things can be sped up, which is when the Man in Black delivers this great line ( as you read it, imagine saying it to your boss next time you’re in the middle of a Big Emergency):

If you’re in such a hurry, you could lower a rope or a tree branch or find something useful to do.

In the movie, Indigo the Spaniard is not actually the Boss, he’s more like a mid level manager (which is allegorically better).  Vizzini is the Boss; he believes blindly in the power of his intellect and blames the world when, inconceivably,
it doesn’t follow his plans, but that’s a subject for another post.

For now, I’ll work on delivering my sarcasm with a bad british accent.

This line is from the title track of Blue Rodeo’s Diamond Mine.  The song right before it on the album is Girl of Mine, and together I think they give a great glimpse into the range of male response to rejection as portrayed (and seemingly embodied)  by the band’s pair of song-writing front men: Jim Cuddy and Greg Keelor.

Cuddy melodiously laments ”Girl of Mine, Where did we go wrong?”  He second guesses himself, he thinks of all the ways it could have been better, but ultimately he knows the emotional score.  The song is a reveling in the last fleeting feelings of something precious as it slips through your fingers.  Keelor’s is so much different.  Diamond Mine is dark, and dissonant.  The affair itself seems based on a depraved predilection, and given the phrasing of the line, it appears that the emotional paroxysms keep reoccurring.  During this particular fit, It’s Over, but Keelor’s the drunk who pounds on the table saying: This Party is over when I say it’s over.  He rages against the dying of their light, then, Bobby Wiseman renders the feeling as an organ solo that starts in a place of primal murk, meanders through a morally medieval forest, before exploding in a Daliesque soundscape.

When it comes back, Keelor’s humiliation is public (“The trash lines up at my door just to bring me the news”) but he still won’t accept it.  He should be the sole object of scrutiny, but he turns his, and our gaze, onto the crowd who’ve gathered, and since we are also they, we are left to wonder as Keelor does ”Why are people so eager to be so cruel?”  And as the crowd of rubberneckers who’ve come to partake of the Schadenfreude ponder that, Keelor climbs on the roof of a parked pickup to shout once more about love as a darkness, where tiny precious things shine in the lamps of those who dare to delve.

Rage Greg, Rage, against the dying of those tiny lights.

On its surface, the line seems to speak volumes about the absurdity of statistics and government studies, but Art can turn even government subsidized absurdity into a thing of beauty.  It’s in the delivery – the soaring trajectory of this line is an acid jazz precursor that transforms the idea into pure sound and pure spirit.

The song pauses then to deliver the quaintly naughty line “you really turn me on” which got it in so much trouble; then it builds to an improvised orchestral crescendo (the players were wearing prosthetic nipples and the bassoonist had a balloon on his vent pipe (well his instrument’s vent pipe)) before culminating in one crashing E Major chord played simultaneously by all the Beatles on 4 pianos.  That chord holds for over 40 seconds.  Do yourself a favour: listen to A Day in the Life, and at the end, as the pianos ring-out, imagine a room full of grown men, creative genie, looking at each other and trying not to laugh, as the sound dies away.