I had ambitions to set out and find like an odyssey, going home somewhere. I set out to find this home that I’d left a while back and I couldn’t remember exactly where it was but I was on my way there, and encountering what I encountered on the way was how I envisioned it all. I didn’t really have any ambition at all. ... I was born very far from where I’m supposed to be and so I’m on my way home.

—Bob Dylan, No Direction Home (dir. Martin Scorsese)

Text within this block will maintain its original spacing when published

The boys on the corner been knowing
Better than then with the PhDs
Sometimes you do right for nothing
On Mercy Avenue, baby

—Hiss Golden Messenger, ‘Mercy Avenue’

Sometimes I take too long declaring a new release a masterpiece. By the time I’m ready to say it, I often feel I’ve missed the boat. Not that I’m a music writer who chases release schedules or needs to be the first to deliver news and reviews. But there’s biding your time and there’s leaving things so long you don’t get round to doing them. So that piece I was going to write last year about Robbie Fulks’ latest album being a masterpiece never got written. Well, it got written in my head several times, usually when I was out on a run with the songs on my playlist. I listened to Now Then as much as, probably more than, any other album while running last year.

Anyway, that post never got written, so I’ll say it now. Robbie Fulks’ Now Then is a masterpiece. It’s one of many masterpieces he’s created, and that’s another important point to make before I get to M.C. Taylor. Masterpieces are multiple, and an artist can have many. Or do I mean that the masterpiece is an ongoing thing, the never-quite finished result of the artist who keeps showing up? The life’s work as masterpiece. For some, that would contradict what ‘masterpiece’ means: ‘the greatest work of a particular artist, writer, etc’, as the OED would have it. But the OED is rarely one for single or unifying definitions, so it also has ‘a consummate example of some skill or other kind of excellence’ and ‘a piece of work produced by a craftsman in order to be admitted to a guild as an acknowledged master’.

I’d still like to write about why I think Now Then is a masterpiece some day. But that will have to be then rather than now, because now it’s time for me to say that M.C. Taylor, aka Hiss Golden Messenger, has painted his masterpiece. Again.

When a notable American newspaper can get everyone arguing about who the greatest living American songwriters might be, prompting endless reaction pieces and reactions to the reactions, don’t you want to stop reading and writing and just spend some time listening to a Great Living American Songwriter delivering a new set of Great American Songs? I know I did. Then I decided I had to write about them, thus inviting the possibility that some other people might be coerced into delaying listening to some Great American Songwriter(s) while they took the time to read what I have to say. Sorry about that.

Yes, ‘masterpiece’ is an overused word. I don’t think I use it that much, but that doesn’t stop it being everywhere I look. When I decided to call this post ‘M.C. Taylor Paints His Masterpiece’, it was for three reasons; I really felt it to be true; I was thinking of Dylan’s ‘When I Paint My Masterpiece’ for some reason; I was running and thinking about masterpieces as ongoing things.

Dylan’s song seems, on first listen or lyric parse, to be defining ‘masterpiece’ according to the first definition I quoted. It’s the thing the artist is going to paint one day when he’s done with all this messing around in Europe, when he’s ‘back in the land of Coca-Cola’, where he can once again be a Great Living American Songwriter, perhaps even The Greatest. And what will be THE masterpiece of the Greatest Living American Songwriter? It would take the NYT another year or two to get their critics and invited artists to vote on that, no doubt, then just as long to revise their revisionism.

But Dylan’s always been hip to the idea of the masterpiece as ongoing, as not bound to one piece, or at least not how that piece would be defined by any evaluator. ‘An artist has got to be careful never really to arrive at a place where he thinks he’s at somewhere’, he told Martin Scorsese for the latter’s No Direction Home. ‘You always have to realise that you’re constantly in a state of becoming.’

In 2014, M.C. Taylor told Chris Richards of the Washington Post a similar thing in regard to faith.

For me, the resolve is in the journey — going through the days and negotiating my position on faith, over time. It’s not about waking up someday saying, ‘I get it! I believe!’ That doesn’t seem realistic. I’m someone struggling to find his way toward being a productive, good citizen. Maybe that’s my faith. Trying to set aside my pessimism and self-defeat for love.

I saw Hiss Golden Messenger live before I ever heard any of Taylor’s albums. It was at the inaugural Tusk Festival in Newcastle upon Tyne in 2011, at the old Star & Shadow venue on Tanner’s Bank. I was hooked into the groove: songs as processes. I thought about Van Morrison and Tim Buckley and a bunch of other cats who present the flow as the work.

When I first heard HGM, I knew I liked the music. But did I like the songs? How many of them would I be able to identify in a line-up? There was something shifting, open-ended, dynamic and unpinnable about most of them. An undeniable groove, each one a thang rather than a thing.

Still, I started buying the records: Poor Moon, Lord I Love the Rain, the revised Bad Debt, Haw, Lateness of Dancers. I saw Taylor do a gig in Brighton with William Tyler. I got the special edition of Heart Like a Levee in 2016, the one that came with a whole extra album, Vestapol. Levee became a vital part of the soundtrack to the many car journeys between Sussex and Tyneside that autumn, and ‘Cracked Windshield’ one of my songs of the year.

So yes, I did like the songs, even if I still felt they tapped into an unresolved thang that I couldn’t pin down. If I think back a decade to my endless crisscrossing of England, ‘Cracked Windshield’ and other favourites seeping out the car stereo, I still feel there was something left out there on the motorway, something I’ll never capture.

Taylor’s been prolific and I haven’t followed every turn. I never stopped listening for long, but there are gaps in the discography for me, particularly between 2016 and 2023, when I added Jump for Joy to my collection. Which makes me even more unqualified to call the new album, I’m People, a masterpiece. How could I know that if I haven’t listened to all the others?

An intensity arrived. It overtook me when I was running through the woods, I’m People on loop in my headphones. I’d heard some tracks on Bandcamp, enough to make me know I wanted the album as a record. I’d bought the record, dug it even more, had about half the songs settling in my head. Then I took the whole thing for a run and I just knew.

I’m People starts in the middle, as all hymns to process should. I mean it starts in the middle of an ongoing thing, the music fading in so that you don’t know how long it’s been going before you pressed play or put the needle in the groove. And wouldn’t you know that Taylor’s gone and called that song ‘In the Middle of It’. What are we in the middle of? A place where the rocks are dreaming and the morning’s dark, a place where you get dropped in and keep running.

From the start (if it has a start), the album’s excellent for running to. The kind of running I do, anyway: medium-paced, long distance, along waggonways and woodland trails, up hills that reward slog with sweeping vistas, down slopes that make you feel you’re on autopilot. And this time, appropriately, it really locked in on the second track, ‘Who You Gonna Run To?’ At first it just got me thinking about how I wanted to do a post or a playlist on running songs, a follow-up to my earlier piece about how the landscape feels with music. But that was just the brain getting its own workout; all the body needed was to lock in to that groove, to let the album ran along with me.

More running in the third track, ‘Shaky Eyes’: ‘I’ll come running whenever you need me’. A line that could come from so many songs. Taylor writes and performs in the great American patchwork tradition. He’s a quilter, an assembler of those fragments that hover on the edge of the familiar. Like Dylan and the countless blues and folk musicians from whom Dylan built his body of work, Taylor takes bits and pieces, tropes and textures, and fashions them into new patterns.

Dylan’s ‘Masterpiece’ contained the kind of fragments we might call, after Roland Barthes, biographemes, albeit fantastically distorted ones: a cold dark night on the Spanish Steps; a date with Botticelli’s niece; dodging lions in the Colosseum; clergymen in uniform; newspapermen eating candy. Many of his other songs deal in tropes, the treasure and detritus gathered from sifting through centuries of song. As Paul Williams once wrote, ‘It’s like he’s living in a garden built of folksong lyrics’.

M.C. Taylor’s latest contribution to the unfinished masterpiece unrolls its tropes as if they’ve never been used before: western skies, running for horizons and homes, wine and whiskey, truth, lies, magic, faith, even snippets of old Grateful Dead songs (‘the candyman’s in town’). It’s the kind of songwriting where there are always highways to move along, always rivers to cross, storms to shelter from, shelters to run to. A boxset gathering four early HGM albums went out under the title Devotion: Songs About Rivers And Spirits And Children, which did a decent job of summing it up.

You have to be confident to work with this sort of timeworn/timeless imagery. Do this cautiously and you’ll sound like every other striver for cosmic horizons. Take a leaf from the Morrison-Buckley book and say it like you mean it, like the very soul of your music depends on it. Because it does.

As with previous albums, the songs on I’m People aim for mood over clear narrative. Listening to lines about crusading children, dependable rivers and all that running home, I encounter contradictory senses. I have no idea what these songs are about and I know exactly what they’re about. Their thang work is strong.

However abstract or vague many of the lines are, some are unambiguous, like the title track’s claim that no one makes it alone. I love the gradual build to this one, the way the drums and guitars lock in on the second verse to suggest the anthem this should become.

This would be the place, I guess, to recall that Hiss Golden Messenger is a group project. It’s people. I’ve just never been too good at following who’s in the band and who isn’t. I know that early mainstay Scott Hirsch hasn’t been part of the line-up for a bit, though he recorded the last HGM studio album, 2023’s Jump for Joy. And I can see that the group of musicians on I’m People differs from those assembled for Jump. For now, while I’m focussed on the current album, I appreciate Josh Kaufman’s contributions on multiple instruments (and his production), JT Bates’ drums and percussion, Matt Douglas’ sax and flute, vocals by Gillian Pelkonen, Annie Nero, Amy Helm and Sonyia Turner, and the lovely piano figures that Bruce Hornsby adds to ‘Depends on the River’. I’m missing a bunch of people out there, all of them part of what makes this a collective effort.

‘I’m People’s observation that ‘every person I know bears a different kind of suffering’ is anticipated on ‘Mercy Avenue’ by a brief nod at life happening: ‘everybody’s getting older / Jesse’s having a baby / times are tighter than ever’. People’s lives as mini list, with Mercy Avenue the aching refrain.

The masterpiece is always something to come, an imagined achievement. Dylan didn’t want to reach that peak. That’s why he set ‘When I Paint My Masterpiece’ in a faraway future. It’s why he told Martin Scorsese that an artist’s job was never to reach somewhere but to always be in process.

M.C. Taylor must understand that process-oriented logic well, judging by the way he writes, plays and sings songs, the way he talks about what he does, the way he just keeps putting more and more great music out there, the way it all flows into a groove. I buy into it too, except that I believe that objects are always in process and processes rely on objects.

It’s fitting that Taylor has paid homage to the Grateful Dead, a band who exemplified music-as-process over reified objects. Would you single out a Grateful Dead album as their masterpiece? Or would you look instead to something that emerged cosmic trope by cosmic trope, lick by lick, segue by segue, gig by gig? Or might you look to what others have done with the Dead? One test of whether songs can be objects is whether they can be covered, Deadicated proved the Dead’s could back in 1991; Day of the Dead expanded on that potential a decade ago (Hiss Golden Messenger contributed a version of ‘Brown-Eyed Women to that five-disc set). And what better reminder of processes relying on objects than the glittering tapestry of fragments that comprises John Oswald’s plunderphonic masterpiece Grayfolded, the Dead deployed at an atomic level for a show that could play out infinitely?

Is it only when I’m on the move that I think of M.C. Taylor painting masterpieces? There’s something about the flow state I achieve while running that locks into the flow state his music projects. I’ve felt it when driving too: ‘Cracked Windshield’ and all the other road weary blues.

I’ve spent much of my life searching for patterns, chasing the idea of a completed project, always knowing it would be unreachable. Just because you know you can’t have, or don’t want to have, the last word, the final piece of the puzzle, the argument that closes it all down, that doesn’t mean you don’t take part in the quest. You’ll never achieve your masterpiece, but your journey to do so will might leave a masterpiece or two in its wake. That’s why I say that M.C. Taylor has painted his masterpiece again.

What happens when I start thinking about patterns:

What happens when I write on the run:

On a plane from Paris to Osaka, I get feverish. It passes but leaves me shaken. In need of comfort, I search my phone for the music I downloaded ahead of the trip.

First up is Bill Callahan’s new album My Days of 58. It opens with a song that poses a question: why do men sing?

When you first hear the song, at the helm of the album, there don’t see to be any answers to hand for that evocative question. You start to rehearse your own.

Men sing, you might say, for all kinds of fathomable and unfathomable reasons. They sing because the world is so ugly and because it’s so beautiful. They sing to weigh the evidence. To bear witness.

Callahan tells us about getting to the gig, about life on the road. We’ve heard this kind of thing before, but rarely that question put so brazenly. Why do men sing?

Later on the album, Callahan offers some answers. In ‘Pathol O.G.’, he tells us how long he’s been doing this. That he loves what he does.

Why do men sing? Because it’s a pathology.

The opening of ‘Pathol O.G.’ reminds me of Merle Haggard’s ‘Footlights’, another song that asks why men sing. Callahan’s songs sit well with Haggard’s. The minimalist approach. Few words and notes, lots of space. Voices that switch between emotion, resignation and wry humour.

Why do men write songs? They write them to sing them, Haggard says, and to give them to others to sing. In live performances of ‘Footlights’, he adds a quip about sending songs to Hank Jr. It’s the kind of wry one-liner Callahan trades in too (‘She told me I should spend the night … looking for a hotel’—from ‘Pathol O.G’).

Why do men sing? To bend words to their own will. Haggard sings ‘Instomatic’ instead of ‘Instamatic’ and a vowel spells out exactly what he feels about fake grins and tacked-on emotions. Callahan uses the word ‘plenipotentiary’ in his song ‘Pigeons’ and ramps up its weirdness by making the ‘o’ an ‘o’ rather than a schwa.

‘Who Do Men Sing’? It’s just a great song title. A title you want to borrow. I know there will be other internet posts that use it to reflect on Callahan’s latest songs. I won’t read them until mine is out.

I want to get to know My Days of 58 as a vinyl record, as I have with other Callahan albums. Prior to my trip, I tried to get a copy in my local record shops, but it was always sold out. Other men who like to hear men sing had got there before me. All I have, for now, are the sound files on my phone. They’re all I could have turned to anyway at this moment. I’m glad to have them. The vinyl can wait.

My Days of 58 ends in a reflection on stillness. The world is still. Yes, but the world is still singing.

Why do men sing? They sing because their inner children’s whys remain unanswered. Because they still haven’t been told why birds sing.

Still awake and in need of solace, I turn to Bonnie ‘Prince’ Billy’s latest. ‘Why Is the Lion?’ is the first song. Why are all these singers asking me questions?

Oldham continues asking questions on ‘Strange Trouble’. ‘Where is the spirit?’ ‘What do we do?’ ‘Where do we go?’ ‘Where do we come from?’ ‘Do we crave the disarray?’ ‘Don’t we love the taste of trouble?’ ‘Don’t we crave for beneficent change?’

Beneficent. A great word. Songful too.

I have questions of my own. Why do I return to these men who ask so many questions? What am I listening for? What answers am I seeking? What are the questions they would be the answers to? Why do I crave the intimacy of singer-songwriters like Callahan and Oldham? And, on other occasions, the confiding voices of the wee small hours (Why do men sing? Ask Frank Sinatra).

Some songs are propositions. Some are plaints, some protests. Some are questions. Who knows where the time goes? Which side are you on? How many roads must a man walk down? (Men again: are they the ones who sing?) Why do birds suddenly appear? Isn’t it romantic?

Why do men sing? They sing to share thoughts they’ve had about lovers who hit them like hurricanes, about skin worn like iron and kerosene-hard breath, about running your fingers through seventy years of living, about a brand new day that follows a longtime hurt. They sing because they finally know why old men cry.

The third album I turn to is Mitski’s latest, Nothing’s About to Happen to Me. There’s prominent banjo, swelling strings and horns on opener ‘In a Lake’. Mitski’s voice calmy contemplating the benefits of big city life.

‘Where’s My Phone?’, she asks next. I’m glad I had mine with me so I could turn to these voices in a moment of panic. Mitski’s protagonist is panicked too on this second track, with its sharp contrast to the languid pace of the lake song. ‘Where’d I go?’, she asks. Are we lost without our prosthetics? Are we no one without those connections?

Fats Kaplan, whose banjo betrayed the city-loving claims of ‘In a Lake‘, brings a slow country glide to ‘Cats’ with his pedal steel. The tension between indie rock buzz and country modes seems echoed in the album cover, which I recall as I listen on the plane (I’d just got to know it before coming away). The front of the LP displays a coolly reposed white cat, a model of feline elegance. Leaping from the rear cover, fang-bearing head and front paws already jutting past the gatefold, a fiercer beast leaves a trail of destruction.

Mitski has more questions on ‘If I Leave’ and ‘Dead Women’. ‘Who could love me quite as kindly as you?’ ‘Would you have liked me better if I’d died / So you could tell my story the way it ought to be?’ And now I think of all those songs that pose ‘if this, then what’ hypotheses.

Why do women sing? How would I know? For all the fathomable and unfathomable reasons, I suppose. Because the world is so ugly and because it’s so beautiful. To weigh the evidence. To bear witness. Because their inner children’s whys remain unanswered. Because they still haven’t been told why birds sing. Because it’s a pathology. Because they know why old women laugh and cry and cry and laugh.

Osaka’s getting nearer, though some way to go. Still awake, I watch Deliver Me from Nowhere on the in-flight movies. Springsteen has questions too. I don’t know that the film answers them. Did it need to?

I watch the excellent Blue Moon, with Ethan Hawke as Lorenz Hart and Andrew Scott as Richard Rodgers. At one point Hart asks, ‘How can you give voice to the whole chorus of the world if the whole chorus of the world isn’t already inside you?’

Why do men and women sing? They sing to find a resonance with the world.

Sleep finally arrives. I think of other answers to the question of why men sing. Possibilities flood me on waking. And in the brief time it takes between rising and visiting the bathroom, before I can get to a place to record them, they disappear.

Why do men stop singing?

One of the books I take on my trip to Japan is Arthur C. Clarke’s The Songs of Distant Earth. In the closing chapters, one of Clarke’s characters ponders questions about the role of grief in relation to biological processes.

Could grief be an accidental—even a pathological—by-product of love, which of course does have an essential biological function? It’s a strange and disturbing thought. Yet it’s our emotions that make us human; who would abandon them, even knowing that each new love is yet another hostage to those twin terrorists, Time and Fate?1

Elsewhere in the book, Clarke offers reasons why humans sing. One of these is to communicate across space and time. To be a channel for memories, legacies and the opening of new conversations.

Eventually, after what has been a weird and artificially lengthened night, we land on the island built to support Osaka’s airport. We’d left Newcastle in the early morning of a mid-March Friday, but with the Paris transfer, long flight and time zone change, we emerge into the middle of Saturday morning.

Bill Callahan, Will Oldham and Mitski were necessary voices during those stretched hours. They reminded me why humans sing. As I make my way into Osaka, I don’t yet know that I won’t be listening to them for a while. There will be trips to record shops amid the temples, shrines, gardens, tea rooms and eateries. But it will be Japanese jazz musicians rather than American singer-songwriters to whom I’ll turn. Isao Suzuki, Kosuke Mine, Ken Watanabe, Mari Nakamoto, Takehiro Honda: these will be the artists who answer the questions I don’t yet know I have.

Everyone was riveted by the truth in his voice. Even people who understood hardly a word. There was a truth within the sounds that surpassed the sentries at the brain to travel straight to the heart and impact in ways that are not forgotten.1

As I send this out, it’s about two months since the release of R/evolution 1969/83—a 7CD+DVD boxset that collects together live and studio recordings of the great Scottish folk singer, guitarist and songwriter Dick Gaughan—and about a month since my copy arrived in the post. As one of the people who helped fund Colin Harper’s Kickstarter project to release this music, I’d been looking forward to it for months. Getting to know it in January and February has been a rewarding experience on several fronts.

As Harper notes, the set is designed as an act of preservation and as a way to get Gaughan some compensation in his retirement:

Dick Gaughan is alive and well, up to a point. He can no longer play guitar and is legally blind, but his optimism remains. He lives totally ‘off the grid’ in terms of internet presence and together with very little activity around his back catalogue (explained below), there is a danger that the memory of Dick Gaughan – and the music of Dick Gaughan – is fading from view, his pre-90s career of 20 years boiled down to periodic reissues of one album, Handful of Earth (1981).

Indeed, Handful of Earth has just been reissued again.

Harper details the ‘legacy gap’ of the rest of the pre-1990s work on the Kickstarter page:

• Four of his 70s albums (including one with the Boys of the Lough) for Leader/Trailer and Rubber have never or only briefly (in one case) appeared on CD and are not available on streaming. Their current ownership makes licensing all but impossible.

• Two of his three Topic albums (1977–81) are available on streaming but have not been remastered or physically reissued in over 30 years.

• His two Folk Freak/Wundertüte albums (1982–83) are available on streaming but have not been remastered or physically reissued in 28 years. The owner of this material has long retired from the music business.

• His three 1985–88 Celtic Music albums are long out of print on CD and are not available on streaming.

The boxset includes some previously released material from the studio albums (with the exception of the Trailer/Leader records, which are subject to ongoing legal issues, currently aided by a separate crowdfunding project), though the bulk of the material comes from live performances and broadcast sessions.

Gaughan’s is a voice I fell for with A Handful of Earth when I heard it around the end of the 1980s. Not long after, I heard No More Forever, Gaughan’s first solo album from 1972. With its time-stopping takes on ‘MacCrimmon’s Lament’, ‘Jock O’ Hazeldean’, ‘Flower of Northumberland’ and ‘Green Linnet’, it remains a classic record, one that has stood the passage of the years.

That passage is scored into the surface of my vinyl copy of No More Forever, obtained only recently after decades of knowing the album as a cassette. Though I remain miffed at the Discogs vendor who charged too much for it, grading a G record at VG+, I’ve come to appreciate its crackles and pops. Not only does the mournful siren of Gaughan’s voice blast through the noise, the wear also bears witness to the presence of that voice and guitar (and Aly Bain’s wonderful fiddle) in at least one other person’s listening life.

The album takes its title from the words to ‘MacCrimmon’s Lament’ (though not the version included on the record, where Gaughan sings ‘no more MacCrimmon’ instead). Of the standout songs, only ‘Green Linnet’ is unrepresented on R/evolution. It’s a song that recalls Napoleonic times, joining a large group of such songs that have lived on to our own times. As Gaughan says in his liner notes, ‘the defeat of Napoleon was the inspiration of some of the finest songs ever’. An idea for a future post.

By No More Forever, Gaughan’s voice has already gained the slow deliberation of the piobaireachd, the music of the highland bagpipes. A bedrock of sustained drones gives way to elegantly weathered peaks. It all comes together on ‘MacCrimmon’s Lament’. The boxset features two versions: a Gaughan/Bain take from a 1972 BBC Radio 4 broadcast that is similar to the one on No More Forever (with the lovely air ‘Mistress Jamieson’s Favourite’ appended), and an unaccompanied rendition from an Edinburgh concert the following year. The boxset extra Untroubled: Live in Belfast 1979-82 has Gaughan stunning a Belfast crowd with another unaccompanied rendition in 1982. The song is also included on the excerpts from the box released separately as Live at the BBC 1972-79.

The lyric sheet in Kist O’ Gold, an album I’ve owned longer than No More Forever, shows the words written as sung (almost: Gaughan always takes words into untranscribable directions). ‘O whaur hae yo been Lord Randal my son / O whaur hae ye been my bonnie young man’.

Kist O’ Gold includes Gaughan’s first studio attempt at Hamish Henderson’s ‘51st (Highland) Division’s Farewell to Sicily’. It’s a captivating recording, but one he’ll come to feel failed to capture the dynamics he’s after due to ‘the technical limitations imposed by tape noise’. He’ll return to it two decades later for the album Sail On, with Mary Macmaster’s harp accompanying his vocal, guitar and keyboards. Reflecting on his later digital recording in the liner notes of the Prentice Piece compilation, he’ll write, ‘I had also had those 20 years in which to develop my understanding of the song and its structural relationship with piobaireachd’.

R/evolution carries two live renditions of Henderson’s Sicily song, two attempts from the late 1970s to learn what the song has to teach, to understand its contours.

Graeme Thomson, who provides a lengthy essay to one of the two booklets in the R/evolution box, writes of Gaughan’s ‘passionate, free-flowing vocals, almost mystically attuned to the essence of the song’. It’s there from the beginning. Certainly there in one of the first performances I noted down while listening, the unaccompanied rendition of ‘Derwentwater’s Farewell’ from 1971. The way he sings ‘Northumberland’ at the song’s close exemplifies the essence Thomson writes about.

Influenced by Davy Graham, he takes up nonstandard tunings, going beyond the then-popular DADGAD. Those listed on Kist O’ Gold include CGCGCE, DAAEAE, DGDEAD, EAAEAE. Mesmerising modal explorations, the perfect foil to what his voice does with language. He retunes the strings of the words he sings: in ‘Rigs O’ Rye’, ‘dead’ becomes ‘deed’.

He learns how to pace a song from his mother, who tells him ‘the song has its own time’. The way he comes to stretch time is different to the legato used by other notable folksingers of the time (think Sandy Denny, Anne Briggs, both singers he finds inspirational). It’s more visceral, a breaking open of the song’s inner time. As if, in each song, there were others wanting to escape.

From early in the career, there’s a reminder that folk ballads were the protest songs of the day, that they live on as political message and historical record. They offer a rebuke to that comment often made about topical songs that they too easily lose their meaning (I’ve made that comment). They come back into focus, the timely returning as the timeless.

Coincidence leads to me reading You Call It Madness, Lenny Kaye’s book on Russ Columbo and ‘the sensuous song of the croon’, at the same time I’m getting to know R/evolution. Kaye writes of ‘the calculus of time as musical space’, and I can’t prevent a thought experiment: Dick Gaughan as crooner. As absurd as it sounds, there’s something to pursue, even if it’s only a jazz-informed exploration of singing, an intimacy with the microphone.

I think of some of the more lulling songs—‘Jock O’ Hazeldean’, ‘Jamie Foyers’, ‘Schoolday’s End’—as a move into the sensuous. Different kinds of love songs.

Columbo and Gaughan. Such different worlds. But something connects, something to do with the sonority of the voice taking over from the narrative of the words, what Kaye calls ‘lyricism beyond the lyric’. Kaye’s chapter on the ‘oo’ sound is fascinating. A sound crucial to crooning, as Kaye shows, but also to songs from Scotland and NE England. I live in a city known as ‘the toon’, once famous for a beer known as ‘broon’.

Kaye: ‘the rounding of the lips, preliminary to a kiss. The slight purse. A prime sound, primal. Ooooo’.

Gaughan’s voice can be as wild as free jazz, as in your face as punk, the very opposite of twee. An instrument as freely, as spiritually, as politically deployed as Coltrane’s horn. At times it can be as startling as jazz bagpiper Rufus Harley, a sound listeners were just not expecting in that world.

All these live versions of the 1970s material are wonderful, but they serve as a reminder of the absence of the studio recordings. Gaughan doesn’t have the options of a young, wealthy, world famous pop star. He can’t remake the music now as ‘Dick’s versions’. So what do you do? The archival recordings sourced for R/evolution are an elegant solution, one that highlights the importance of live performance for artists like Gaughan. By all accounts he was no fan of the recording process, at least in the period covered by the boxset (1969-1983), and those records he made were generally attempts to capture the way he sounded in concert.

That said, these were always songs in process. Not only the long decades and centuries of the folk process, where ballads swap characters, outcomes, melodies and more, but also the shorter evolution that occurs within a performer’s career as they learn new things about their material and their abilities, as they lean into where songs want to take them. Hence the ‘evolution’ part of R/evolution, early and later versions of the same song providing a sense of the directions Gaughan followed.

‘Willie O’ Winsbury’ is a song I first knew, via Fairport Convention, as ‘Farewell Farewell’, with Richard Thompson’s lyric and Sandy Denny’s aching, mournful vocal. Later I’d fall for Thompson’s version of ‘Winsbury’ when it was released on the RT boxset.2

Gaughan recorded the song for the 1977 Topic album Gaughan. He included it in his sets (there are versions on R/evolution) until an unspecified date in Liverpool when he decides the song has achieved its purpose.

Under a YouTube clip of Pentangle performing the song on British television, someone comments that they could linger in the song for hours. So could I. And so could I linger in Gaughan’s versions (and have) as he runs the song to over eight minutes that I always find too short.

There’s a good discussion of the song on the Cover Me website. A feature called ‘Good, Better, Best’. Tom McDonald has Richard Thompson offering the good, Pentangle the better, and Anaïs Mitchell and Jefferson Hamer the best. I don’t agree with all the points and have reservations about the format. I’m critical of that ranking process because there’s a tendency to present subjective favourites as objective bests (see also: year-end lists). At the same time, I also indulge in these practices from time to time. And anyway, we all know about the whole subjectivity-as-objectivity game don’t we? It’s all part of engaging with culture as a fan.

I think I just question those narratives that insist on definitive versions of songs at the exclusion of others. Because even when I have favourites, they never make me want to stop listening to as many other versions as I can. If the song is good—and this one, ‘Willie O’ Winsbury’, is superb—then bring it on in all its forms. I’ll find my inner jukebox switching from Jacqui McShee to Sandy Denny to Richard Thompson to Dick Gaughan, all within the space of minutes, and I just end up with more respect than ever for the song itself, for song as a palimpsest of versions and experiences.

If Gaughan’s renderings of songs sung by others are usually among my favourites, R/evolution also provides some counterexamples. I find his ‘Arthur McBride’ from 1976 too rushed, especially for a singer who is so adept at stretching time. If I were playing ‘good better best’, I’d be lining up that much-viewed clip of Paul Brady again.

I hesitate to compare Gaughan’s ‘Seven Gypsies’ to Nic Jones’, given its variation of source material, but the basic story is the same and I’d rather hear Jones spin the tale over his wonderful ‘Canadee-i-o’-like guitar arrangement. I hesitate to say any of this because of what I’ve just said about definitive versions, and because music’s not a competition. The wonder of great songs is the variety of shapes they can be set into. But perhaps I do need some kind of comparative approach, if only to try and figure out what makes so many of Gaughan’s performances so remarkable.

I start to collect favourite words: hae, wae, lang, braw, doon.

We hear Gaughan mock apologizing over and over for being indecipherable to audiences in many parts of the non-Gaelic world. He seems to revel in the confusion he’s about to unleash.

• ‘Can you understand me? This is my best English’ (introducing ‘Now Westlin’ Winds’, Berkeley, 1981).

• No one south of Berwick will understand a word—and maybe not many north of Berwick either (at the start of ‘Gillie Mor’).

• ‘I sing in Scottish, which is not English’ (‘Magdalen Green’, Vienna Folk Festival, 1981).

A stubborn pride in obfuscation? A touch of self-exoticizing? Or just an honest reckoning with what he’s doing to language (of any kind), to song as communication?

Gaughan’s humour comes through in these live performances. The ‘English’ comments and the fond accounts of other musicians and song sources. ‘Cathal’s a hard man not to get a tune off’; ‘The second one’s called “The One After”’; ‘[the Scottish are] the original permissive society—it’s permitted to do anything except enjoy yourself’.

He brings several of his favourite tropes together introducing ‘Bonnie Jeannie O’ Bethelnie’:

a song about a very quaint thing we used to have in Scotland—a thing called “aristocracy”. We managed to get rid of it. We gave it to the English. Scottish ballads are either extremely violent or extremely pornographic. And this is one of the non-violent ones … Fear not, it’s in Scots. If you see me laughing, you know that’s when to be offended.

Parallel Lines, the album Gaughan released with Andy Irvine in 1982 on the German Folk Freak label. As always when Gaughan’s placed against other voices, it’s his I crave. That’s no slight on the brilliant Irvine, just the truth of a relationship between an ear and a voice.

This is the album with Gaughan’s version of Bob Dylan’s ‘My Back Pages’. I don’t like the appended ‘Afterthoughts’, with its sax and mandolin, but Gaughan nails the main song. A rendition of this much-covered number that has a voice as affecting as its author’s. If I were to pick just one verse, it would be ‘In a soldier’s stance …’

His ‘Floo’ers o’ the Forest’ here is pure vocal sonority, tone and timbre taking precedence over semantic clarity. Here, the additions—a lengthy electric solo (DG), hurdy gurdy (Irvine) and Fender Rhodes (Bob Lenox)—absolutely work. Sound art of the first order.

There’s an affinity with Appalachian song, with a journey into the drone. I’m reminded of what the musicologist Wilfrid Mellers once wrote about the contrast between ‘vocal bloom’ and ‘a monody of deprivation’ found in Appalachian song. I don’t think Gaughan’s voice ever achieves the almost depersonalised quality Mellers found in a Nimrod Workman, but it comes close in some of the most drawn-out numbers, where the drone becomes a primal reckoning with the landscape of the song.

Andrew Means writes of ‘the hardy weathered character of songs like “MacCrimmon’s Lament”’. Yes, I sense geology and meteorology in Gaughan’s singing: landscapes. seasons, hardiness, renewal. Means made his comment in a 1972 review that’s included in R/evolution’s second booklet of press clippings. I think of how much more weathering that song was to gain in the following years.

Gaughan distrusts intellectualism, we are told on one of the booklet texts. Distrusts ‘armchair balladists’ too. I distrust anti-intellectualism, especially in these days and on these platforms where it’s so rife. I trust Gaughan’s music, though, and what it does for me, what I feel and think when I hear it.

‘Song for Ireland’. A standout from A Handful of Earth, and from the Berkeley set included in the boxset. A Scottish singer performing a song by an Englishman about Ireland for an American audience.

In an interview for BBC Scotland’s Spectrum programme in 1982 (included on the boxset’s DVD), a clip of ‘Song for Ireland’ is followed by a question about romanticism and sentimentalism. Gaughan admits a pleasure in such indulgences and then tries to square that with his politics:

All Marxists are open to the accusation of being romantic. It’s an optimism … I think the human race is a wonderful idea … I like people, I like what goes on between people. And if that’s romantic, yes I’m romantic.

Ireland is a constant refrain on A Handful of Earth. He thanks ‘the many fine singers of Northern Ireland’ in the liner notes: ‘it took me years of listening to understand and fully appreciate your skills, and to be aware of how much you have influenced me’. Introducing one of his many migration songs to an audience, he quips that his Irish grandparents had the choice of emigrating to America or Scotland and chose the Promised Land.

The DVD that comes with R/evolution adds so many pleasing elements: Gaughan filmed by a Danish TV crew playing in an Edinburgh room for fellow folkies, his hair dark and luxurious, sideburns and goatee adding to the elegance; the two main instruments—voice and guitar—already so finely honed, so him; the cans of McEwans lager his colleagues are swigging between collective choruses of ‘Fiddler’s Green’; Gaughan’s jumper. I feel I could watch this clip over and over.

The Sunday gallery feature on BBC NI from 1972 with the Boys of the Lough: Gaughan’s stripy socks; Aly Bain’s boot heels; the thick frames of Cathal McConnell’s glasses . Bain, the narrator tells us, has ‘been playing fiddle since he was a bairn’.

Then we jump a decade. Most of the footage on the DVD is from the 1980s, when the politics of the songs turn more contemporary.

The Spectrum broadcast includes a brilliant take on ‘Bonnie Jeannie O’ Bethelnie’. ‘I like ballad language’, Gaughan confides in an accompanying interview. ‘And every time I sing that song, I learn something from it’. Singing as education and archaeology. All the things preserved in the strata of songs.

He tells Bill Paterson that the songwriters worth modelling yourself on are Robert Burns, Woody Guthrie and Bertolt Brecht.

As with another of my favourite song interpreters, Nina Simone, most of my treasured Gaughan performances are not explicitly ‘political’. But like Simone, Gaughan’s an artist who cannot be detached from political song or from performance as political act.

Gaughan performed Ed Pickford’s ‘Worker’s Song’ for the Spectrum broadcast. That version doesn’t appear on the DVD, but is available on YouTube.

‘Now Westlin Winds’, Gaughan’s haunting adaptation of a Robert Burns poem, was also included in the Spectrum broadcast. This is substituted on the DVD by two other performances of the song, one from a BBC2 Edinburgh festival special and one from the Vienna Folk Festival in 1981.

Lauren Laverne described Burns’ poem beautifully while promoting the R/evolution fundraising project last April.

Burns Night fell while I was working on this piece. Sharing Gaughan’s Spectrum performance of ‘Now Westlin’ Winds’ on Substack Notes, I became aware of David Wilson’s splendid post on the poem and song from last year.

Steve Byrne provides a brief essay to one of the R/evolution booklets on Gaughan’s traditional song repertoire. He includes the several works by Burns that Gaughan performed as they ‘would be considered by many nowadays as traditional song’. Of ‘Now Westlin Winds’, he writes that few can hear it ‘without thinking of the way the vowels and rhymes flow from the Gaughan voice, to the extent that one rather wishes Burns had lived to hear it’.

We see Gaughan performing ‘A Different Kind of Love Song’ for an unknown STV programme in 1988. This was the title track of his 1983 album, a song that deals with the dynamic tension between ‘protest songs’ and ‘entertainment’. It’s far from my favourite of his songs, but I admire his decision to explain why he wanted to sing, and later write, these different kinds of love songs.

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So I’ll keep trying to make people happy
I’ll keep trying in the best way I know how
And for me to help make the most people happy
I must make you even more sad and angry now

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So you see where you misunderstand me
If you listen again then you might even find
All the songs that I sing are love songs
But their love is a different kind 

In 1978, Gaughan released an album with the folksingers Tony Capstick and Dave Burland, The Songs of Ewan MacColl, on the Newcastle-based Rubber Records. I own the 1986 reissue on Black Crow, a subsidiary of Rubber. Because these labels were bought by Celtic Music, the album hasn’t been available for years and its songs couldn’t be included on R/evolution (though there are solo Gaughan versions of ‘Shoals of Herring’, ‘Jamie Foyers’ and ‘Schoolday’s End’ from other sessions).

Gaughan is quoted in the R/evolution booklet: ‘they were all the very safe MacColl songs. Very little of his Maoist stuff’. Fine by me. These are humanist songs and all the more moving for it. All three singers are superb. The album introduced me to Burland and Capstick and I’ve been glad to pick up records by them in the intervening years (Burland’s 1971 Trailer album A Dalesman’s Litany being a favourite).

I’ve always been glad that all three provide verses on ‘Shoals of Herring’. Capstick (good) and Burland (better) drive the story forward, their voices moving and clear. I’d doubtless enjoy a rendition from just the two of them. But it’s what Gaughan (best) does with his bookend verses that makes this unforgettable: shaving the ‘g’s off MacColl’s gerunds, stretching words to their limit, sailing far from shore. While the other verses roll out like fireside tales in a harbourside inn, Gaughan’s pitch us into the storm-flecked waters. The opening verse is an astonishing portent of what’s to come. The final verse contains one of the most dramatic and moving vocal attacks I know, all the more effective for its slow emergence from the waves of the song.

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Day and night the sea we're darin'
Come wind, come hail or winter gale
Sweatin' and cold, growin' up, growin' old and dyin'
As we're following the shoals of herrin'

MacColl has already strained the limits of meter with that third line. Gaughan takes it and explodes it, examining the phonemes from all angles. Singing as cubism.

R/evolution’s six CDs take the Gaughan story to 1983, the DVD to some years later. There was much more to come in the 1990s and 2000s, but I’ll save those years for another post.

The box stands in front of some shelving units that hold several hundred LPs. In case it weren’t obvious, that location provides a strong hint at what’s inside the box.

I can’t remember how long I’ve had the orange box (I think of it as orange despite the other colours, because orange is the dominant tone outside and inside). I’ve owned several LP storage boxes over the years. Some are still around (I have three in my office at work), others have gone the ways these things go: lost, broken, left behind. For some years (at least ten, probably more), this has been the box I use to hold my newest records. I mean those that I acquire as new releases or new reissues rather than new-to-me secondhand records, which tend to live in a variety of other containers.

The box provides a focus, a reminder that, whatever else I’m drawn to pull from the record shelves on any given day, there is a group of records (typically 20-25 albums) that I want to get to know better. Increasingly, these will be records that I’ve discovered through digital platforms (Qobuz and Bandcamp currently) or have been persuaded to check out from the many and varied recommendations that arrive daily via email and social (+ other) media.

It’s January. As snow settles around the house, I’m putting records away. I’m going through the orange box and deciding which albums from last year to take out and file in the shelves behind (A-L), or upstairs where there are more shelves (L-Z and compilations). One reason I’m doing this is in anticipation of new records. There is already one new LP to go in the box—Jenny on Holiday’s Quicksand Heart, of which more below—and I expect there will be others to come in the next few months.

But I’m not done with 2025 yet. Why would I be? It’s not as if us music fans and writers, having put the finishing touches to our year-end reviews, should just put all thought of them aside and pack away our physical or virtual tracks like so many Christmas baubles.

Those records will continue to entertain, comfort, challenge and inspire. There are those I’ll want to keep in circulation just for the pleasure they bring me. Others are ones I’d have liked to write more about last year and may still have ambitions to write about this year. Like the Robbie Fulks album that peeks out when I release the clasps of the orange box.

I’ve written a little about Fulks here before, recording the effect his 2013 album Gone Away Backward had on me, especially the song ‘That’s Where I’m From’. I want to write more about that song and album, and more about his newest release, with its brilliantly observed reflections on family and ageing. Fulks will stay in the box for now.

What else is in there? A list is in order (but what sort of order? front to back will do):

• Poor Creature, All Smiles Tonight (good to have at least one representative of the constantly intriguing Irish folk scene in the box)

• Panda Bear, Sinister Grift (not done with those harmonies yet)

• Rosalía, Lux (kind of glad I didn’t write an opinion piece on this now, still grateful that it arrived just in time for the Rosalía class I taught last term at Newcastle, still working my way around the confusing, cruciform lyric insert)

• Emma Swift, The Resurrection Game (pleasingly robust LP packaging, and great to have the sublime ‘Oblivion and You’ on vinyl for winter listening sessions)

• Big Thief, Double Infinity (I wanted to write about numbers, infinities, ageing: perhaps I still will)

• Jerskin Fendrix, Once Upon a Time … in Shropshire (nowhere near finished with this, even temporarily)

• CMAT, Euro-Country

• Blood Orange, Essex Honey

• Dave, The Boy Who Played the Harp

• Jim Ghedi, Wasteland

• Jim Legxacy, Black British Music (neighbouring Jims, each with compelling takes on British culture)

• Robert Forster, Strawberries

• V/A, Sand Worms: The Songs of Howe Gelb and Giant Sand (I have to write about GS/HG one of these days)

• The Cosmic Tones Research Trio’s self-titled second album

• Park Jiha, All Living Things (just as Masayoshi Fujita’s 2024 album Migratory continued to reside in the orange box for months last year, I can sense Park’s doing the same. It falls into several categories I hold dear: a concept album about space, place and the natural world around us; aspects of ambient music and Korean folk, with some of Park’s earlier jazz-informed music still shimmering in the background; an exploration of temporality, seasons and cycles through musical motifs that use repetition, silence and texture.)

• Molly Tuttle, So Long Little Miss Sunshine

• Jason Isbell, Foxes in the Snow (I hadn’t realised that what I needed from Jason Isbell was a solo album of acoustic guitar-based songs, but it made sense. As much as I’ve enjoyed the singer-songwriter’s string of band releases, and as much as I appreciate Isbell stretching out for lengthy electric solos with his fellow guitarists, I’ve felt some distance from the songs in recent years. This album brought the intimacy back.)

• Little Simz, Lotus

• Lonnie Holley, Tonky (too new at the time to feature prominently in my Holley essay, but an affirmation of all I hold dear in his art)

• Rich(ard) Dawson, End of the Middle (of course I’ll continue to write about Dawson)

• Bonnie Prince Billy, The Purple Bird (how a lot of the first third of 2025 sounded to me; this will give way to a new BPB album in March)

• FKA twigs, Eusexua (odd to see this on sale in Newcastle department store Fenwick last year when they were capitalising on the city’s hosting of the Mercury Music Prize. My copy didn’t come from there, but from the twigs store; I got caught up in the buzz of the limited edition and its extra goodies)

• Bog Summoner, The Cube of Unknowing

Bog Summoner is at the back. Time to file this album that never quite made it to my most-played last year, though I do like its cover, concept and gradually building kosmische vibe. An album that rewards concentrated listening. One more play before it goes on the shelves. I particularly enjoy ‘Breeder of Enchantments’.

The others will stay for now as I only need to make space for one new record so far this year.

Jenny On Holiday - Quicksand Heart

I became a fan of Let’s Eat Grandma, the duo of then-sixteen-year-old best friends Jenny Hollingworth and Rosa Walton, after buying their debut album I, Gemini on the back of a Simon Reynolds review (The Wire, June 2016). I adored the quirky ‘experimental sludge pop’ (their description) and schoolgirl psychedelia. When they showed, first with 2018’s I’m All Ears and then with 2022’s Two Ribbons, that they could also fashion the kind of pop hooks that should have seen them topping charts, I was totally smitten.

Those last two albums have been on regular rotation in my car for the last few years, while I’m more likely to play the debut on vinyl still. Like many LEG fans, I've often wished there were more music, and I’ve followed side projects and one-offs with interest: LEG’s soundtrack for Half Bad / The Bastard Son & The Devil Himself; Rosa Walton’s ‘I Really Want to Stay at Your House’ written for the Cyberpunk 2077 game; the duo’s contribution to a Nick Drake tribute album (the finest cover on the album for my money).

The announcement last year that Hollingworth would be releasing new work as Jenny on Holiday came as welcome news. Three singles subsequently appeared, followed a week ago by the album Quicksand Heart. Over the last seven days, these songs have got their typically barbed hooks into me as I’ve played the record and taken the Qobuz version on a couple of runs.

My impression is that, though we’ve lost much of the experimentalism that marked out the LEG of a decade ago and clung on in some form as their pop powers grew (at least for I’m All Ears, less so for Two Ribbons), the music still feels like part of an ongoing narrative about how human relationships are mediated through experiences with the nonhuman world, how existing in a world of nonhuman things and systems can feel like a safe space from the messiness of interpersonal relationships. There may be no ‘Eat Shiitake Mushrooms’ or ‘Donnie Darko’ here, but there are wished encounters with animals and landscapes, metaphors of growth, nurturing and intimacy. There’s feeling frozen for so long and being scared of thawing out, of what it might mean to give yourself to someone or something again.

In terms of popcraft, these songs are as catchy as any Hollingworth and Walton have produced, full of tiered builds, punchy setups, breaks and drops. Jenny’s voice soars, seduces and sags. Vulnerability assumes the form of a voice that shifts from anonymous perfection to something closer to speech, and a concise lyricism that ties 21C pop to everyday conversation.

From ‘Every Ounce of Me’:

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You said darling
And I’m like hardly
And you said sweetie
And I’m like kill me
You call me crazy
And that’s a maybe
But then you held me
And oh, God, help me, no

Repeated listens highlight different approaches to how the songs build, break and drop. The first time the chorus of ‘Push’ comes in, I expect it to be louder, to do that thing that pop and EDM drops do of pushing the hook to the foreground. But it holds back, with the volume coming on the second verse instead. There follows a gradual build, leading to tiered backing vocals before the chorus returns for the third time. It seems apt for a song about pushing and pulling, about positionality, to be asked to reflect the space that voices take up in the mix.

‘Dolphins’

And then there’s ‘Dolphins’, a track that leapt out at me even before I heard it. Was Jenny offering a cover of the Fred Neil song? No, it turned out, she wasn’t. But she has produced a song every bit as affecting for me (and that’s saying a lot: I love Neil’s song: his own recording and the versions I know by Tim Buckley, Eddi Reader and Billy Bragg).

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I wanna see dolphins in the ocean tonight
I wanna meet the eyes of something that don’t live a human life
Down by the coast and
It goes on for miles
I wanna see dolphins ...

That appeal to the nonhuman, that same desire for a refuge from the messiness of human life that is frozen into ‘Every Ounce of Me’. And lurking in the background throughout the song, a high keening sound that we’ve come to associate with marine life.

There’s a further appeal for me, and it’s to do with the structuring of the lyrics. The musical pulse of the track is steady and is what we hear first, before any words enter. The bobbing synth suggests a tempo that the lyric then undercuts. The irregular meter of the second line packs extra syllables and contributes to the musicality of the lyric, a wave of ideas and emotions. Then, relative calm again for ‘down by the coast and’ … pause … ‘it goes on for miles’. The repeated ‘I wanna see dolphins’ is both a resolution of the verse and an opening of the chorus. (I see that whoever’s responsible for posting the lyrics to Genius has put that line at the start of the chorus, whereas I’d have started the chorus with ‘And over time’, but that’s just proof of this song’s wonderful porosity).1

And oh that chorus:

• ‘And over time’—soaring up, carrying us across the imagined deep

• ‘Words don’t suffice’—because they’re clumsy human efforts at capturing experience; as Richard Dawson and Sally Pilkington sang to us last year, words are both ‘mere echoes of the world’ and ‘the foundation of the world’: super important, but also not sufficient

• ‘And I feel how I feel / And I need to look out and see them’—to experience the world on its own terms when words won’t suffice

• ‘Soaring high’—still up in the choral ether, with seabirds and whales and dolphins as companions

• ‘Just how this life could be’—the wish at the heart of so many songs

• ‘Could still be’—a genius touch: aching, hopeful

Notes towards a 2026 playlist

I generally get my year-end playlists finished later than many people. But I start early, logging notable tracks as I listen to new releases, laying down waymarkers for an otherwise unplanned route through the year. What remains on them at year-end is not in any manner a stab at an objective ‘best of’, more like a reflection of my listening year subjected to a mixtaper’s rule or two (e.g. only one track per artist/album, what works well as a sequence). Signs to help me navigate my way back through the wilderness of the recent past.

‘Dolphins’ is on my 2026 list and the only reason I can see it coming off at year-end is if I decide to replace it with one of the more uptempo tracks for the ‘catchy’ section I usually place at the start of my lists. Time will tell on that, and also on what records will join Quicksand Heart in the orange box. In the year’s first quarter, I’m anticipating releases by Mary Lattimore & Julianna Barwick (Tragic Magic), Beverly Glenn-Copeland (Laughter in Summer), Hen Ogledd (Discombobulated), Bill Callahan (My Days of 58), Bonnie ‘Prince’ Billy (We Are Together Again), Robyn (Sexistential). There will be others.

On the timing, I could say that dates are arbitrary (they’re not). I could say I didn’t have time (I had time, but other things forced themselves forward). I could say I wanted to wait until the year really ended (I know as well as anyone these things don’t work that way). Sometimes these things just take time. And more time to write up, hence only note form here. And time to translate from one platform to another (I currently use Qobuz; most people I know don’t).

Links first, then lists, then notes for anyone who wants to continue that far, and for future me to refer back to.

The Qobuz version

The Spotify version

The text version

Artist, track and album titles mostly stylized as they appear in Qobuz (where not all featured artists are listed). Albums listed because I still mostly listen to albums.

1. Sharon Van Etten, ‘Afterlife’, Sharon Van Etten & The Attachment Theory.

2. Alison Goldfrapp, ‘Hey Hi Hello’, Flux.

3. FKA twigs, ‘Childlike Things’, EUSEXUA.

4. Oklou, ‘want to wanna come back’, choke enough.

5. Ela Minus, ‘BROKEN, DÍA.

6. Water From Your Eyes, ‘Playing Classics’, It’s a Beautiful Place.

7. Wet Leg, ‘u and me at home’, moisturizer.

8. CMAT, ‘Take A Sexy Picture Of Me’, EURO-COUNTRY.

9. Robert Forster, ‘Tell It Back to Me’, Strawberries.

10. Suede, ‘Dancing With The Europeans’, Antidepressants.

11. Portugal. The Man, ‘Denali’, SHISH.

12. Rival Consoles, ‘Jupiter’, Landscape from Memory.

13. Ale Hop, ‘Bonne Année’, Mapambazuko.

14. marta, ‘BIP’, ROOM.

15. clipping., ‘Run It’, Dead Channel Sky.

16. BABYMETAL, ‘from me to u’, METAL FORTH.

17. Pigs Pigs Pigs Pigs Pigs Pigs Pigs, ‘Stitches’, Death Hilarious.

18. Tropical Fuck Storm, ‘Goon Show’, Fairyland Codex.

19. Gloyw, ‘Kew Rhone is Real’, My Father Was A Tree.

20. Darkside, ‘Graucha Max’, Nothing.

21. LEENALCHI, ‘God of Mud’ (single).

22. Etceteral, ‘Prepad’, Kimatika.

23. Ammar 808, ‘Brobba’, Club Tounsi.

24. Noura Mint Seymali, ‘Lehjibb’, Yenbett.

25. Maryam Saleh, ‘El Fetra’ (single).

26. Bon Iver, ‘Day One’, SABLE, fABLE.

27. Cerys Hafana, ‘An Dro’, Angel.

28. Djrum, ‘Waxcap’, Under Tangled Silence.

29. Dj Narciso, ‘Dificuldades’, Capítulo Experimental.

30. Hiromi, ‘Balloon Pop’, OUT THERE.

31. Waxahatchee, ‘Mud’ (single).

32. Jason Isbell, ‘Good While It Lasted’, Foxes in the Snow.

33. Bonnie “Prince” Billy, ‘Boise, Idaho’, The Purple Bird.

34. Richard Dawson, ‘More than real’, End of the Middle.

35. Park Jiha, ‘A Story Of Little Birds’, All Living Things.

36. Laura Cannell, ‘Wake the Slumbering Lyre’, LYRELYRELYRE.

37. Takuya Kuroda, ‘Car 16 15 A’, EVERYDAY.

38. Yugen Blakrok, ‘The Grand Geode’, The Illusion of Being.

39. Little Simz, ‘Free’, Lotus.

40. Dave, ‘The Boy Who Played the Harp’, The Boy Who Played the Harp.

41. Jim Legxacy, ‘stick’, black british music.

42. Panda Bear, ‘Anywhere but Here’, Sinister Grift.

43. CAPICUA, ‘Estrela Da Tarde’, Um Gelado Antes Do Fim Do Mundo.

44. Xexa, ‘Kizomba 003’, Kissom.

45. Rosalía, ‘Memória’ (feat. Carminho), LUX.

46. Nazar, ‘Mantra’, Demilitarize.

47. Blood Orange, ‘Countryside’, Essex Honey.

48. Jerskin Fendrix, ‘Beth’s Farm’, Once Upon A Time... In Shropshire.

49. Carl Allen, ‘Alter Ego’, Tippin’.

50. Ichiko Aoba, ‘mazamun’, Luminescent Creatures.

51. Lonnie Holley, ‘Kings In The Jungle, Slaves In The Field’, Tonky.

52. Patterson Hood, ‘The Forks of Cypress’, Exploding Trees & Airplane Screams.

53. Alison Krauss, ‘Looks Like The End Of The Road’, Granite Mills.

54. Anna B Savage, ‘Lighthouse’, You & i are Earth.

55. Eliana Glass, ‘Good Friends Call Me E’, E.

56. Me Lost Me, ‘Ancient Summer’, This Material Moment.

57. Willie Nelson, ‘Banks Of The Old Bandera’, Oh What A Beautiful World.

58. Lukas Nelson, ‘Ain’t Done’, American Romance.

59. S.G. Goodman, ‘Planting by the Signs’, Planting by the Signs.

60. Shelby Means, ‘Up on the Mountain’, Shelby Means.

61. Margo Price, ‘Wild At Heart’, Hard Headed Woman.

62. Molly Tuttle, ‘The Highway Knows’, So Long Little Miss Sunshine.

63. Big Thief, ‘Los Angeles’, Double Infinity.

64. Laufey, ‘Silver Lining’, A Matter of Time.

65. Emma Swift, ‘For You And Oblivion’, The Resurrection Game.

66. Anna von Hausswolff, ‘Aging Young Women’, ICONOCLASTS.

67. James Brandon Lewis, ‘Prince Eugene’, Apple Cores.

68. William Prince, ‘All the Same’, Further From the Country.

69. Robbie Fulks, ‘That Was Juarez, This Is Alpine’, Now Then.

70. Mavis Staples, ‘Sad and Beautiful World’, Sad And Beautiful World.

71. Valerie June, ‘Changed’, Owls, Omens, and Oracles.

72. Snocaps, ‘Hide, Snocaps.

73. Maya Delilah, ‘Begin Again’, The Long Way Round.

74. Poor Creature, ‘Willie-o’, All Smiles Tonight.

75. Jim Ghedi, ‘Wasteland’, Wasteland.

The notes

Some threads, planned segues and happenstantial placements from the playlist:

1. The dominance of female voices in the opening ‘catchy’ section: Sharon Van Etten, Alison Goldfrapp, FKA twigs, Oklou, Ela Minus, Water From Your Eyes, Wet Leg, CMAT.

2. One recurring theme: vocal glitchery and pitch-shiftery: FKA Twigs, Oklou, Bon Iver, Jim Legxacy, Nazar, Blood Orange, Jerskin Fendrix. Something I always have an ear open for: how tech-manipulated voices do emotion in new and familiar ways.

3. The Water from Your Eyes track, which sounds Wet Leggy to me, is followed by a Wet Leg track that doesn’t. I could have chosen a more ‘typical’ WL track for the list, but, for all the album’s brilliance, this was the one that spoke to me.

4. Bon Iver anticipating something that Mavis Staples and Valerie June later bring home. I hear BI’s track as essentially gospel, whatever the distractions of its vocal glitchery.

5. Songs that reflect my year of the harp): Cerys Hafana, Djrum, Laura Cannell. Dave, too, though ‘The Boy Who Played the Harp’ is based on a Satie-like piano loop (other tracks on his album do feature harp).

6. Gloyw’s ‘Kew Rhone is Real’: a 2025 song about a 1977 album that I wrote about.

7. The Lusophone section: Panda Bear, Capicua, Xexa, Rosalía & Carminho, Nazar.

8. Anna B. Savage » Eliana Glass » Me Lost Me: a happy segue.

9. Willie and Lukas Nelson next to each other.

10. Little Simz and Dave next to each other.

11. Laufey » Emma Swift » Anna Von Hausswolff: still moments in a turning world.

12. Ichiko Aoboa as a necessary point of stillness between Carl Allen and Lonnie Holley.

13. Big Thief’s Adrianne Lenker rhyming ‘Los Angeles’ with ‘you sang to me’.

2025 moments either not present on the playlist or that I want to say more about:

1. Richard Dawson and Sally Pilkington refusing binary choices in ‘More than Real’: ‘words are mere echoes of the world’, ‘words are the foundation of the world’, and all the variations between. Judging by YouTube comments, I wasn’t the only one who found the final song on End of the Middle a standout. ‘More than Real’ is not quite like anything Dawson has put on his solo albums before. It features a duet vocal from Sally Pilkington, who beautifully brings the song home in its moving second verse and chorus. The song is also a co-write from the pair, connecting it to their Bulbils project. It’s perhaps closest to ‘Distant Memories’ from 2022’s The Ruby Cord, which began life as a Bulbils piece. At the same time, all the expected Dawson ingredients are present: the shifting perspectives, the human lives evoked through the evocative object world, the importance of memory, connection, family. Here also, a desire to break destructive cycles, to be a better human, to escape the script that’s been written for you, to try and write your own, to learn about the collaboration and trust that such an endeavour will require. Faye MacCalman’s clarinet on this, as elsewhere on the album, is just the right, exquisite detail that’s needed to bed it all down / lift it all up.

2. Faye MacCalman providing further clarinet on Me Lost Me’s This Material Moment, an album I was supposed to write about in 2025 and will now be writing about n 2026.

3. Two Newcastle album launches (also featuring Faye MacCalman): Richard Dawson’s for End of the Middle at The Lubber Fiend in February; Me Lost Me’s for This Material Moment at Live Theatre in July. These and several others that I couldn’t make showed the local scene to be as vibrant as ever.

4. Big Thief. ‘Incomprehensible’. One of several excellent songs about ageing that I heard in 2025. A narrator contemplating 33 and what comes after. Countering society’s expectations that age is something to fear. Loving the appearance of silver locks. Looking to three generations of women before her and the wrinkles of time and nature. ‘Let gravity be my sculptor’: a fine age-embracing lyric to put alongside Jenny Joseph’s poem ‘Warning’. The way the song’s refrain plays with word order and expectation: ‘incomprehensible, let me be / incomprehensible, let me be’. The ‘let me be’ as resolution.

5. More songs about ageing: Anna Von Hausswolff’s ‘Aging Young Women’ (on the playlist); Richard Dawson’s ‘Gondola’ (I wrote about the song’s British specificity—I might have easily written about the themes of ageing, repetition and renewal that pervade End of the Middle, the album this playlist candidate and final choice ‘More than Real’ come from); Robbie Fulks’ Now Then (like Dawson’s, an album permeated by reflections on ageing, memory and family: it’s there in playlist choice ‘That Was Juarez, This Is Alpine’, more explicitly in ‘Ocean City’, ‘The Thirty-Year Marriage’, ‘Ol’ Folks’ and ‘Nobody Cares’).

6. Taking records for a run. I listened to a lot of new music while running this year. Though it’s always good to have adrenalin-building. motivational tracks for later stages of a long run (from the playlist, marta’s ‘BIP’ is a good example), what I’ve really enjoyed in this first year of soundtracked runs is how I can connect to pretty much any kind of music while on the move. The subtle works as well as the blatant. I made meaningful connections while listening to Laura Cannell’s LYRELYRELYRE one week, Pigs Pigs Pigs Pigs Pigs Pigs Pigs’ Death Hilarious the next. Bluegrass turned out to be great to run to, with Shelby Means becoming a favourite. I made notes about some of my experiences, planned a series for Substack, then stopped when several readers bailed after the first one (Rival Consoles).

7. Ambitious songwriting. I’ll always include Richard Dawson in this category. If End of the Middle seems more modest about its ambitions than 2022’s The Ruby Cord, there are still few people writing songs like these. When I heard Jerskin Fendrix’s Once Upon A Time... In Shropshire, I thought of Dawson, though JF’s album does its own thing (and does it beautifully). Rosalía was the headline act when it came to ambition and was praised and ridiculed for her audacity. The Carminho-featuring ‘Memória’ was hardly the most ambitious track on the multilingual LUX, but I chose it to continue a two-decades-plus tradition of representing fado on my playlists (see also: Capicua, ‘Estrela da Tarde’).

8. Other Newcastle gigs this year: Cat Power Sings Dylan ’66 at The Glasshouse (a highlight even if, surprisingly, it didn’t quite live up to the thrill of hearing the record in late 2023: sometimes, the intimacy of audio wins out); Lisa O’Neill at The Glasshouse (this was a year where every Irish TV drama seemed to be under instructions to include ‘Old Note’ on the soundtrack); Jim Ghedi at The Common Room.

9. Books. I’d like to write more about my reading year, but those thoughts will have to drift into future pieces about other things. For now: the arrival, at the start of the year, of Alex Pheby’s Waterblack, the final instalment of the Cities of the Weft trilogy; picking up the first two volumes of Solvej Balle’s On the Calculation of Volume in The Portobello Bookshop, on a day spent hobbling around after the Edinburgh Marathon (drawn to several passages about listening, writing, sound and time in this extended tale of a woman caught inside a single day); regular visits to another Edinburgh bookshop, Topping & Company, where purchases included Ian Penman’s Erik Satie Three Piece Suite (my book of the year), Michael Simmons Robert’s Quartet for the End of Time: On Music, Grief & Birdsong, Graeme Lawson’s Sound Tracks: Uncovering Our Musical Past; reading and writing about Ben Ratliff’s Run the Song: Writing About Running About Listening; Ruy Castro’s O Ouvidor do Brasil: 99 Vezes Tom Jobim (acquired in another favourite book shop, the Lisbon branch of Livraria da Travessa); the arrival, towards year’s end, of the third translated volume of Solvej Balle’s series (bought in Morpeth on a pre-Christmas shopping trip, finished within days); the discovery, in a charity shop, of Colombian novelist Juan Gabriel Vásquez’s The Shape of the Ruins, an unintentionally apt text to be reading as the the year turns and the US intervenes in Latin American politics again.

10. In the Satie book, Penman mentions artists and thinkers whose thinking is uncompartmentalised, who make connections across many spheres of thought and activity. Once again, he shows himself to be one of those thinkers. Whole worlds open up within these pages, especially in the cross-referenced ‘dictionary’ section. Reading this book at the same time I was rereading Peter Blegvad’s work, I was reminded that I’ve always been drawn to figures who make these kind of connections. Penman and Blegvad both bring together artists I was already in love with (Borges, Barthes, Queneau, Perec) and introduce me to new ones. They synthesise my interests and expand them.

11. Penman’s a writer I trust. Unflashily persuasive. I want to follow him on his trains of thought, connections, musical preferences. As well as making me want to listen to more Satie, he makes me want to listen to more Debussy, Poulenc, Evans. He cites his favourite Prince album as Parade, and it becomes mine (perhaps only temporarily, but for long enough to matter). I find validation in his playlist of ‘hospital radio’ music.

12. I’m drawn again to writers who use fragments to create new coherences. Books I’ve read this year that do this: Jordan Alexander Stein’s Fantasies of Nina Simone; Philip Hoare’s Albrecht & the Whale, Peter Blegvad’s Imagine Observe Remember; Penman’s Satie book and its predecessor, Fassbinder: Thousands of Mirrors; Maggie Nelson’s Bluets.

13. Nick Drake, The Making of Five Leaves Left. I saw comments online (Substack etc.) about this four-disc set representing process over product. True. But what it really shows, especially when listened to while reading the new booklet, is how unhappy Drake would have been having his work represented by the process. He was a perfectionist and this is the sound of perfectionism happening. He’s not the only one, as is clear from comments made by others in the studio and the arrangers. This is a group of people in search of a perfect ‘product’, something finished and tangible that they can all be proud of.

14. I want to write more about time, space and intimacy. It’s fairly obvious that Drake’s songs are about time, from track titles through to seasonal lyrical references, times of day and of life. What was immediately striking about the first disc of the new set was the intimacy of the recording, like having Drake in the room with you. Adherents of his final album often mention its stripped-back nature, its relative simplicity when heard alongside the more arranged predecessors. To hear that approach to Five Leaves Left is startling. That’s not to say that I think the album should be, or should have been, shorn of its other instrumentation. What the box set shows is the gradual colouring-in of the tracks, echoed nicely in the design of the four record sleeves, each a more vivid green than the previous one. As thrilling as the stripped-back arrangements of the first disc are the sudden entries of the flute, cello and double bass on the later sessions. It’s like taking a favourite piece of machinery apart and putting it back together again.

15. There’s something to say about patience here, about waiting and working towards the thing that you imagined. These recordings stretch from 1968 to 1969, with significant gaps between them. Reading the account of Drake moving between his studies at Cambridge and his musical adventures in London—and how he tried to keep those worlds apart, until they had to come together—gives a documentary feel to the box set. It’s good to read about the photography sessions that led to the album sleeve. When I think about Drake in relation to time, I usually focus on his lyrics and the ‘out of time’ sound he and his producers captured so hauntingly. But it’s there in the photos too: not just that they are of their time (they are, especially the famous shots of Drake in the countryside or on the coast), but they take time as their theme too. The ‘running man’ shot that graced the rear cover of the UK album (used as a front cover for the 1971 album Nick Drake in the US) is a study in comparative time: the blurred, rushing commuter and the still, sharp-eyed observer of human life. The photos on the front cover and inner gatefold, meanwhile, exemplify reflective time, the time of gazing and thinking. Time turned in on itself

    

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November, 2025. The curators at Qobuz, my current music streamer of choice, place Mélanie Laurent’s Pastel in the ‘Discover’ section. Laurent is a French harpist and the pieces on her debut album are by French composers: Claude Debussy, Maurice Ravel, Germaine Tailleferre, Cécile Chaminade, Marcel Tournier. The timing’s just right. I’ve been listening to a lot of harp music this year, imagining a piece called ‘Ancient Axe’.

I like this feature of Qobuz’s ‘Discover’, placing new classical releases among the pop, jazz and trad ones. Spotify never did this for me. Perhaps I didn’t train it well enough. I know little of the classical harp repertory. Laurent’s album provides some portals I’d like to explore in the future. For now, though, I’m thinking about harp-featuring tracks that I recall from my more usual listening fare or that I heard as new releases this year.

I’m borrowing ‘ancient axe’ from Ira Gitler’s liner notes to In a Minor Groove, a Dorothy Ashby album from 1958 that was reissued, along with other early Ashby albums, in New Land’s With Strings Attached boxset in 2023. I’ve been listening to those six albums a lot this year.

Ashby’s take on Margarita Lecuona’s ‘Taboo’, a song I first encountered on Arthur Lyman’s album of the same name. Jazz and exotica as mutually attractive forces. Ashby delineating what the harp would be for jazz: washes of colour, new textures and ways of taking melodies for journeys. On some of these early albums, other instruments dominate for periods (flute, vibes), but the harp is always the guiding force.

‘Feeling Good’, a song owned by Nina Simone but excavated differently by Ashby on her 1965 album The Fantastic Jazz Harp of Dorothy Ashby.

Ashby’s harp is the first sound heard on Bobby Womack’s The Poet II: ‘Love Has Finally Come At Last’. The first sound, too, on Stevie Wonder’s ‘If It’s Magic’.

Alice Coltrane at New York’s Carnegie Hall, 1971. A fifteen minute version of ‘Journey in Satchidananda’, the title track of her recently released album. The music comes in like waves: the steady pulse and surge of the bass, the splash and spray of the harp. Coltrane’s playing reflects the paradoxical logic and randomness of water: laps, eddies, currents, swirls, the pull of gravity, the seeking of levels. If we think of bathing, floating, soaking, submerging, washing, it’s all part of the creators’ plan. ‘Anyone listening to this selection’, she writes in the liner notes to Journey in Satchidananda, ‘should try to envision himself floating on an ocean of Satchidanandaji’s love, which is literally carrying countless devotees across the vicissitudes and stormy blasts of life to the other shore. Satchidananda means knowledge, existence, bliss.’

Brandee Younger takes on the legacies of Ashby and Coltrane. Brand New Life (2023) is an Ashby homage (DA originals and tracks she featured on like ‘If It’s Magic’). On Gadabout Season (2025), Younger plays Coltrane’s restored harp. As much as I enjoy these albums, it’s her set of Covid-era quarantine tunes with bassist Dezron Douglas I return to most often this year: something about the intimacy of lockdown duets and the selection of tunes: John and Alice Coltrane numbers sitting alongside Kate Bush’s ‘This Woman’s Work’ and The Stylistics’ ‘You Make Me Feel Brand New’.

One seed for what became my Year of the Harp: the strange Peggy Lee album I bought in a charity shop in Truro in early January. Sea Shells (1958) finds Lee performing songs and reading translations of Chinese poems to the accompaniment of Stella Castellucci on harp and Gene Di Novi on harpsichord. ‘We used the harp in this album’, Lee writes in the liner notes, ‘to capture the mood of the sea—and because it’s just wonderful to sing with the harp’. The oceanic harp, songs as seashells found on the shore. Of Castellucci’s playing, Lee highlights ‘the lovely surf sounds and oriental flavour’. A nod, perhaps, to those exotica and mood music albums of the time, where harps abound to denote the celestial, the dreamy, the romantic, the ocean-lapped.

When I listen to Mary Lattimore’s albums, oceanic metaphors are never far from my mind. I berate myself for falling into cliché, for not finding new language to reflect the listening experience, while at the same time resigning myself to words like ‘sparkling’, ‘incandescent’, ‘shimmering’, ‘glistening’, ‘celestial’. Lattimore doesn’t exactly help with her song titles: ‘It Feels Like Floating’, ‘Hello from the Edge of the Earth’, ‘Their Faces Streaked with Light and Filled with Pity’ (all from Hundreds of Days, 2018); ‘And Then He Wrapped His Wings Around Me’, ‘Music for Applying Shimmering Eye Shadow’, ‘Horses, Glossy on the Hill’ (from Goodbye, Hotel Arkada, 2023). That is to say, she absolutely helps: I love these titles as much as I love the music. Just don’t ask me for new language when describing it.

An album by Lattimore and Julianna Barwick is due for arrival in 2026. Pre-release tracks augur well.

I’ve seen Robin Williamson live twice. The first time was in the early 1990s in a hall in North Devon. Barnstaple, if memory serves. The stage was strewn with instruments which Williamson navigated during the course of the evening, moving from stories to songs to instrumentals. No live performance I’ve seen since has matched it for eclectic panache. Even the In Concert video released by Shanachie Records in 1990, brilliant as it is, doesn’t capture the beautifully ordered chaos of that half-remembered gig.

I have the first of Robin Williamson’s two Legacy of the Scottish Harpers LPs. The harpist as teacher. The album as pedagogy. Extensive liner notes on the harp’s history and the provenance of the fourteen tracks, with bibliography and glossary. Among the many things Williamson shares are the ‘numerous references to the harp’ in the old Welsh laws: ‘its study being permitted only to freemen; its ownership, together with a chess-board and a cloak, being the three marks of a gentleman; its being the one possession not seizable for debt’.

‘Three essentials of song / To write verse, to play harp, to recite history’. No lyric poetry without the lyre.

Williamson’s Songs of Love and Parting (Cladagh, 1981). I’d have probably wanted it for the title alone, but the harp-based songs—‘Verses in Stewart Street’, ‘Return No More’, ‘Sigil’, ‘Flower of the Briar’, ‘Gwydion’s Dream’, ‘The Parting Glass’—are outstanding, and it also contains ‘For Mr. Thomas’ (revisited two decade later on Williamson’s ECM album The Seed-At-Zero). When Van Morrison covers ‘For Mr. Thomas’, he changes ‘rough god go striding’ to ‘rough god go riding’. He later writes a song called ‘Rough God Goes Riding’, and Greil Marcus publishes a book about Morrison that uses that song’s refrain for its title.

Harp as pedagogy for rock fans. Alan Stivell was there from the early 1970s. I don’t recall where I first encountered his Renaissance of the Celtic Harp. I think my parents had a copy. I do recall that, once I started frequenting record shops, markets, car boot sales and charity shops, Renaissance was a ubiquitous presence. At some point, I ended up with two copies: a French and an English edition. Harp revival with a rock aesthetic at a time when rock was looking in all directions and searching all eras.

Stivell and Williamson doubtless primed a certain type of listener (was I one?) for Joanna Newsom’s arrival in the early 2000s. Yet nothing could deflect from the absolute unexpectedness and originality of her debut album The Milk-Eyed Mender. (Drag City, 2004). It’s still the album I go back to when I want to relive that sense of wonder, no matter how brilliant the work that came after was. (And it was: Ys, the follow-up, is a masterpiece of ambitious songwriting. I was surprised when she said in an interview with The Wire that that the album’s title wasn’t a nod to the opening track on Alan Stivell’s famous album, but something that came to her in dreams).

She sang of meteorites and bears and ringing bells, of her and him and you, and she played not for us, it seemed, nor for herself exactly, but for the very presences her music conjured. Her songs were not performed so much as drawn from herself like nets dredged from the sea, heavy with kelp and flotsam and minnows that flashed before darting back into the deep. When she occasionally stumbled and lost her way, the material itself would pick her up again and carry her forward.1

I remember reading this brilliant piece by Erik Davis when it was new. Lovely to revisit it, and to have Jay Babcock’s classic Arthur available again.

Babcock himself interviewed Newsom at the time of her 2004 debut. I like what she said about building songs from objects:

I saw a painting the other day of this gypsy lady that had a skirt covered in pockets everywhere and there were little things in all her pockets. Sometimes I feel like that: I have little objects and every once in a while I take them out of my pockets, lay them all in a row and I like the way they look next to each other, so that’s a song! [laughs] But I’ve had them in my pockets for such a long time.2

Harp memories keep flowing. The time in 2007 I saw Joanna Newsom perform with the Northern Sinfonia at what was then Sage Gateshead, with Alasdair Roberts providing spellbinding support. As well as performing the Ys album, Newsom played a non-orchestral set of older songs, a new song and a setting of Isabel Pagan’s ‘Ca’ the Yowes’. Years later, YouTube provides a version of that song from an earlier show.

Another 2007 gig. Baby Dee upstairs at The Cumberland Arms in Newcastle. Eccentric, meandering, beautiful harp songs. The following year would bring Safe Inside the Day. For all I continue to love that album (its title track a near pinnacle of songwriting as far as I’m concerned), I’ve always wished there were more harp on it. The instrument appears on a couple of tracks, including ‘The Dance of Diminishing Responsibilities’ with its lyric ‘there’s a harp in that piano / there’s a girl inside that boy’ (a theme touched on in the song’s video).

One of my favourite pictures of Violeta Parra shows her with a harp. Her arpillera (tapestry) La cantanta calva (The bald singer) shows a harpist, as does her papier-mâché work La niña y el arpa (The girl and the harp). Though I have several CDs of Parra’s songs and décimas, recordings of her playing the harp prove harder to source. Do they exist?

Harp as loom. A connection suggested in Parra’s work is explicit in Edna St. Vincent Millay’s ‘The Ballad of the Harp Weaver’. A male narrator remembers the sacrifice his widowed mother made one Christmas when, too poor to heat their home or eat, she turned to the harp to weave clothes for her son. He finds her on Christmas Day, frozen in death to her instrument, a pile of garments by her side. Johnny Cash includes his rendition of the poem at the end of his 1963 album The Christmas Spirit and performs it on his TV show in December 1970. The album’s liner notes identify hope, joy, sacrifice and giving as the core themes of Cash’s seasonal selection. Giving and sacrifice play their part in Millay’s ballad; otherwise, quite the downer to close an album (and a TV show) with.

August 2025. On a trip to Edinburgh, I purchase a secondhand record: The Harp Key, by Alison Kinnaird (Temple Records, 1978). An utterly beguiling album. Scottish harp (clarsach) pieces, some solo, some accompanied by other clarsachs, whistle, flute, concertina small pipes, fiddle. The music seems to make even more sense now, in the shortest days of the year. A fire and a glass of Glenlivet. Kinnaird and Aly Bain duetting gracefully on ‘Chapel Keithack’.

I find Robin Williamson another fine companion to winter nights alone, especially his late album Love Will Remain.

The three albums Williamson released with ECM between 2000 and 2006 are remarkable. There’s a fourth, from 2014, that I missed at the time, my ears tuned elsewhere.

To think, when The Seed-At-Zero came out in 2000, it was only a decade (perhaps less) since I’d seen Williamson at that hall in Devon, yet it felt a lifetime away and the music seemed so different. Now more, than a quarter century has passed since that ECM debut.

I came to know Rhodri Davies’ work through his collaborations with Richard Dawson: the guitar and electric harp duets on Dawson’s 2013 album The Glass Trunk; the LP the two released under the title Dawson-Davies: Hen Ogledd (also 2013). Then two Davies LPs on the Newcastle-based Alt. Vinyl label: Wound Response (2012) and An Air Swept Clean of All Distance (2014). On Wound, as on the Dawson collaborations, harp as heavy metal, transducers and electronics warping the strings’ genteel nature into jagged sheets of sound. On Air, a more delicate approach, but the harp still juddering towards something more discordant, a challenge to all those sweet shimmers we associate with the instrument. Uneasy glistening.

Davies’ gorgeous 2024 album Telyn Wrachïod. The title translates to ‘bray harp’, an instrument that dates back centuries. Pegs, or bray pins, are attached to the strings to make them buzz. Likened to the braying of donkeys. Davies on mesmerising form as he delves into Welsh culture. A quote from 17th-century Welsh poet Huw Machno accompanies the release: ‘Precise, angled brays / Speaking every profound feeling’.

Rabbitholing harp history at the Early Music Muse website. Ian Pittaway’s article on the bray harp, fabulously illustrated. A donkey harpist accompanies a goat singer. An ancient Greek swings a lyre like a rock god. All manner of angels pluck harp strings. A naked man is crucified on the strings of a giant harp in Bosch’s The Garden of Earthly Delights.

Rhodri Davies at his most harp-conventional as a member of Richard Dawson’s Ruby Cord band. His graceful contribution to ‘The Hermit’. His vital presence in ‘Museum’.

Harp as archaeological object: Laura Cannell’s Lyre Lyre Lyre (Brawl, 2025) summons subterranean sounds from a replica of the six-stringed Anglo-Saxon lyre uncovered at Sutton Hoo in the 1930s. Another ancient axe.

Cannell on the lyre’s self sufficiency:

It almost resonates on its own, it makes the violin and recorders that I usually play feel like they only thrive the more you put into them. The more attention you give them the better they sound and feel, but with the lyre it’s kind of happy and sings whether you are there or not…. Like a perfectly content bird, singing just for itself.3

Harp as web: delicacy and strength, music hanging in the air.

Cannell writes of ‘shrouded sounds’. Mystery. Slumber. Burial. Rituals that bring what was in the dark to light, and vice versa.

Alina Bzhezhinska & Tulshi, Whispers of Rain (Tru Thoughts, 2025). The harp summoned for watery thoughts again. ‘The album’s concept centres on the idea of rain as a metaphor for life’s ever-changing rhythms—moments of sorrow, renewal and the quiet strength found in solitude’ (liner notes by the artists). The title track connected to John Coltrane’s ‘After the Rain’. The album inspired by Alice.

I play music by Mary Lattimore during a meal for friends. One says it sounds like the music he hears at yoga.

Another harp album from 2025: Cerys Hafana’s Angel. A feature in The Wire highlights Hafana’s embeddedness in Welsh musical culture, especially the triple harp. ‘An Dro’ is the standout track for me. Something about the combination of chordophones and aerophones that sits well with other albums I’ve enjoyed this year: Cannell’s Lyre Lyre Lyre (lyre and crumhorn), Park Jiha’s All Living Things (piri, saenghwang and yanggeum).

The record labels of Cerys Hafana’s Angel and Mary Lattimore’s Hundreds of Days have similar typographical designs. I probably wouldn’t have noticed were I not placing harp records together. It doesn’t really mean anything, but my mind goes wandering nonetheless. With Angel, I’d originally thought of tree rings, but these are spirals. Record grooves. Swirling water. Journeys inward and outward.

Marcel Tournier’s Pastels du vieux Japon, as essayed on Mélanie Laurent’s new album, imagines harps dreaming of kotos. It’s tempting to travel forth on the strings of the world, to trace connections between harps and zithers. Vertical and horizontal axes.

Dorothy Ashby, too, dreamed of harps and kotos. She plays both instruments on The Rubáiyát Of Dorothy Ashby (Cadet, 1970) while singing lyrics inspired by Omar Khayyam. Her wildest album, but with that mellowness all her work contains. Hearing her weave words into her arrangements, I’m reminded of Beverley Glenn-Copeland, another artist I’ve listened to a lot this year and whose albums have complemented my harp-and-Satie-soaked days.

I must resist the temptation to go further on that global journey, at least for now. I’ve always loved kora music, though, and find myself inevitably exploring harp/kora duets such as the collaboration between Catrin Finch and Seckou Keita.

My year ends as it began, in Cornwall. I listen to Mary Lattimore albums as I drive the country lanes and coastal roads. Then I listen to Lattimore through other artists’ ears. The Hundreds of Days remix album. Sometimes the harp is lost in the mixes as other textures and beats steal into the foreground. But always the sense of the harp as structuring logic or as seed for what these tracks become. The notes on the album’s Bandcamp page note the ‘mesmeric, sun-kissed stomp’ that Julianna Barwick makes of ‘Never Saw Him Again. ‘Lattimore’s signature drone and halcyon flutter obscure and throb under the new tempo, evoking the optimistic glow of a golden hour in California, where both artists reside’. I’ve never been to California, but I’ve basked in the golden light of Cornwall, have known that glow you feel inside and out as late afternoon sun glints on surf and endless waves meet endless sand.

A late-year rediscovery as I go through the 2025 album lists. Djrum, the project of British DJ and producer Felix Manuel. I’d picked up on his previous music, but hadn’t played this year’s Under Tangled Silence enough to become familiar. I choose it as the soundtrack to a Boxing Day run, Manuel’s skittering beats adding weird cadences to my ragged route along a Cornish mining trail. Harp sounds glisten through the electronics.

UK rapper Dave refers to the ancient axe in his 2025 album The Boy Who Played the Harp. Already deep in harp reverie when the album came out in October, I hoped the instrument would feature as a sound on the album, and it does. It’s there in the background of Dave’s duet with Kano, ‘Chapter 16’ (aka ‘Legacy’ on my vinyl version). The harpist is Eleanor Turner, who also features elsewhere on the album. There’s a harp (and a different harpist) in the background of the one-shot video too.

The Book of Samuel. Chapter 16. Kano as Saul, Dave as David. Legacy passed on, anointment made. ‘God loves a trier, David loves a lyre / But even a harp’s half a heart, so why could Cupid fire?’

The title track of Dave’s album doesn’t feature the sound of a harp, but the lyrics refer again to David’s performance for Saul and for God, the same one Leonard Cohen alluded to in ‘Hallelujah’. On Dave’s song, as elsewhere on the LP, piano seeps through. Echoes of Satie. In this year when Ian Penman’s book on Satie had me listening to hours of the composer’s music, it all connects.

Robin Williamson’s Love Will Remain comes with a booklet of paintings, lyrics and notes. One of the paintings is King David the Harper.

A 1990 concert by Robin Williamson is filmed and released by Shanachie as a VHS video. It disappears, a victim of format change. In 2017 it emerges on YouTube. An hour and ten minutes of the kind of genius I witnessed all those years ago in Devon, albeit shorn of a few instruments. There’s still harp and twelve-string guitar, pennywhistle and sound effects as Williamson spins his tall tales. It ends, as Songs of Love and Parting ends and as all good gatherings should, with ‘The Parting Glass’.

Playlist

I’ve made a playlist to accompany this piece.

Qobuz (non-embeddable): https://open.qobuz.com/playlist/35944114.

Spotify (almost the same: no Joanna Newsom currently on Spotify):

There’s also this (not currently on Qobuz):

Clark is thirty-four when Old No. 1 comes out. Born 6 November 1941, a date I might not have recorded here were it not for the fact that, as I write this, it’s 6 November 2025. Next May will be a decade since he died.

March 1990. I’m eighteen. I sit with friends and family to watch Robert Earl Keen and Guy Clark play sets in the Plough & Harrow pub in Newton Abbot, Devon. Keen’s West Textures has recently been released in the UK and become a fixture on my turntable. Clark has moved from being a name I occasionally stumbled across in record guides and music history zines to the artist behind Old No. 1, an album I acquire via the 1988 Edsel reissue. That album will never be far from my mind. Nor will this evening. Even then, we knew how unusual it was to have such artists visit our small town in the southwest of England. That wonder will only grow with the years, making this a treasured memory. I get a few photographs, none of them brilliant quality, and an autograph.

Years pass. I always intend to write something about Old No. 1. I come close on occasion, then put the notes aside for another time. I lose so many thoughts and notes on the album and on Guy Clark’s wider importance to me and others. I come to terms with that.

November 2025. The album’s fiftieth anniversary. I decide to publish some of the notes that remain. I start to think that fragments are a truer way of expressing what Clark’s songs mean to me than the kind of longer-form essay I’d previously imagined. It’s not like I’m looking to close anything down here. Nothing definitive, always something left open.

The cover of Old No. 1. Denim, material, objects. Guy’s and Susanna’s smiles. A moment of forever. Jerry Jeff Walker’s liner note, that same mixture of factual and fanciful you’d find on other country endorsements of the time (Kris Kristofferson on Mickey Newbury’s Looks Like Rain, Johnny Cash on Kristofferson’s Me and Bobby McGee). Also, for me, the Edsel logo on the rear cover of the reissue. Such an important imprint for me at that time, a portal to areas of music history I might not have discovered in those pre-internet days. Old No. 1 was ED285. Other reissues from 1988: The Notorious Byrd Brothers (ED262); Gene Clark with the Gosdin Brothers (ED263); Tim Rose’s Morning Dew (ED267); Loudon Wainwright’s Attempted Mustache (ED269); Alexander Spence’s Oar (ED282); Guy Clark’s Texas Cookin’ (ED287); Kaleidoscope’s A Beacon from Mars (ED288); John Cale’s Vintage Violence (ED230). We still ordered record label catalogues in those days.

‘L.A. Freeway’ is the song I always expect to open Old No. 1, even after all these years and all these plays. It takes less than a second to remind me the opener is ‘Rita Ballou’, for which I’m always glad: a great start to an album. I suppose that ‘L.A. Freeway’ was the magnet that pulled me in and never let me go. That guitar hook. That bittersweet lyrical thread that runs from ‘pack up all your dishes’ to ‘don’t you think it’s time we’re leavin’’. A song where the determination to leave has its confidence belied by the ache of the music and the sense that the singer’s partner still needs persuading: ‘Oh, Susanna, don’t you cry, babe / Love’s a gift that’s surely handmade / We got somethin’ to believe in’. And, though Clark’s default would be to play it solo or with minimal accompaniment, I wouldn’t be without the other textures on the album version: Johnny Gimble’s fiddle, Mickey Raphael’s harmonica, the additional voices on the chorus. The instrumental outro stretches the song to nearly five minutes; I could lie in that bed of sound for much longer.

Clark mentions in interviews that ‘L.A. Freeway’ began life as a thought in the back of a car. The exact words change with each retelling, but are always based around what would become the song’s refrain: ‘If I can just get off of this L.A. Freeway, without getting killed or caught’. He holds on to the fragment for two years, letting the song grow in its own time. The lyrics turn again to fragments in other people’s projects: Without Getting Killed or Caught as the title for Tamara Saviano’s Clark biography and the documentary that follows (directed by Saviano and Paul Whitfield); Truly Handmade as the title for a posthumously released collection of acoustic demos. A reminder that song objects have their own biographies.1

‘We got something to believe in’. As good a line as any for a piece on Guy Clark or Heartworn Highways. Or Townes Van Zandt, Steve Earle, Larry Jon Wilson, David Allan Coe. For a long time, I wanted to write about the sense of familiarity I felt with these artists: hearing their music, reading about them, seeing them in Heartworn Highways. I first saw the film on British TV in the early 1990s, videoed it, played it back. Around 2003-4, I bought the DVD, watching it repeatedly in my room on Gallowgate during my first year and a half in Newcastle. It became something I’d put on like a record, something to comfort and reassure me. A coat from the cold. Something to believe in.

‘Texas—1947’. The train rendered in exquisite detail, but also the flattened coin. How the train imprints itself on the memory of the bystanders, while the six-year-old boy is smart enough and quick enough to get the memory stamped in nickel. The whole story recalled from decades later. Does he still have the coin?

Old No. 1’s cast of characters: Rita Ballou, the ‘walkin’ talkin’ Texas texture’; the ‘fiddler from Kentucky who swears he’s 83’; the old people of ‘That Old Time Feeling’—the salesman, the bluestime picker, the soldier, the lover; the old people of ‘Texas—1947’—old man Wileman, old Jack Kittrell; the old men playing dominoes in ‘Desperados Waiting for the Train’; ‘the lady beside me’ in ‘Like a Coat from the Cold’; the grown men and women of ‘Let Him Roll’—the tried and true wino; Alice, with a black veil covering her silver hair; the couple from the mission singing ‘Amazing Grace’; old one-eyed Jack. The folk of indeterminate age: the one-night-standers trying to feel fully dressed the next morning in ‘Instant Coffee Blues’; the hitchhiker ‘standin’ on the gone side of leavin’ in ‘She Ain’t Goin’ Nowhere’.

Johnny Gimble’s fiddle on ‘A Nickel for the Fiddler’. And how this song initiates future Clark songs: ‘Virginia’s Real’ on Texas Cookin’; ‘Sis Draper’ on Cold Dog Soup.

Gimble’s appearance on Old No. 1 was enough for me to pick up a double album of his. The Texas Fiddle Collection, CMH Records, 1982. I bought it in the early 1990s on one of my occasional culture-hunting trips to London. Rhythm Records in Camden, where I’d make a beeline after the record shops on Oxford Street and Tottenham Court Road and before heading to Compendium Books. Rhythm had so many hard-to-find treasures: soul gems, psyche reissues, Butch Hancock cassettes. I got my copy of Townes’ Live at the Old Quarter, Houston, Texas there; it still has the shop’s discreet sticker on the back.

The opening credits to Heartworn Highways. Guy’s hypnotic guitar figure for ‘L.A. Freeway’. The dedication to Skinny Dennis in both the film credits and Clark’s lyric. The shots of the artists—somehow, there’s always one I’ve forgotten since the last time I watched. Clark’s photo coming to life in time with the song.

The same song is later used for the opening credits of Without Getting Killed or Caught.

‘Desperados Waiting for the Train’. A song so good, no one can get its title correct. Sometimes it’s ‘desperadoes’, sometimes ‘waitin’’, sometimes ‘a Train’. A song packed with biographemes: playing ‘Red River Valley’ in the kitchen; the old man running his fingers through seventy years of living; dominos in the Green Frog Café; tobacco-stained chins. I didn’t need to know what ‘Moon & 42’ meant to be put square in the picture. ‘Like some old Western movie’ indeed.2

Freaky apple pie. Ice cream on a stick. Homegrown tomatoes. Fairs, festivals, barbecues. The evocation of the sensual.

It makes sense that ‘Let Him Roll’ and ‘Randall Knife’ should share a guitar figure. Two songs with a death at their centre, both concerned with what people leave behind. Personal effects. How to grieve in song.

‘Life’s a tune you whistle in the dark’. A line in ‘Bag of Bones’, from 2002’s The Dark. Another song to ignite my fascination with life writing and objects. A fascination Clark had too, if his lyrics are anything to go by (and they are). Bodies as objects with a complex relationship to age. Bodies as reminders of earlier incarnations.

The song as object, something to be crafted, sculpted, stored, retrieved. A trace left behind, from a life and for the benefit of other lives.

Visual imagery was always important. There are examples on all the albums, from the denim shirts of Old No 1 to the photograph on My Favorite Picture of You. Susanna Clark’s vital role, as artist and photographic subject. (And not forgetting her covers for Willie’s Stardust. and Emmylou’s Quarter Moon in a Ten Cent Town) The persistence of cigarettes across the discography. The chunky ring that appears whether Clark is holding a cigarette or a guitar. The thumb print on the cover of The Dark that serves as a trace of the body, evidence, seal of authenticity, identity. (The songs as evidence of lives lived, confessions). The CD booklet for The Dark uses the by-then common image of Clark as craftsman: wood shivers, basement workshop, customised guitar. The photos are by Jim McGuire (credited as ‘Senor McGuire’). Those are McGuire’s photos on the front and back of Old No. 1 too (credited to The Grease Brothers, his photography studio). McGuire’s Nashville Portraits is one of my favourite books of music photography. ‘The camera loves you, and so do I … click’.

There’s something to say about work: many of Clark’s songs are about the doing or the consequences or the memory or the lack of work: ‘Desperados’, ‘Boats to Build’, ‘Homeless’, ‘Immigrant Eyes’, ‘South Coast of Texas’. Also, the work of poetry: ‘Cold Dog Soup’.

Listening to Guy’s songs taught me that it was okay to write about the specific—things that you know about—and have it apply universally. When he tells you about Monahans in Texas-1947, that could be a similar experience anywhere in the world. You can write to the small picture and ir becomes the big picture. That’s how I learned about songs, just listening to songwriters like Guy.

—Lyle Lovett3

Clark’s songs mix time, age and experience, the texture of history and biography, the objects we live by and with, what is wrought upon our bodies and minds by time and the past.

Geographies of the imagination: ‘L.A. Freeway’ then and now and all the roads in between. Not so long ago, I found myself on a long southbound stretch of the A1, stuck in slow moving traffic, listening to Old No. 1 and really feeling that song, singing along, willing escape from the gridlock.

‘How she hangs that music in the air’ (‘Virginia’s Real’, on Texas Cookin’). A square dance painted in words and music. Multisensory country sublime.

‘Instant Coffee Blues’. Trying to make it rhyme: country grammar, southern phonemes, Texas textures. Then later, on ‘Homeless’ or ‘The Dark’, the realisation that the ends of days and lives don’t always rhyme.

Textures of the voice. Clark’s alternation of deep grain with high lonesome and yodelling registers.

Textures of the body, repeated gestures. Running your hands through years of living. Time, age, experience.

Rhythm: train songs, the rhythm of words and music. Narrative, storytelling, imagery, like some old western, characters and caricatures.

He didn’t like the ‘craftsman’ label that was put on him. He wanted to be thought of as a poet like his friend Townes.

There’s a 1988 interview with Townes Van Zandt and Guy Clark, part of a broadcast for KPFK-FM Folkscene that has appeared on various unofficial releases. Both artists have revealing and contrasting things to say about songwriting, craft, collaboration and whether the song exists for the songwriter or for others. Van Zandt says that he doesn’t think of writing a song for other people to sing; he implies that the song exists for itself. Clark points out that lots of writers in Nashville make their living writing songs for others which they have no intention of performing themselves. He then contrasts that with his own view: he writes songs to have things to perform. He says he wouldn’t be able to perform without his repertoire of songs. Might this be one of the reasons Clark disliked the ‘craftsman’ tag, that it placed too much emphasis on the song object at the expense of performance?

Tamara Saviano thinks that Clark’s alternative vocation as a luthier contributed strongly to people’s desire to label him as a craftsman (in contrast to, say. Leonard Cohen, another songwriter known for painstaking work on lyrics but who tends to be thought of as a poet). It may also have annoyed him that people referred to his friend Townes Van Zandt as the poet. There could be more than one, couldn’t there?

John Spong on the ‘songwriting as craft’ issue as it played out in Van Zandt and Clark:

Townes’ [songs] sounded almost metaphysical, like he’d plucked them off the air after they’d floated in through an open window, as he often claimed. Guy’s were stark and grounded, like he’d found them in the back of a roughneck’s pickup in the Monahans oil field.4

But note also JT Van Zandt’s insistence on his father’s work ethic when it came to crafting songs. He contradicts this a little in an interview cited by Saviano, where he claims that Clark had the stronger work ethic of the two. But the point is well made that the TVC-poet/GC-craftsman binary requires nuance.

“Keepers” was Clark’s phrase for songs that are worth recording. Like a fisherman, he implies, you hook and reel in a lot of songs from the subconscious but most of them are too scrawny and ill-shapen to take home. So you throw them back into the pond with instructions to eat a lot of plankton and fill out.

—Geoffrey Himes5

He didn’t need to be topical, and so the songs didn’t need to be finished quickly.

My least favourite of his songs are those too prosaically connected to events in his life. Evidence for the prosecution: the song he and Terry Allen wrote about his dog getting shot. Songs like ‘Desperados’ escape this danger, steeped as they are in everyday mythologies and ordinary affects. The ‘sumbitch’ landlord in ‘L.A. Freeway’ and the ‘S.O.B.’ shooter in ‘Queenie’s Song’ feel qualitatively different to me in terms of lyrical affect.

I’m always happy when other writers evoke objects and materiality when discussing Clark.

Holly Gleason:

There was the ashtray: a circle of skulls, often overflowing with the charred and twisted papers, hand stuffed with tobacco or otherwise. Everyone who wrote with Guy Clark knows it, a resonant artifact that spoke to life’s inherent earthiness.6

John Spong:

The rest of the room is cluttered with the ephemera of his life, some of it stored in little clementine orange crates, the remainder hanging on the walls and scattered on tables. Guy is endlessly loyal, and each item carries a specific sentimental tie. There’s a tight portrait of Van Zandt taken by their friend Jim McGuire. A cane that artist Terry Allen found for him in Santa Fe. Every last piece of a fiddle that Guy smashed on a mantel in a drunken fit forty years ago and still means to repair. And on a stand-up table along the back wall, the actual Randall knife, along with others sent in by fans and a letter of thanks signed by the knife maker himself.7

Craig Clifford and Craig Hillis use the term ‘ruthlessly poetic’ to describe a school of Texas singer-songwriters that include Clark, Van Zandt and several others. Acknowledging the strangeness of the term, they note that ‘it is, in writing as in songwriting, the unexpected but mysteriously telling phrase that lets us see something from a perspective that we wouldn’t ordinarily have access to’. What is ‘mysteriously telling’ about this particular phrase? One answer seems to be the dedication to purpose, such that Van Zandt ‘lived for the sole purpose of writing profound songs’. The authors attend to the issue of reading biography for clues to songcraft rather than reading biography into song content: ‘Is it really a matter of the purity of artistic intent of these ruthlessly poetic songwriters, or is it the ruthlessly poetic nature of the songs that we care about?’.8

Saviano’s biography is well-written and answers a lot of the questions I had about Guy Clark. At the same time, there were times I felt that my admiration fade. It was as if I needed the mystery to still be attached to the songs rather than to know that their writer was someone who, from a young age, was expert at many things and probably could have been a success in several fields. It’s odd because I’ve long thought of him as a craftsman (and there’s so much supporting material for that characterisation), but reading about his approach to doing things approached the banal at times. Does this provide an answer to why I’ve repeatedly slid away from trying to write about those country artists who made such an impression on me as a young man?

‘Hillbilly haiku’: the term Clark uses in ‘Cold Dog Soup’ to describe Townes Van Zandt’s songs. An apt description of the craft and labour of songwriting to which both artists adhered.

He takes influence from Japanese painting and negative space. ‘It’s what you leave out, so you focus on the important part rather than the clutter’.9

One of his early songs is ‘Step Inside This House’. A life sketched in objects: a picture on a wall, a book of poems, a prism glass, a guitar, a pair of boots, a yellow vest, a leather jacket and bag. He’s not happy with it. Too wordy. He doesn’t release it. When Lyle Lovett records the song as the title number of a 1998 covers album, Clark wishes he’d edit out the clutter. His own recording surfaces posthumously on Truly Handmade.

Clark’s use of imagery, especially that associated with paintings, photographs and films, comes through strongly in the interviews and reviews gathered in Saviano’s book. Barry Poss of Sugar Hill Records: ‘He creates these little intimate, personal narratives that speak to a larger landscape. He may be writing about a knife or a boat or a dance or a road or a hooker or even a tomato, but they’re also about the human condition and all its complexities and flaws’ (p. 210). Verlon Thompson, longtime Clark collaborator: ‘What impresses me is the way he uses fewer words to give you more images. With two or three words, you get a complete visual idea in your head about the character and the setting and what’s going on … One of the songs that I think illustrates that is ‘The Last Gunfighter Ballad’ … a three-minute movie’ (p. 192). Vince Gill: ‘The visual side of those songs [is] what annihilate[s] me’ (p. 192). Joe Ely describes hearing a Guy Clark song as ‘just like seeing a great movie’ (p. 228).

Some critics found Clark’s imagery to be clichéd, simplistic or sentimental. John Rockwell, writing for the New York Times in 1976, near the start of Clark’s solo career, uses the word ‘maudlin’: ‘an old gunfighter as a symbol of an anachronistic American spirit; the freeway as alienation; a prostitute showing up at the funeral of the man she once loved and shedding a tear’.10 Jon Pareles, reviewing a 1990 show by Clark, Townes Van Zandt and Robert Earl Keen for the same publication, notes a tendency for Clark’s songs to ‘slip into easy sentimentality and clichés (a caged bird, ties that bind) as they unequivocally praise the country over the city, friendship over alienation and the good old days over the present’. He finds Clark’s representation of women simplistic: ‘saints who would save a troubled man (“like a coat from the cold”) or whores who won’t’.11

Nanci Griffith on ‘She Ain’t Goin’ Nowhere’:

It’s always been my favourite song of Guy’s. It felt like it was my life story the first time I heard it. You know, Guy writes like Larry McMurtry, the novelist, he’s extraordinary at writing a woman’s feelings, finding that place in a woman’s heart.

After talking with a woman who runs a women’s shelter in Australia for which Clark’s ‘Better Days’ has become the theme song, he rewrites a line that he’s always found too lightweight (the one line the women in the shelter didn’t like either). The new version is recorded for Keepers and he makes sure Roseanne Cash includes the new lyric when she covers the song for This One’s for Him. Details matter to him.

I recall listening to This One’s for Him, the tribute album celebrating Clark’s 70th birthday, on a long coach journey in 2012. Standouts then and now:

• Willie Nelson, ‘Desperadoes Waiting for a Train’ [sic]. The ideal voice to put to this song. For me, so much more affecting than The Highwaymen’s multi-voiced version.

• Emmylou Harris & John Prine, ‘Magnolia Wind’. Sounding like a John Prine song: something about the clipped economy of the lyrics. These two voices together and Jen Gunderman’s accordion.

• Terri Hendrix, ‘The Dark’. Hendrix gets to the dark wonder of it.

• Patty Griffin, ‘The Cape’. This could have sat easily on her brilliant contemporaneous album American Kid.

• Kris Kristofferson, ‘Hemingway’s Whiskey’. Like Nelson, better on his own when covering Clark than with the Highwaymen. Again, an ideal voice-song match.

• Jack Ingram, ‘Stuff that Works’. Doing his mentor proud on this perfectly pitched version of one of my favourite mid-career Clark songs.

• Jerry Jeff Walker, ‘My Favorite Picture of You’. A new song to me when I heard JJW’s version (it would appear as the title track of Clark’s final studio album in 2013). A very Walkeresque song; I almost mistook it for an original at the time.

That I could go in listing is testament to the excellence of the musicians on the tribute and, of course, to the sturdiness of the material. Songs made of stuff that works.

It strikes me again that Guy Clark and others (Townes Van Zandt most obviously) were for me and a few of my friends something like what the people Clark sings about were for him. People who taught us how to do and think about things. And, just as Clark wondered why his mentor in ‘Desperados’ was ‘all dressed up like those old men’, we wondered why these songwriters weren’t marked out from the crowd. Discovering Townes standing in a car park outside a York pub ahead of a show one afternoon in 1994 and thinking: how can all these people just be walking by?

Vince Gill’s ‘Nothin’ Like a Guy Clark Song’ underlines the object-oriented nature of Clark’s songwriting. A list song made up of fragments of Clark lyrics and borrowing the guitar figure that Clark used for ‘Let Him Roll’ and ‘Randall Knife’; that musical figure becomes an evocative object in itself.

As Sherry Turkle notes, some objects are life companions.12 The Randall knife is a companion object and also the object that connects son to father. The ‘coat from the cold’ is a reliable object (an example of ‘stuff that works’), but is also a simile for a life partner. ‘Old friends shine like diamonds’.

The immortal lines from ‘Dublin Blues’:

Text within this block will maintain its original spacing when published

I have been to Fort Worth, and I have been to Spain
And I have been too proud to come in out of the rain
And I have seen a David, I’ve seen a Mona Lisa too
And I have heard Doc Watson play “Columbus Stockade Blues”

It’s not just the cultural levelling of the lyrics, it’s the ‘hmm-hmm’ after ‘Fort Worth’ and ‘David’. I was glad to hear Joe Ely retain those vital non-lexical rhymes in the version he recorded for the tribute album.

‘He didn’t know he couldn’t fly, and so he did’. (‘The Cape’)

The crackle on my copy of Old No. 1. Surprised I never bought a second vinyl copy. (I have two copies of the 1978 album Guy Clark for some reason). I suppose I’ve had the twofer CD of Old No. 1 and Texas Cookin’ for about as long as I’ve owned a CD player and there’s the crackle-free digital version that’s never off my car’s music system (how many journeys have been soundtracked by Guy Clark?). Even so, another vinyl purchase might be on the cards.

If I do get another copy, I’ll need to remember to transfer the inner sleeve from my old one.

As I occasionally mention in this newsletter, I’m writing a book about songs and objects. I started the newsletter as a way of moving the project forward during a time when it was difficult to find the space to write. The newsletter has taken on a life of its own, which I’m happy with, but in recent months I’ve been trying to steer it back to its founding purpose.

With that in mind, I’m finally tackling the work of Peter Blegvad and some artists he’s collaborated with over a long career of making music, illustrating, writing books and being the president of the London Institute of 'Pataphysics.

Blegvad is one of a handful of foundational artists for my project. Like many of the artists I’ve already written about here, his work provides fascinating insights into our relationship with the object world.

Some of the artists I’ve written about have been informing my thinking for decades. Some I’ve known for less time, often because of the way I think and the connections I make. As someone whose listening past involves a certain amount of prog and prog-adjacent rock and jazz from the 1970s (of relevance here: Robert Wyatt, Henry Cow, Carla Bley, Michael Mantler), I was aware of Blegvad’s work but hadn’t dived deeply.

That changed when I embarked on the Songs and Objects project in 2017. Reading Marcus O’Dair’s excellent book about Robert Wyatt and working on my own publications about Wyatt got me thinking about the artistic circles that Wyatt moved in. That was one entry point to Blegvad’s work. Another text by O’Dair, an interview feature with Blegvad about the 1977 album Kew. Rhone., was a second portal. A third was writing a book about the sound of nonsense, using a motley cast of characters offering playful ways of thinking about words, sounds and music.

It turned out to be a good time to get into the weird and wonderful world of Peter Blegvad generally, and Kew. Rhone. in particular.2 In 2014, Blegvad published a book about the album, a work that unlocked some of Kew. Rhone.’s mysteries and added many more.

What is Kew. Rhone. again?

A good question, with no definitive answer. I’m still puzzling it out, and I’ve been thinking about it for a while. Blegvad likes pictures and lists, and so do I, so let’s start with some pictures and a list.

• Kew. Rhone. is a 1977 album released by Virgin Records (the same year the label released Never Mind the Bollocks, Here's the Sex Pistols) and credited to John Greaves (music), Peter Blegvad (words) and Lisa Herman (vocals)

• Kew. Rhone. features several additional credits:

  • Greaves: piano, organ, bass, vocals and percussion

  • Blegvad: vocals, guitars, tenor sax

  • Andrew Cyrille: drums, percussion

  • Mike Mantler: trumpet, trombone (and engineering)

  • Carla Bley: vocals, tenor sax

  • Michael Levine: violin, viola, vocals

  • Vito Rendace: alto & tenor saxes, flute

  • April Lang: vocals

  • Dana Johnson: vocals

  • Boris Kinberg: vocals

• Kew. Rhone. was engineered at Grog Kill Studio, Woodstock, New York, in October 1976.

• Kew. Rhone. features a reproduction of C.W. Peale’s Exhuming the First American Mastodon on its front cover and illustrations by Peter Blegvad on the rear.

• Kew. Rhone. contains a song titled ‘Seven Scenes from the Painting “Exhuming the First American Mastodon” by C.W. Peale’, for which the album’s front cover serves as an illustration.

• Kew. Rhone. contains a metatextual song called ‘Pipeline’. The illustrations on the back sleeve refer to the song’s lyrics printed on the inner sleeve (and sung by Herman on the record) and the written/sung words refer to the cover illustrations. Herman actually sings ‘FIGURE B illustrates the assertion - “ambiguity can’t be measured like a change in temperature”’.

• Kew. Rhone. has a title track which begins with several lines made from the letters K, E, W, R, H, O, N and E. Examples include ‘we who knew no woe’, ‘we who were her hero’ and ‘when we were one’. Investigators of the album’s/song’s meaning(s) are also pointed to the almost-anagrams ‘nowhere’ and ‘know where’.

• ‘Kew. Rhone.’ (the song) also has lyrics made from the palindromic phrase ‘Peel’s foe, not a set animal, laminates a tone of sleep’.

• Kew. Rhone. has a song titled ‘Catalogue of Fifteen Objects and Their Titles’, one of several list songs on the album. Anyone who’s read my essays on list songs and catalogue songs, or any of the posts where I go to town on songs about objects, has a fair chance of understanding why I had to say something about this song/album/book/endeavour.

• Kew. Rhone. has a song called ‘Apricot’ which contains four footnotes. The footnotes are printed on the lyric sheet but, on this occasion, are not sung.

• Kew. Rhone. is, in Andrew Cyrille’s words, an album of ‘show music’.3

• Kew. Rhone. is, in Marcus O’Dair’s words, an album of ‘show music from a parallel world’.4

• Kew. Rhone. is jazz / art rock as it might have been created by a cast of pataphysicians, Dadaists or Oulipians.5

• Kew. Rhone. is, in Peter Blegvad’s words, ‘a work designed to resist interpretation even as it invites it’.6

A reasonable response to a list like this would be: ‘okay, enough listing, is the music any good?’ Greaves’ compositions are as playful, clever and unpinnable as Blegvad’s riddling words. The musicians all provide moments of brilliance. I wouldn’t say this results in the catchiest set of songs you’ll ever hear, nor the most moving. But I don’t think that’s the point. Catchiness isn’t everything. Humour and suggestion count for a lot too.

Kew. Rhone.’s unknowability extends to its sonic qualities. Andrew Cyrille’s ‘show music’ description offers one way of thinking about this. Music for a show that hadn’t been written yet, to slightly misquote Nina Simone. Or just ‘show music from a parallel world’, as Marcus O’Dair has it.

The Simone connection might not be as far off as it seems. She was, after all, a brilliant interpreter of Kurt Weill and other show composers, and these ingredients were influences according to Greaves. Responding to a list of critics’ comparisons that included Soft Machine, the Art Ensemble of Chicago, Kurt Weill and Leonard Bernstein, he suggested:

Kurt Weill certainly. Funny time signatures came from the Softs exploded by Henry Cow. American free jazz is all Andrew [Cyrille], who called it ‘show music’. Hence Bernstein. And we’ve always recognised the seamless incongruity of those lyrics and Lisa’s Broadway delivery.7

A listener’s propensity for those musical coordinates will partly determine the extent to which they’re receptive to Kew. Rhone.’s songs. I’m a fan of Wyatt-era Soft Machine. I love the Art Ensemble. I’m partial to a slice or two of Henry Cow. Musical theatre I’m less keen on, though I adore Nina Simone’s show tunes. The same goes for many theatre songs that became jazz standards.

Also in the ‘less keen’ camp: the crossover space between speech, dramatic exposition and song that you often find in musical theatre and which, thankfully, many of the best standards omit.

Kew. Rhone. has some of the vocalese quality of Eddie Henderson, Jon Hendricks, King Pleasure and Annie Ross, a style I admire greatly but sometimes find more conceptually satisfying than musically enjoyable.8 There are lyrics that sound like ideas played out rather than lines meant to be sung: weird abstraction, strange gameplay, disturbed songlines.

When I use words like ‘weird’, ‘strange’ and ‘disturbed’ here, they’re not meant as criticisms. I embrace the weirdness. And when I express reservations about the ‘catchy’ or ‘moving’ qualities of the songs (or the lack of them), again that’s not criticism but a reckoning with how these songs play in the wider worlds of pop, rock, jazz, folk and other styles I write about more frequently.

I have mixed feelings too about the anagrams in ‘Kew. Rhone.’ (the song). For all the crosswords I complete and word games I take part in, there’s something about anagrams and palindromes that can grate when it comes to music. To be more specific, there’s something about multi-word anagrams and palindromes that moves too far into artificiality. I think it’s the weird battle that has to go on between sense and nonsense, even though that’s one of the weird battles I usually like. Take palindromes like the long one in ‘Kew Rhone’ or the following from Weird Al Yankovic’s ‘Bob’: ‘I, man, am Regal, a German am I’; ‘Do nine men Interpret? “Nine men,” I nod’; ‘May a moody baby doom a yam’. In order to work as multi-word palindromes, they have to use regular English words, forcing a conventionality on them that their clever nonsense would otherwise challenge. They stick out. I know that, in Weird Al’s case, the point is to lovingly send up Bob Dylan’s nonsense lyrics of the 1960s, so not making sense is part of the point. But, but … tub tub.

Other examples are smoother. From ‘Bob’ again: ‘Madam, I’m Adam’; ‘never odd or even’; ‘too hot to hoot’; ‘do geese see God?’ It strikes me that the difference is between words that are ‘songful’ and those that are less so. That’s probably it: I’ve struggled with the songfulness of Kew. Rhone.’s more experimental lyrics.

Is experimental a more neutral word for Kew. Rhone.? Experimental and progressive, the kinds of terms hailed by magazines like The Wire or its lesser-known companion of the 1980s and 1990s, The Rē Records Quarterly (a publication I’ll return to below).

O’Dair: ‘Kew. Rhone., with its 3D songs and 7/4 bossa novas, was progressive – but not the sort of progressive that makes you want to punch it on the nose for its smug pomposity. This was a version of prog that poked fun at itself, and at anything else, while being absolutely serious at the same time’.9

Another question emerges. Is this music that’s too clever for itself? For us? I sometimes wonder about that. But I also revel in the play, just as I do when deciphering Wordles, Octordles, crosswords, Letter Boxes, Spelling Bees, Sudoku.

As for poking fun at oneself, yes, important every now and then. Always worth balancing the risks that come with taking things too seriously against those that come with not taking the right things seriously enough. Andrew Hugill touches on this in the introduction to his book ’Pataphysics: A Useless Guide:

How to write about something that exists mainly in the imagination, that constantly resists clear definition, is purposefully useless, and is regarded by many as a pseudophilosophy, a hoax, a joke, or a schoolboy prank? The enterprise is fraught with dangers. There is the risk of reduction … there is the problem of taking it all too seriously. Everybody knows that a joke explained is not a joke at all.10

There are times when I’ve had similar doubts over writing about Peter Blegvad’s work. Yet something compels me to try, not least because so many of the themes he explores and the artistic sources he draws from are ones that have long fascinated me and that eventually led to me wanting to write a book about songs and objects.

This isn’t my first ride on the taking-things-too-seriously rollercoaster. Some might say my entire career has been based on taking things too seriously, especially popular music. More specifically, I’ve published a couple of book chapters on Robert Wyatt’s love of, and use of, nonsense. These laid the groundwork for The Sound of Nonsense. I’ve also written about Georges Perec, one of my favourite writers and someone who took the interplay of the tragic, the playful and the absurd to extraordinary levels.

Kew. Rhone. is a work that invites, and deserves, exegesis, as Blegvad has noted on several occasions. One of these was in 1985 when he playfully contributed an interview with himself (apparently conducted in 1976, when the album was being prepared) for Rē Records Quarterly, a magazine-and-record series run by Henry Cow’s Chris Cutler.

On Kew. Rhone. (a record) ; A Few Words By The Editors of Amateur (a pamphlet)

It seems to us at Amateur that certain works by certain artists are not really complete until they have been thoroughly glossed, until commentary and exegesis, like colonies of clinging limpets, have extended the original contours and made the work of one the work of many. It seems to us, furthermore, that Kew. Rhone. (a singularly conceptual “concept album” of songs by John Greaves and Peter Blegvad, sung by Lisa Herman) is such a work. It cries out for annotation and analysis! Regrettably, no one in the nine years since its release has come forward to provide this service. In fact, so superb is the indifference of the community, that it was left for lyricist and illustrator Peter Blegvad to interview himself (in 1976), a mono-dialogue published here as Appendix B for the first time, a dia-monologue which, for all its vagaries, sheds some light at last on the ideas and processes which inform these remarkable chansons insolites, these little machines made of words, music and pictures.11

There’s plenty of Borgesian play here, from the self-interview and the mock academia to the folding of time references (the interview as a response to nine years of indifference conducted before the object of indifference even existed?).

That playful exegetic spirit, a channel for what Blegvad calls his ‘wackademic tendencies’, is on full display in his 2014 book about Kew. Rhone., published by Colin Sackett’s Uniformbooks.12

As Blegvad notes in the book, the twentieth anniversary of Kew. Rhone. had also been marked by a CD reissue of the album that contained a digital bonus in the form of ‘Kew.Rom’. As well as containing additional artwork (including reworkings of the original illustrations) and music, ‘Kew.Rom’ included ‘exegetical contributions from Andrew Cyrille, Carla Bley, Harry Mathews, Michael Mantler, Robert Wyatt’.

Four of the five listed above are musicians. Harry Mathews, a major influence on Blegvad, was a writer and a member of Oulipo (Ouvroir de littérature potentielle, or ‘workshop of potential literature’), the group of writers, mathematicians and artists who created works using constrained writing techniques.

In his brilliant recent book on Erik Satie, Ian Penman uses the term ‘rigorous playfulness’ to compare Satie and the Oulipo co-founder Raymond Queneau. That feels right for Blegvad too.13

From Penman’s book:

Calling something ‘playful’ as a way of not taking it seriously. The quality of lightness is too often underappreciated. The superficial playfulness of some practitioners of avant-garde art barely hides an intransigent, humourless, rhino-sized ego. Too many artists put a premium on difficulty, impenetrability, doom. No such transcendent value is afforded the light, the dizzy, the caressing. (157-8)

I detect variations on ‘playful’ happening here, but mainly I see connections between what Penman values in Satie and what I value in Blegvad.

I think of Borges too: playful wackademia, rigorously done.

Who is Peter Blegvad again?

We’re two and a half thousand words into this essay and I’ve yet to say much about Blegvad himself. I wanted to focus on Kew. Rhone. rather than on the biographies of its creators. Even so, I find myself led away from the album, song, book, CD-ROM and other KR materials partly because I want to know more about the artist and partly because Blegvad also leads us away via his writings and illustrations. Kew. Rhone. wouldn’t be what is it (whatever it is) without its illustrations and the wider wackademic contexts in which it resides. It’s clearly part of a much bigger Blegvadian cosmos that has been underway for several decades and which has appeared in many connected forms.

I think I’d need a book the length of Penman’s Satie study to do justice to Blegvad’s work. I’d be tempted to borrow Penman’s ‘three piece suite’ form too: part biography, part compendium, part diary. Foregoing that task for now, I offer some brief borrowed biographemes, beginning with the excellent overview provided on the Trouser Press website:

Peter Blegvad’s work contains some of the most oblique and poetic wordplay ever to make its way to song. An affecting singer and a fine guitarist, Blegvad has an uncanny knack for creating literate lyrics — a golden triangle of emotion, intellect and humor — and combining them with enduring melodies. A restless spirit that displays no patience for cliché runs through all of his work. And while Blegvad has hiked with many stellar companions, he has always blazed an utterly personal trail. It’s a testament to his hard work and clear vision that, though his references can sometimes be too arcane, literary or personal to be widely recognized, his work is generally friendly and inviting. This is in no small part due to a dry wit and a voice which can bring forth everything from anger to vulnerability with a folkish naturalism. Which is not to say that Blegvad’s a folksinger, just that folk music’s dictum of celebrating the natural, honest resonance of everyman’s voice is the path he follows.14

Here’s an equally useful bio written by Rupert Loydell for an article-length interview published in the journal Punk & Post-Punk in 2018:

Peter Blegvad is a writer, graphic artist, songwriter, musician, teacher and broadcaster. He has been making music since the mid 1970s with Slapp Happy, Faust, Henry Cow, John Greaves, Chris Cutler, the Golden Palominos, John Zorn, Andy Partridge and others. His weekly comic strip, Leviathan, ran in the Independent on Sunday from 1991 to 1998 and The Book of Leviathan was published in the United Kingdom and the United States in 2000 … He has supplied BBC Radio 3 with ‘Eartoons’ since 2002, and has won two Sony awards for his radio work, one in 2003 and one in 2012 (the latter for Use It Or Lose It a collaboration with composer Iain Chambers). He taught Creative Writing at the University of Warwick for seventeen years and was senior tutor in visual writing at the Royal College of Art, London from 2012 to 2015. He has taught several illustration workshops at the Die Hochschule Luzern – Design & Kunst.

He was awarded the Ordre de la Grande Gidouille by the Collège de ’Pataphysique, Paris, in 2000. In 2011 he was elected president of the London Institute of Pataphysics. An introduction to his life-long multi-media epistemological project Imagine, Observe, Remember is online at: http://www.amateur.org.uk. Related works have been exhibited in Kunstverein Hannover and Kunsthalle Düsseldorf (2004), in the Kunsthalle Luzern (2007), in Extra City, Antwerp (2010) and elsewhere. He co-hosts the Amateur Enterprises website (www.amateur.org.uk) with Simon Lucas.15

The interview that follows this makes for excellent reading and covers the full breadth of Blegvad’s work. Anyone who’s read his published writings will be familiar with the style, and some of the content, of his responses to Loydell’s questions (I’m assuming they were emailed; their composition suggest they were). Right off the bat, he points out that he has ‘encyclopaedic tendencies’ and is ‘drawn to impossible projects’. He talks about lists as portals to the infinite, Perec, Borges, Whitman, writing as ‘an elaborate form of displacement activity’, Wyatt, Holiday, Hopkins (Lightnin’ and Mary), Zorn, Partridge, the blues, drawing faceless tots, pataphysical epistemology and Words of Power (‘those non-lexical vocables in early rock ‘n’ roll, like awopbopaloobopalopbamboom! poppa-ooma-mow-mow, louie-louie, diddy-wah-diddy, woolly-bully’).

As for Blegvad’s cartoons, I mentioned his longest-running strip in one of my first Substack posts nearly two years ago. Here’s what I wrote:

Blegvad’s comic strip Leviathan, which ran in the Independent on Sunday through the 1990s, often dwelt on the minutiae of everyday life, presenting the world from the perspective of a baby called Levi. As Levi discovers the world, he helps to make it new and strange for the adult readers of Blegvad’s strip. Several of Blegvad’s episodes made reference to music, not surprising given his other role as a musician and songwriter. In six panels devoted to ‘little things’ in popular songs, the baby Levi and his constant companion, a cat named Cat, reflect on the confusing scales evoked by Roger Miller’s ‘Little Green Apples’, Burt Bacharach and Hal David’s ‘My Little Red Book’, The Everly Brothers’ ‘Wake Up Little Susie’, the ‘little letter’ in Chuck Berry’s ‘Roll Over Beethoven’, Willie Dixon’s ‘Little Red Rooster’ and Prince’s ‘Little Red Corvette’. At the bottom of the strip are four miniature panels depicting figures identified as Little Richard, Tiny Tim, Little Anthony & the Imperials and The Small Faces: musicians whose performing names drew attention to pop’s fascination with the diminutive.

Leviathan was succeeded by a shorter-lived series called The Pedestrian. Blegvad compared the strips as follows:

‘The Pedestrian’ (1999-2000) is the antidote to ‘Leviathan’ (1991-1999) in that it involves minimal drawing, and minimal fantasy (both ran in the Independent). Also, there are very few people in it; it’s non-anthropocentric. Things, not people. Our species is so solipsistic! It’s not the grand themes of Nature the strip celebrates and explores but the mystery of quotidian ephemera.

…

Maybe all three [Leviathan, The Pedestrian and Amateur Enterprises] share a tendency to look at familiar things in a way that makes them strange again, as all things once were, back when we were ALIVE and ALERT in a way that habit cures. In this sense, maybe all three are about LIFE against DEATH. Hmmm. That might be bollocks.16

The pedestrian is the walker and the ordinary. Blegvad’s illustrations play with both meanings, producing documentary hallucinations of the everyday stroller.

A coincidence of reading trajectories forces me to compare Blegvad’s ‘On the Nose’ with this from Penman’s Satie book: ‘There ought to be a technical term for all those tiny evanescent moments experienced in a city. Something heard from a window… a face glimpsed for mere seconds… something grazing the skin eye or ear and then gone forever. Stray details felt with disproportionate intensity.’ (166).

Satie’s furniture music and Blegvad’s pedestrian meditations? A similar focus on the intimate contours of the everyday, the functional, the almost unnoticed.

I can’t stop noticing how crowded the intersection of the Blegvad-Penman Venn Diagram has become: references to Robert Walser, Jorge Luis Borges, Georges Perec, Raymond Queneau, Alfred Jarry, Gaston Bachelard, Fernando Pessoa, Carla Bley, encyclopaedias, Oulipo, surrealism, umbrellas. Olson’s saturation job: everything connecting to everything else.

Penman: ‘The encyclopaedia and the charity shop are both spaces which facilitate the chance meeting. Echoes, arrows, eureka moments. Is this merely chance, tho’, or a hint of some wider skein of connections? As if a secret book of names underlay all our lives and everything we do is merely a fond, best-intentions attempt to bring it out into the light.’ (Erik Satie, 199)

Blegvad: ‘Although it’s almost 40 years ago, I remember the Sturm und Drang, but also the euphoric sense I had while working on these songs that everything I read or saw or heard seemed relevant or a potential part of the project.’ (Kew. Rhone., 10)

Another infinite nexus: Blegvad’s Imagine Observe Remember. A book published in 2020 (Uniformbooks), its rabbit-holed pages offering the documented traces of what has been, for Blegvad, a lifelong project. A book I read with an increasingly resigned glee. Of course Blegvad would mention Pessoa’s alter ego Bernardo Soares (The Book of Disquiet never far from my mind or reading pile), hypnagogia (a book on which I’d recently bought at a charity shop), microscope pioneer Antonie van Leeuwenhoek (who I’d been reading about in Siddhartha Mukherjee’s The Song of the Cell AND Ed Yong’s I Contain Multitudes), Leonora Carrington (whose stories and paintings I’d been studying), Simonides and the memory theatre (bizarrely, I found that Blegvad and I had been teaching this last topic to university students at roughly the same time in 200917).

Another nexus: Milk: Through a Glass Darkly. A book from 2023 in which Blegvad suspends the act of writing his own observations and, in the time-honoured tradition of the literary collector, provides a list of quotations related to milk.

Another chance encounter—this one created by a social media algorithm that reads me like a book—leads me to another connection. Peter Blegvad and Lonnie Holley. Artists from very different backgrounds, making very different art. But something links them for me: the pursuit of lifelong projects through words, music and visual art; work in one medium reflecting (on) work in another; the dizzying, revealing wordplay, a recognition of the poetry and potential of unremarkable objects. Thinking of them, I detect ‘the barely audible melody of random connections’ (Penman, Satie, 211).

Another way of putting this: if I’d ever wondered what my peculiar constellation of knowledges qualified me for, one answer would be a thorough appreciation of Peter Blegvad’s books and records.

What does it sound like again?

I’ve shed enough ink for now. It’s time to share some music. First off, the Kew. Rhone. album as it currently exists on Bandcamp, where it’s credited to Peter Blegvad.

This makes me think about the various formats in which Kew. Rhone. has appeared. I find traces of the album and its world on LPs, CDs, CD-ROMs, in print magazines, digital magazines, books, as digital files on Spotify, YouTube, Bandcamp.

Digital ecosystems make versioning easy. Versions of the song ‘Kew Rhone’, for example.

From John Greaves’ 1995 album Songs, sung by Robert Wyatt:

Another Wyatt rendition from the album Around Robert Wyatt by Orchestre National de Jazz (2009):

The anagrams stand out here, and are repeated. For me, this also evokes Wyatt’s own work: that thing of repeating a word so much that it falls apart, loses its sense, exposes a nonsense moment, shows how sense is contingent and contextual.

A live version from a 1993 concert released as Passage du Nord Ouest in 2020 features brilliant guitar from François Ovide:

From Greaves’ 2017 album Piacenza. This contains new words ‘about’ Kew Rhone. It took me a while to realise they are from a poem Lisa Herman contributed to the Kew. Rhone. book in 2014.

Live version by Greaves and Annie Barbazza from the 2023 album Earthly Powers:

The new words from Herman’s poem, the Piacenza recording and the live recording by Greaves and Barbazza reappear as a song called ‘Kew Rhone Is Real’ on a 2025 album by Gloyw, the trio of Greaves (bass, voice), Régïs Boulard (drums) and Olivier Mellano (guitar).

These are just some variations on ‘Kew. Rhone.’ There are also version of other songs from the album. I’ll round this off, though, with a song that doesn’t feature on Kew. Rhone. but looks back to the time of the album’s creation. It’s called ‘The Song’ and it has appeared on a few releases. Its first recorded outing, as far as I know, was on the 1988 album Smell of a Friend by The Lodge, a short-lived group comprising John Greaves, Peter Blegvad, his brother Kristoffer Blegvad, Jakko Jakszyk and Anton Fier. Division of labour on songwriting was identical to Kew. Rhone., with Greaves composing the music and Blegvad the lyrics.

Text within this block will maintain its original spacing when published

No mere machine made of music
Of words and music as other songs are
This was the Song
A recipe, a remedy, a cure

My favourite version is the one Robert Wyatt sings for Greaves’ Songs album. Full of the wistful mixture of melancholia and wonder that Wyatt’s voice uniquely provides.

All summer long, we were stalking what we came to call the Song.

Does this leave us any closer to knowing what Kew. Rhone. was or is? I hope so. I can’t really know. It’s an album that opens many portals. I thought I’d already travelled through most of them. Writing this piece, I realised how short-sighted that assumption was. Drawn to making connections and searching for patterns, I would have gone on seeking them anyway. Writers like Blegvad and Penman, pattern-seekers extraordinaire, only make my condition more incurable.

Before I dive in, I want to give a nod to Robert Gilbert’s excellent Substack essay on September of My Years from three years ago, which weaves analysis of the album with accounts of Guy Talese’s ‘Frank Sinatra Has a Cold’ article, the TV special that Sinatra recorded around the same time, and the subsequent Moonlight Sinatra album. I haven’t drawn on the Talese text for my piece, though I discuss an offshoot of the New Journalism of the time in the form of album liner notes.

Lingering plays a large part in this music and in my reflections on it. Which is one way of saying that there’s quite a long on-ramp here. Anyone wishing to jump straight to the September material can click here.

Last Night When We Were Young

To listen to ‘You Make Me Feel So Young’ or ‘Young at Heart’—representative examples of Frank Sinatra’s vocal art whose classic performances represent the ascendancy of his mature style—is to hear a voice that promises to make its listeners feel young, that betrays its age (and perhaps ours) through its seductive power. Its crooning style may be aided by, and made possible by, developments in microphone technology that had revolutionised the art of singing in the years preceding these performances. But we don’t hear the microphone, we hear the voice and the body it summons. As Steven Connor writes:

the crooning voice is seductive because it appears to be at our ear, standing forward and apart from the orchestral background with which it is nevertheless integrated … Such a voice promises the odours, textures, and warmth of another body … Most of all, perhaps, the imaginary closeness of such voices suggest to us that they could be our own; they are the magical antidote to the grotesque and insufficient effigies of our voice returned to us by the tape-recorder. These voices—Frank Sinatra, or Billie Holiday, or Tori Amos—are loved because they are recognized.1

That the voice could be our own (if we could love our own voices as much as we love these) suggests that, when the voice is singing to us of youth, we may feel ourselves to be young within its presence. ‘So long as the inner feeling of youth remains alive,’ wrote Simone de Beauvoir, ‘it is the objective truth of age that seems fallacious: one has the impression of having put on a borrowed mask’.2

Sinatra’s 1950s songs were heard as individual numbers but were also collected on extended-play singles and long-playing albums. Songs for Swingin’ Lovers!, which included ‘You Make Me Feel So Young’, was one of a series of concept albums that Sinatra recorded for Capitol. Theses albums tended to present the artist as either upbeat optimist (A Swingin’ Affair, Come Fly With Me, Come Dance With Me) or downcast loser (In the Wee Small Hours, Only the Lonely, Where are You?, No One Cares).

The LP, which had been introduced in the late 1940s and came of age during the following decade, was a technological event that helped to secure Sinatra’s persona and was arguably as crucial to his mature art as the microphone had been to his early career. It allowed for the concept album, which in turn allowed for the crafting of time and narrative and brought cohesion to the work contained in its grooves. Such cohesion did not necessarily mean the promotion of a consistent persona or story, however. Sometimes it was more important to evoke a mood as the album’s concept. As Roger Gilbert observes,

The LP proved ideal for Sinatra because, while he generally tried to give each of his albums a distinct mood, the inherent disjunctiveness of the form allowed him to explore a range of emotional tones, unfettered by the need to present a consistent persona; song followed song without the artificial glue of plot or patter.3

And, as Travis Elborough notes, Sinatra’s parallel career as a screen actor strengthened his believability when taking on the roles suggested by his album titles and concepts, as did his listeners’ awareness of his love life:

In all these roles, he was a consummate method actor, only recording after 8 p.m. to maximise the lustre of his voice and drawing on events in his own life for sustenance. If he sounded palpably lost on ‘In the Wee Small Hours’ or ‘Only the Lonely’, then it wasn’t unreasonable for audiences to assume that the recently departed Ava [Gardner] or a spat with Lauren Bacall were to blame … or perhaps to be credited. In many respects Sinatra accelerated and popularised this pseudo-psychological trend—to a point popular singers, much like Hollywood actors until newfangled questions of ‘motivation’ arose, hadn’t really been expected to care about what they were saying, only to pretend and to sing the lines well.4

Like many other developments in music technology, the LP was often implicitly (and sometimes explicitly) gendered as a masculine artefact. This was especially the case with those recordings associated with the mid-century hi-fi boom. Like the discourse and instructional material that had accompanied sound reproduction technology from its earliest days—notable in dedicated journals such as The Gramophone—the long-playing record often came addressed to an assumed male listener. We see this in the advertising of record players and records in the popular and specialist press and also in the liner notes printed on record covers. Such texts place the male listener in an idealised, isolated domestic sphere—a dedicated listening room, perhaps, equipped with the latest in high fidelity technology—and able to reflect on life’s serious issues away from the distractions of the workplace or the rest of the home. In the 1950s and 1960s, this was particularly notable in the genres of exotica, mood music and what developed into ‘easy listening’, but it can also be detected in the way that pop and jazz artists were presented.5

The liner notes for Songs for Swingin’ Lovers!, for example, present five stages, or facets, of Sinatra’s career, from his early popularity as a crooner to his position over a decade later as a ‘knowing’ artist:

For teen-agers, when he himself was young and frail, Frankie stood in the theater spotlight and sang with all his heart, till the throng of girls screeched their delight. … For adventure-loving moviegoers, he became the ill-starred soldier, private Maggio, and his spirited, sensitive performance won a coveted Academy Award. ... For sad romantics, singing bittersweet ballads, he gently caught the mood of the wee, small hours of the morning, and created a best-selling record album. ... For observers of the social scene, he courageously fashioned a new identity in his taut, dramatic film portrayal of the man with the golden arm. ... And now, for swingin’ lovers, he returns to what is, after all, home grounds—to the happy task of singing the most enchantedly romantic songs he knows. No one can do this with greater verve or skill than can Frank Sinatra, who is surely one of the most knowing and compelling entertainers anywhere.

The distinction between the ‘Sinatra for girls’ and the later Sinatra(s) would become a mainstay of such texts. Sometimes a distinction is made between the teenage female audience and an older female audience, as on the (uncredited) liner notes to the 1968 compilation Someone to Watch over Me, where we’re told that ‘all the females swoon from sixteen to sixty’. The text continues, ‘Even men like him for his unequaled way with a song; and they admire him, perhaps grudgingly, for his prowess as a Casanova’. Far from contradicting my suggestion that an implied male fan is addressed in most of the liner notes, I feel this only confirms it; it speaks to the male listener between the lines, as it were.

While the first sentence of the Swingin’ Lovers liner note is the only one that explicitly genders its audience, I’d argue that a male listener is subsequently assumed, partly in distinction to the screeching girls and partly through the emphasis on Sinatra’s expertise and mastery, culturally coded at the time as masculine traits (or traits appreciated by men). That the ‘sad romantics’ he sang for were probably imagined as male is confirmed in the liner notes to Frank Sinatra Sings for Only the Lonely provided by lyricist Sammy Cahn and composer Jimmy Van Heusen, where ‘the lonely’ for whom Sinatra is singing are exemplified as ‘the keeper of the lighthouse’, ‘the New York policeman’, ‘the lyricist and composer’ and ‘the losers’. The gender of the latter is asserted by a note that reads ‘This album was nearly titled “For Losers Only,” until it was decided that this could well be mistaken for a collection of songs dedicated to the gentlemen of the two-dollar window’.

This process of creating Sinatra as object of admiration and identification for the male LP listener would be taken to further extremes with the launch of Sinatra’s Reprise record label and Stan Cornyn’s liner notes.

Sinatra Stayeth

Many writers have highlighted connections between Sinatra and the lyrics he sang, especially those lyrics relating to loss and experience. Is it his experience we are hearing, his ‘real’ late voice? Or is it technique, a set of skills perfected by a trained and talented singer?

Whatever the case, what seems important here is the construction of a fantasy whereby the communication channel between singer and listener becomes transparent. The classic tropes were well in place as Sinatra entered the 1960s on his way to his fifth decade. For many commentators, this decade would mark the point where Sinatra’s art started to decline, where he became more power-hungry and arrogant, more obsessed with his public persona than with dedicating himself to great music. Some see the initial run of albums he produced for his new label Reprise as literally a reprise of the work that had re-established his reputation in the previous decade. His old label Capitol clearly saw it this way too, launching legal action against Reprise for what were perceived to be almost identically themed albums to those they’d released.

To an extent, Sinatra’s Reprise work can be seen as a repeat of the dynamics of mastery and vulnerability essayed so powerfully on the classic Capitol albums. Far from making the later work redundant, however, the Sixties albums provide fascinating commentary both on Sinatra’s continued layering of the self and on the new historical context in which he found himself. He had fairly easily survived the coming of rock ’n’ roll in the 1950s, producing work that was amongst his strongest even as the new rockers were capturing the youth market; indeed, one way in which his music endured was precisely as an antidote to the new music, as an ‘adult’ alternative.

The Sinatra of the 1950s was contrasted with his own ‘frail’ youthful self. Now, in the 1960s, he could be contrasted with a younger generation of artists. By the end of the decade, Sinatra was veering between continued disparagement of the new popular music and a strange attraction to it. Whereas rock ’n’ roll had been fairly easy (for those who so desired) to dismiss as a fad once pioneers such as Elvis Presley, Chuck Berry, Little Richard, Jerry Lee Lewis disappeared from sight or got absorbed into the mainstream, the pop and rock artists of the 1960s showed no such sign of fading away. Not only would some of them become label mates of Sinatra on Reprise; many would also find The Voice recording songs they had written or with which they were associated.

One of the most obvious ways in which Sinatra’s layered self developed was a continuation of the kinds of narrative written about him for promotional purposes. The sleeve notes from Sinatra’s 1966 album Strangers in the Night, written by Stan Cornyn, are worth quoting at length as a typical example of the way Sinatra was spoken about by hagiographers of the time:

ON SINATRA or HOW TO BE TIMELESS TONIGHT

Back in New York, where he started, where twenty thousand bobby soxers once pressed themselves against the doors of The Paramount Theatre to see him, things are different. The brilliant bronze doors are green with neglect. On one side wall, the chalk legend “The Animals Are Loved Only By Girls Named Josephine”.

Animals may come, and they sure do go, but Sinatra stayeth. He stays to sing. Whatever it says at the top of your calendar, that’s what Sinatra sings like: 66, 67, 99 ... He isn’t with the times. More than any other singer, he is the times.

If the electric guitar were disinvented tonight, a few thousand singers would be out on their amps. But not Sinatra.

He defies fad. He stayeth. He has known more and felt more about the stuff songs are made of, the words of poets. He’s been a Stranger in the Night, and you have to be long rid of baby fat to be that Stranger. You can’t sing the way he does until you’ve been belly to belly with Reality a few times.

That’s what makes insight, and what’s made The Sinatra. What’s made him last, and get better. Allowed him to last through The Age of Anxiety and The Age of the Atom and The Age of Acne.

He’s lasted. Most men would give away twenty years of life to be him, or even to have his memories.

...

So the man’s the master of pop singing form. But that’s not the big thing. What’s the big thing is the way he uses form.

Sinatra, when he sings at you, doesn’t look at you. He looks about six inches behind your eyes.

His eyes a little far away. A little closer to where the truth lives.6

There’s much to note here, from the period language through the criticism of rock music to the alliance of voice and gaze. Cornyn, who became an executive at Reprise, wrote liner notes to sixteen of the albums Sinatra released, from 1964’s It Might as Well Be Swing to 1984’s L.A. Is My Lady, as well as an extended note for a 1995 collection of Reprise recordings. As Gilbert Gigliotti observes, in authoring so many liner notes, Cornyn became ‘the voice of Frank Sinatra’.7

It might be more accurate to say that Cornyn became an important part of a much larger machinery that produced this ‘voice’ and which would also include lyricists, composers, arrangers, musicians, engineers, producers, other label executives, promoters and critics. But Gigliotti’s highlighting of Cornyn as a part of this process is an intriguing one. Gigliotti notes the mixture of New Journalism (as essayed by Tom Wolfe, Gay Talese and others), ‘hip’ language, poetic devices and advertising spiel that make up this essentially hagiographic discourse.

Part of Cornyn’s job as a Reprise employee was to market Sinatra, so we might be wary of reading too much serious commentary into such texts. But it’s equally important that Cornyn is a narrator of Sinatra’s public life in a way that is both inclusive and exclusive; through him, we get to hear about details we might not otherwise be privy to—orchestra rehearsals, recording sessions, conversations between Sinatra and his friends and fellow musicians. More than this, Cornyn’s writing reminds us, as Gigliotti notes, of the proximity between creative writing (especially poetry) and the language of marketing.

Cornyn’s texts become another creative component of the layered self that is Sinatra’s persona. They also allow us to witness the development of Sinatra’s career, replete as they invariably are with allusions to his songs and his past. The factors of time, age and experience are all underlined by Cornyn’s texts and used to narrate Sinatra to his audience and set the stage for listening. This sense of a narrated life becomes even clearer when the pieces are brought together, as they are in Gigliotti’s analysis and in the long text ‘Eye Witness’, which Cornyn contributed to the boxed set Frank Sinatra: The Complete Reprise Studio Recordings in 1995.8

In Cornyn’s notes, Sinatra’s ‘existential man’ comes to the fore once more. In hearing him sing of life, love and loss, and in seeing him portrayed on his record sleeves and in publicity material as a kind of existential hero—a graduate of the school of hard knocks, turned observer of the human condition—we simultaneously identify with his similarity to us (we too have lived, loved and lost) and marvel at his difference, his unattainable cool, his mastery of sartorial and vocal style, his success: even, Cornyn claims, his memories.

September of My Years

If record sleeves were one place in which Sinatra’s public persona was developed to an extent that would encourage biographical readings of his song texts—something hinted at in the 1950s but never taken to quite such extremes—the material Sinatra would perform from the mid-1960s onwards would take this even further. While Sinatra had long been praised for his ability to ‘own’ the material he sang, now he would become more and more the explicit subject of that material as songwriters, arrangers, producers and poets lined up to create pieces specifically for Sinatra to sing.

One such example is the 1965 album September of My Years, released as Sinatra was approaching his fiftieth birthday. The album was designed as a way of recognising and aestheticizing Sinatra’s ‘considerable’ age.

That fifty may not strike us as ‘old’ nowadays serves as a useful reminder of the relativity of age. This relativity works itself out in multiple complex ways but I’d flag three pertinent points: an understanding of age in the 1960s; an understanding of age in the world of pop (then and now); and an understanding of age in relation to gender. It wouldn’t have seemed as premature in the mid-twentieth century as now to refer to a fifty-year-old American man as being in the autumn of his years. While there has always been a strong association between pop music and youth, Sinatra had moved on from the youth audience of his early career (1940s) to be recognised (by the 1950s) as a performer of adult contemporary material, even while pursuing the life of a ‘middle-aged adolescent’. As for gender, the presentation of a fifty-year-old man would have been far easier for the culture industry to handle than for a woman of the same age, due to the long-established, and still prevalent, acceptance of ageing masculinity in contrast to the disparaging of ageing femininity. Sinatra’s late middle age could be written about—mournfully, elegiacally or victoriously—in ways that would not be available to female popular music performers then or more recently.9

Charles Granata sees September of My Years not as a repeat of the earlier thematic albums, but as a distillation of ‘everything Frank Sinatra had ever learned or experienced as a vocalist’:

Where programs like Only the Lonely and No One Cares carry a common theme, they are as much about Sinatra the actor as Sinatra the singer; with September of My Years, he is the concept.10

And, as Robert Gilbert put it in his essay on September of My Years, ‘To hear Sinatra in the mid sixties is to hear a voice that is imbued with wisdom, even callused from the unrelenting need, as he once sang, “to live, live, live until I die.”’ There’s no escape, by this point, from the equation of the biography and the music. The title of the NBC TV special that aired in November 1965 ahead of Sinatra’s fiftieth—A Man and His Music—played on that same conflation.

September of My Years is a song suite that presents a search for lost time even as it asserts an acceptance of ageing. Many of the references to passing time are seasonal: ‘one day you turn around and it’s summer / the next day you turn around and it’s fall’ (‘The September of My Years’); ‘you are the summer / and I am the autumn’ (‘Don’t Wait Too Long’); ‘the autumn of my years’ (‘It Was a Very Good Year’); ‘winter is near’, ‘when the wind was green at the start of the spring’ (‘When the Wind Was Green’). There are also references to days growing shorter, twilight nearing, lines showing, leaves falling, colours changing, frost and snow appearing.

The singer presents himself as a man for whom a life spent in ‘wandering ways’ has brought accumulated experience and wisdom; a man ‘old enough to know’, as a line in ‘How Old Am I?’ puts it. He is a man who has, in the words of a Borges poem, ‘seen the things that men see’.11 He wears his experience in the lines on his face and the silver in his hair; the lines are ‘well-earned souvenirs’. And he notes of the silver that ‘it took many lovers quarrels to put it there’ (‘How Old Am I?’).

Another repeated metaphor is song as a representation of passing time. In ‘Don’t Wait Too Long’, he advises a younger person that ‘your song’s beginning / while mine’s nearly sung’. Seasons and songs are combined in ‘This Is All I Ask’ with the lines ‘let the music play, as long there’s a song to sing / then I will stay younger than spring’.

‘This Is All I Ask’ luxuriates in the ‘lingering sunsets’ and the value of slowness that one may discover in later years (years which represent, for the singer, ‘the prime of my life’) and which, nearly five decades later, the eighty-year-old Leonard Cohen would praise in his song ‘Slow’.12

This sense of lingering and luxuriating extends to Sinatra’s singing, as he dwells on certain lines, syllables and sounds. While this had long been a staple of the Sinatra style, the lingering vocal here has a particular relevance to the themes of passing time and spending time. Even as he warns younger listeners to make good use of time in ‘Don’t Wait Too Long’, there’s a sense of justification to be had in the possibility to dwell a while in the space of enunciation. Listen to how he stretches out the words ‘don’t, ‘wait’ and ‘long’ at the close of that song.

This would be as good a point as any to highlight Gordon Jenkins’ brilliant arrangements on this album. For Charles Granata, they are ‘melodically superior to any [Jenkins] created for Sinatra in the past, going beyond his usual reliance on strings to demonstrate the complex harmonic voicings and instrumental textures and rhythms he was capable of’.13 Whether that’s the delicate use of harp at the start of the album, the cascading strings that complement the many references to falling leaves, or the folk music flourishes in ‘It Was a Very Good Year’, there’s always something fascinating going on. In the section of ‘Don’t Wait Too Long’ that precedes the finale I’ve posted above, Sinatra sings the title refrain in conversation with the keyboard in a masterful example of vocal/instrumental spacing.

When Sinatra reprises ‘Last Night When We Were Young’, the song he had recorded for In the Wee Small Hours over a decade before, it’s not only an expression of a heartbroken lover, but also a reflection on time passing and past time. As before, Sinatra emotes most powerfully on the first syllable of ‘ages ago’, lingering on the first word as though he doesn’t wish to let it out. This lyric now bears the added resonance of referring to the period, ‘ages ago’, when Sinatra first sang the song.

SoMY ‘Ages ago’ example 1:

SoMY ‘Ages ago’ example 2:

A similar reference to the singer’s past can be read into ‘Hello, Young Lovers’ by thinking back to the ‘lovers’ albums Sinatra had recorded for Capitol: ‘I’ve been in love like you’, he sings, as though recalling the past. Even back in the Fifties, he was cast as the distant observer, allowing us, his listening subjects, to relegate to him the documentation of young love and the way it felt. This sense of Sinatra as the external, eternal observer is echoed in ‘It Gets Lonely Early’, with its references to ‘every single endless day and’ ‘every single lovely day’ and questions addressed to a general addressee: ‘it gets lonely early, doesn’t it?’; ‘it was lovely, wasn’t it?’. Again, Sinatra lingers on key words, splitting ‘endless’ and ‘lovely’ into long first syllables (‘end’, ‘love’) and shorter second syllables.

‘Endless’ example:

‘Lovely’ example:

‘The Man in the Looking Glass’ presents a classic image of ageing, that of the person looking into the mirror and not always recognising the reflection shown there. The literary scholar Kathleen Woodward has referred to this process as ‘the mirror stage of old age’, a point at which the subject refuses to recognise the external signs of ageing etched on the body by time and experience.14 Listening to Sinatra, we might rather think of it as a mirror stage of middle age, a time of equal anxiety for many.

Just as Woodward connects this mirror stage to the work of Marcel Proust (in particular, his extraordinary rendering, in Le temps retrouvé, of the dawning perception of age in others and in oneself), so we might detect a Proustian strategy at work on this album. Our singer’s attempts to control the narrative of the self aim for mastery even as they articulate anxiety. By voicing the narrative, by modelling the promise that he could capture every moment from the past to show he hasn’t lost it, the singer claims a kind of victory over time. But, at the end of the song, he’s yet older and realises, perhaps, that the act of narrating involves so much time. A lifelong quest to narrate a life.15

The sense of lingering extends to the running time of ‘It Was a Very Good Year’. At nearly four and a half minutes, its unusually long for a Sinatra recording (‘longer than the first act of Hamlet!’, he quipped while recording it—see the footage from the studio below). The song tells the story of a life in stages, with the opening and closing lines of each verse framing their contents with a reference to a particular age: ‘when I was seventeen’, ‘when I was twenty-one’, ‘when I was thirty-five’. In each case the lines frame ‘a very good year’ and, like photographs, the verses detail a few vivid memories, what we might think of, after Roland Barthes, as ‘biographemes’:

[W]ere I a writer, and dead, how I would love it if my life, through the pains of some friendly and detached biographer, were to reduce itself to a few details, a few preferences, a few inflections, let us say: to “biographemes” whose distinction and mobility might go beyond any fate and come to touch, like Epicurean atoms, some future body, destined to the same dispersion; a marked life, in sum, as Proust succeeded in writing his in his work.16

The biographemes summoned in Sinatra’s song include soft summer nights, a village green, city girls with perfumed hair, and riding in limousines with ‘blue-blooded girls of independent means’.

Following the logic of the biographeme, Stan Cornyn channels the imagery of the album’s themes in his liner notes:

He sings of the penny days. Of the rose-lipt girls and candy apple times. Of green winds, of a first lass who had perfumed hair. ... He has lived enough for two lives, and can sing now of September. Of the bruising days. Of the rouged lips and bourbon times. Of chill winds, of forgotten ladies who ride in limousines.17

It’s interesting that Cornyn doesn’t add much in the way of mythologising for once. No new layers to the Frankenstein’s monster: it’s all there in the songs. The conflation of man and music does its convincing work, as if all these songs were written for or about Sinatra.18

The fourth verse of ‘It Was a Very Good Year’ opens differently, in the present—‘now the days are short, I’m in the autumn of the year’—and the singer considers his life differently, as ‘vintage wine from fine old kegs’. The ‘very good year’ is connected to maturity, ageing seen as something to celebrate.

As in Joni Mitchell’s ‘A Case of You’, this wine is bittersweet. The singer’s still lost in memories of the past even as he boasts of his achievements and his present status. The song could be heard as a bearing-up to biological destiny through a particular form of boastful masculine self-fashioning, another moment in the ongoing dialectic of the swinger and the loser, albeit that the loss hymned here is not that of a ‘mere’ romance, but of an unrecoverable past.

The storytelling aspect of this song, echoed later on Side Two in the song ‘Once Upon a Time’, calls to mind the traditional ballad, a correspondence made more explicit by the constant reference to passing years and seasons. Sean Wilentz and Greil Marcus also make this connection in their book about American ballads, The Rose & the Briar:

After World War II, amid the explosion of a musical mass culture, the ballad persisted and even proliferated, not simply as folksy throwback but as a resource for telling new kinds of stories in old ways with a shifting sound and style, from the car crash in Mark Dinning’s ‘Teen Angel’ to the changing seasons of Frank Sinatra’s ‘It Was a Very Good Year.’19

It’s perhaps not surprising that we would look to the decay and renewal of the world to articulate our experience of time passing. Seasonal references abound in all art forms. Such themes lend a sense of the mythical and the universal to the songs found on September of My Years, albeit with the caveat that its particular seasonal associations are far from universal. There are many parts of the world where April does not mean spring, nor September autumn.

In 1971, Willie Nelson used a similar concept for his album Yesterday’s Wine, which presents the life story of ‘imperfect man’ over ten tracks. His song ‘Summer Roses’ dwells on the brief season of a romantic relationship, with the singer offering to bring his partner ‘one springtime of Robins’, ‘one Summer of roses’, ‘one autumn of dry leaves’ and ‘your winter of snow’. Another song, ‘December Day’ relates a ‘time-to-remember day’ in which the singer recalls ‘a spring / such a sweet tender thing / and love’s summer college’, the last line a reference to learned experience. As the song winds its way towards the December moment in reports how ‘September wine numbed a measure of time / through the tears of October’.

In his book on Sinatra’s recording sessions, Charles Granata describes ‘It Was a Very Good Year’ as ‘the showstopper of the September of My Years album’ and as ‘closer to being an autobiographical statement than the impudent “My Way”’. He bases his account of the recording session on footage filmed for the CBS documentary Sinatra: An American Original, ‘among the most important documents showing how Frank Sinatra worked in the recording studio’.20

Some of this footage is available on YouTube:

Given the sense of mastery over the representation of time, age and experience that grows ever more palpable in his albums of 1950s and 1960s, I’m led to feel that Sinatra’s true late voice was the voice he found in middle age rather than that he found in ‘real’ old age. This was when the anticipated lateness of his early work met the response of his more experienced self in a way that led to a quite new persona (not just for Sinatra, but for other popular male entertainers).

Not every album of the late middle period showed this as well as September of My Years, however.

Coda: Cycles

September of My Years found Sinatra working with songs that still held a strong connection to the lyricists and composers of the past. By the time of Cycles three years later, this had changed, and the album found Sinatra offering readings of contemporary folk and pop songwriters associated with younger musicians of the 1960s. There were two songs that had been hits for Glen Campbell (John Hartford’s ‘Gentle on My Mind’ and Jimmy Webb’s ‘By the Time I Get to Phoenix’) as well as a version of Joni Mitchell’s ‘Both Sides, Now’ (listed as ‘From Both Sides, Now’).

Mitchell was becoming well-known by this point. The previous year, Judy Collins had enjoyed a hit with her version of ‘Both Sides Now’ and had included the song, along with Mitchell’s ‘Michael from Mountains’ on her album Wildflowers (1967). As performed by Collins and Mitchell (who would include it on her 1969 album Clouds), ‘Both Sides, Now’ is a classic example of early lateness, the term I use to describe the precocious wisdom found in work by young singers and songwriters.

While it’s obvious that Mitchell (born in 1943) and Collins (born in 1939) had had ample time to accumulate lived experience by the late 1960s, it was still a notable occurrence when younger singers dealt with the big questions of life with such mature balance and retrospection as found on ‘Both Sides, Now’. Sinatra, however, had been cultivating precisely this image for some years prior to Cycles, meaning that his version of Mitchell’s song ought to resound with the requisite gravitas. But the style of the song as first recorded by Collins, then imitated by Sinatra’s arranger Don Costa, was jaunty, with tinkling harpsichord and ‘dizzy dancing’ strings. Sinatra’s rendition doesn’t sound original, and his relatively clipped delivery makes the words seem trapped in the jaunty rhythm rather than being liberated (or interrogated) by his famous phrasing. Of the early renditions, it is Mitchell’s own—with its slower, deliberate guitar strumming and Mitchell’s varied vocal—that provides the combination of gravitas and wonder the song calls for.

Sinatra has more success on Cycles with two songs written by Gayle Caldwell of the New Christy Minstrels, ‘Wandering’ and the title track. ‘Cycles’, which was also a successful single for Sinatra, presents life as a process of ups and downs: ‘first there’s laughter / then those tears’. As with ‘From Both Sides, Now’, the sense of having seen life from different perspectives gives the impression of accumulated experience (though it is more convincing on this song) and therefore maps onto the authority invested in Sinatra as a mature purveyor of adult pop. Singing is proffered as a potential way out and as a metaphor for facing up to life’s challenges, though it may not always be possible to raise one’s voice; the song closes with the lines ‘I’ll keep on trying to sing / but please just don’t ask me now’.

If I’m critical of Cycles when comparing it with the Sinatra canon, it’s still an album that means a lot to me. It was the first Sinatra album I ever bought. I think I was intrigued by the cover (and the covers). It holds a special place in my memory and in my awareness of Sinatra’s mature style.

It’s worth hanging on to those moments of awareness—the phenomenology of musical knowledge—as they’re so easy to forget when we measure our personal experiences against critical canons, myths and collective histories. That’s why I included ‘Cycles’ in ‘Songs for Some People I May Have Been’, one of my own attempts at recording biographemes.

Thompson’s a prolific musician, and I can’t say I’ve followed every twist and turn of his career. I own several albums that bear his name and was enough of a fan to pick up the 1976 compilation (guitar, vocal) and the later career-spanning sets Watching the Dark (1993) and RT (2006). The songs I’ve picked here are ones I remembered from the albums I own. I’ve always felt that Thompson’s work had a pedagogical aspect to it, and his songs about musicians are a good example of that. I don’t mean that they provide encyclopaedic details about the lives and works of his chosen subjects, more that they encourage curiosity.

I’ve written before about the extent to which songs about musicians are about musicians. I won’t labour that point here. It’s fairly clear that Thompson uses musicians’ names and associations to give songs historical, contextual and emotional depth rather than to detail the lives and times of the musicians. In that respect, these songs are a bit different to some of the more biographical ones I’ve previously featured. But it’s also clear that the musicians mentioned in the songs are crucial to the song’s meanings and emotional resonance.

‘Al Bowlly’s in Heaven’

Thompson released this song on the 1986 album Daring Adventures. It tells the story of a demobbed British soldier in the aftermath of World War 2. The verses compare the wartime years when the soldier and his comrades were treated as heroes to the situation in the following decades when their sacrifice has been forgotten and their country has ‘sentenced [them] to misery’. The mention of the ‘demob suit’ (civilian wear issued to soldiers on demobilisation) places some of the narrative in the immediate postwar period, but the reference to the homeless charity St. Mungo’s suggests a later date as that charity only opened its doors in the 1960s. Whatever the timeline, Thompson’s narrator has clearly been down on his luck—‘in limbo’ as the song has it—for a while.

Happier memories come with the recollection of popular songs and dance bands. The song’s title and refrain remember Al Bowlly (1981-1941), the Mozambique-born, British-based crooner of the interwar years. There was a period in the 1930s when Bowlly, having mastered the art of the microphone, could give Bing Crosby a run for his money. As told by the contributors to the 2007 BBC documentary Al Bowlly: The Very Thought of You, it was Bowlly’s inability to crack Hollywood that led to his profile being lower than Crosby’s.

Thompson doesn’t see it quite that way. As reported in Patrick Humhpries RT biography Strange Affair, the songwriter claims ‘no particular fondness for Bowlly’s singing, preferring him as a convenient symbol’.

Thompson:

It’s a classic example, I suppose, of what happens in many countries, that once you cease to be of use to your country, wilfully or otherwise, you get forgotten. Another government comes, or three governments later they’re looking for ways to save money, and they don’t remember you being a hero or being of any particular use. So you’re just a statistic.

…

I’m not a huge Al Bowlly fan, I quite like him but I don’t think he was Bing Crosby or anything. He was the Great British Hope, but what else did we have, and he died.

What Thompson doesn’t mention, either in this interview or in the song, is that Bowlly died when a German bomb fell on the area of London where his flat was in 1941. That loss ensured a continuation of his fame for some time. For Thompson’s song, it also marks the death of a certain kind of hope, one that his narrator keeps relating to his own situation: ‘Al Bowlly’s in heaven, and I’m in limbo now’

On the matter of timelines, Thompson had this to say:

It’s a contemporary song … it’s not nostalgic, it’s now. The guy’s having a terrible time now and this is all the baggage that he’s brought with him up to this point … It’s the past impinging on the present—which is basically what fiction is. It’s what luggage you drag along to this point and how it affects what you do now.

As Humphries notes, the jazz style of ‘Al Bowlly’s in Heaven’, along with the lyrical weaving of the present and past, displays a ‘deftness … in understanding nostalgia while avoiding queasy sentimentality’.

Humphries makes a comparison to ‘Shipbuilding’, the Elvis Costello song memorably recorded by Robert Wyatt in 1982. I sense that relationship too, both in the lyrics that juxtapose wartime governments’ effects on civilians and in the slightly uncanny laid back jazz style. But I also think of ‘Brother, Can You Spare a Dime?’, Yip Harburg and Jay Gorney’s Depression-era song about a down-and-out former soldier. Bing Crosby’s version is probably the most famous, though Al Bowlly also sang it as part of a medley when he was in Lew Stone’s band. (The lines ‘don't you remember? They called me ‘Al’ / it was ‘Al’ all the time’ had a special resonance in Bowlly’s rendition.)

As for the refrain about Bowlly being in heaven, this might be a nod to his recording of ‘Where Am I (Am I in Heaven)’, though I haven’t read anything by Thompson confirming that. The main song reference in the song is ‘The Very Thought of You’, which I’ve linked to below. First, though, a note on the version of Thompson’s song that I’m using here. I usually look for YouTube links connected to the artist’s channel, but Daring Adventures is missing from Thompson’s channel and from the streaming services I’ve tried. There are a couple of live versions of ‘Al Bowlly’ available on Thompson’s YouTube (here and here), but these are from later concerts where he changes the song reference in the first verse from ‘The Very Thought of You’ to ‘Love Is the Sweetest Thing’, another Bowlly hit. I prefer the former for biographical and aesthetic reasons: it’s the version I first knew, I believe it scans better, and I think ‘The Very Thought of You’ is a better song. I’m therefore including the link from another YT uploader and hoping it stays available.

And here’s Bowlly, from the famous British Pathé footage of ‘The Very Thought of You’.

Before leaving this song, I want to share another hard-to-find version. The late British folk singer Norma Waterson covered ‘Al Bowlly’s in Heaven’ on her 1999 album The Very Thought of You and coupled it with the Bowlly song mentioned in the lyric and which provides her album’s title. Waterson’s album seems to have suffered the same fate as Daring Adventures when it comes to YouTube and other streaming platforms, so I’m including the link from a helpful YouTuber to access this stunning recording.

‘Don’t Sit on My Jimmy Shands’

This humorous number appeared on Rumor & Sigh, the 1991 album that contained ‘I Misunderstood’, ‘1952 Vincent Black Lightning’, ‘Keep Your Distance’ and ‘God Loves A Drunk’. Described by Thompson as a ‘backhanded, twisted tribute to one of Scotland’s great musicians’, ‘Don’t Sit on My Jimmy Shands’ relates the anxieties of an obsessive collector of 78 RPM discs by Scottish accordionist and bandleader Shand (1908-2000).

Shand was known for popularising Scottish dance songs and polkas, most famously his ‘Bluebell Polka’. That recording, dating from 1955, was a Top 20 hit in the UK. His career began before the Second World War, though, hence the 78s. His main success in this period came from the recordings he made for the Beltona label from the mid- 1930s; the label’s mentioned in Thompson’s lyrics.

As with Al Bowlly, Thompson has said in interviews that he’s not a big fan of Shand’s music, though his Scottish father was. Actually, Thompson puts it in starker terms, mentioning a ‘love hate’ relationship with the music, a mixture of familiarity and wanting to get it out of his system. To that end, Shand acts as a cultural reference point in the song, while the main subject is the obsessive record hoarder trying to protect his fragile shellac discs from the chaos of the party he’s been invited to.

Why is this record nerd at the party? The answer’s there in verse four: ‘No shindig is half complete / without that famous polka beat / that’s why they invite me, I suppose’. Cranking the shaft of his wind-up gramophone, he supplies the waltzes, strathspeys, eights and reels the dancers crave. Things will go fine as long as no reveller gets too close to the precious 78s: ‘just down rest your cheeks against my man’.

Thompson had previous form for Shand references. The jaunty dance piece tagged on to the end of ‘Nobody’s Wedding’ (from Thompson’s debut solo album, Henry the Human Fly, 1971) is ‘Mairi’s Wedding’, a Scottish tune that Shand performed. (Thompson also used the tune for a novelty piece called ‘Madonna’s Wedding’ that’s collected on the 2006 box set RT: The Life and Music of Richard Thompson.) And he included music associated with Shand on the instrumental album Strict Tempo (1981), which also features a pastiche of 1950s Shand albums.

There’s a version of ‘Jimmy Shands’ by Richard Thompson accompanied by Danny Thompson from twenty years ago at Cropredy with RT performing polkas on the acoustic guitar between verses and the crowd singing along at the chorus. It’s splendid. Below, though, I’m including the studio version from Rumor and Sigh which features the concertina and accordion player John Kirkpatrick. There’s also a video of Jimmy Shand’s band performing ‘Bluebell Polka’

‘From Galway to Graceland’

Outside the bootlegging world, this song was largely unknown until a live recording (from a 1990 concert) was included on the 1993 Hannibal compilation Watching the Dark. As related by Nigel Schofield, the man behind the RT box set (which included a version by Thompson and Faiport Convention):

Amazingly, this is almost a song that got away. Plainsong recorded it for the British tribute album to Richard. Had Richard’s own recording not been included on Watching The Dark (at a point where he was still uncertain whether it was a finished song), it might never have seen the light of day. Instead, it appealed immediately to fans, and became another hugely requested song.

Indeed, Schofield lists it as the fourth most requested song following a survey he did while preparing the RT tracklisting.

As with the other songs I’ve discussed above, the musician at the heart of the song—in this case, Elvis—is not the song’s main subject. The protagonist is an Elvis-obsessed Irish woman who leaves her two-decade marriage to travel to Memphis in search of her idol. The mix of religious and secular devotion is set from the song’s opening: ‘Oh she dressed in the dark / And she whispered amen / She was pretty in pink / Like a young girl again’.

The pilgrimage to Graceland becomes more of a fall from grace as the song proceeds, the calm ritual of that opening scene and the first stage of the journey—‘silver wings carried her over the sea / from the west coast or Ireland to West Tennessee’—giving way to a graveside vigil that only ends when the woman is dragged away in handcuffs. In Schofield’s words, ‘a mood of quasi-devotion’ develops ‘into tragic obsession and delusive mania’.

Thompson displays wonderful songcraft here in terms of concise narrative development, imagery and rhyme. I’m always grabbed by those silver wings and how ‘over the sea’ is matched with ‘East Tennessee’. It’s the mixture of dispassionate observation and the glimpses of passion that grow with each coming of the refrain, though, that really carry the song and show its empathy.

‘Josef Locke’

Here’s another musician-referencing song that didn’t get included on a studio album. It first appeared on Norma Waterson’s The Very Thought of You, with Thompson contributing guitar. He recorded a solo version for the RT box set in 2005 and can be heard performing the song on an episode of the Folk on Foot podcast from December 2020 (it’s near the end, at 1:04; RT tells the story behind the song from 1:01).

Josef Locke (1917-1999) was an Irish tenor who was popular in the UK and Ireland in the mid-twentieth century. Locke became the target of the Inland Revenue while working in England and was wanted by the authorities for tax evasion. Locke fled to Ireland to escape and stayed there for most of his later life. These woes are mentioned in Thompson’s song, which, unlike the others mentioned here, puts Locke in charge of the narrative:

Text within this block will maintain its original spacing when published

And I've been gone from you for some while
Those English tax men they've cramped my style
And if you think I'm some fraud upstart
Just let my voice be my calling card
It melted hearts, and royal teardrops fell
They loved me well, they loved me well

The narrative takes place in a pub, with Locke offering drinks and repertoire (‘I’ll sing Ave Maria, I’ll sing The Old Bog Road or A Shawl of Galway Grey’) in exchange for recognition of his fame. Thompson relates the song’s origin as a chance encounter in a London pub during his Fairport Convention days with a man claiming to be Locke (see the Folk on Foot link above).

The song’s reference to ‘The Singing Bobby’ stems from a nickname Locke was given based on his time working for the Royal Ulster Constabulary. It’s another aspect of the former glory from which the narrator has fallen. Once loved, now forgotten and mocked, a man whose time has passed, singing as he’s wrestled from the bar whose patrons he’s disturbing, his fate little different from the nameless Irish lady who left everything behind to be with the King.

When Norma Waterson recorded ‘Josef Locke’ for The Very Thought of You, she paired it with a song from the tenor’s repertoire, ‘Blaze Away’. Below, I’m pairing her version of Thompson’s song with Locke singing a song the lyric mentions, ‘A Shawl of Galway Grey’.

I wish Waterson’s album was more widely available. It really is superb, with performances of Nick Drake’s ‘River Man’, Arlen & Harburg’s ‘Over the Rainbow’ and Freddie Mercury’s ‘Love of My Life’ among its many delights.

‘Guitar Heroes’

As brilliant a songwriter as Thompson is, his other claim to fame is as a guitarist. That’s why I’m including ‘Guitar Heroes’, the closer from the 2015 album Still (produced by Jeff Tweedy). As songcraft, I find it a slighter achievement than the other pieces discussed above, but it’s good to hear a song about musicians that performs its about-musician-ness musically. Thompson’s verses outline the sacrifices made by a guitarist in pursuit of his craft: staying in on a Saturday night to master ‘the Django way’; risking expulsion from school to sound like Les Paul; letting the dishes pile up to get the Chuck Berry bounce; prioritising a James Burton tune over rescuing a relationship; the threat of parental excommunication for wanting to perfect the Shadows beat.

As each hero is named, we hear Thompson show that he has, in fact, achieved what his protagonist set out to do. He gives us tasters of Django Reinhardt’s ‘Mélodie au crépuscule’, Les Paul’s ‘Caravan’, Chuck Berry’s ‘Little Queenie’, James Burton’s immortal ‘Suzie Q’ lick, and the Shadows’ ‘F.B.I.’. A small selection for a longish song, but indicative. ‘We could make it a 48-hour song and put everybody in there’, Thompson told Paste magazine.

At the close of the song, the singer still doesn’t know if he’s good enough after all the years of practice. In Thompson’s case, though, I think the jury decided on that question a long time ago.

What roles does music play in the songs I’ve featured here? It’s something that marks moments in listeners’ lives and transports them back to remembered moments (‘Al Bowlly’s in Heaven’, ‘Josef Locke’, ‘Guitar Heroes’). It offers something for fans to obsess over (‘Don’t Sit on My Jimmy Shands’, ‘From Galway to Graceland’). It showcases virtuosity and repertoire (‘Josef Locke’, ‘Guitar Heroes’).

Running through several of these songs is a thread of regret, a sense of something that’s been lost. ‘A sweeter age it was that loved me well’, claims Josef Locke, as he’s escorted from a time and place that has no time or place for him now.

Listening to the new Nick Drake box set while working on this post, I was struck again by the haunted refrain of Drake’s ‘Fruit Tree’: ‘Forgotten while you're here / Remembered for a while / A much updated ruin / From a much outdated style’. Having already made the connection, I was interested to read Thompson describing Al Bowlly as ‘the 40s Nick Drake’ when I returned to Patrick Humphries’ Strange Affair to see what biographer and subject had to say about the songs I’d chosen.

Thompson’s always been willing to explore those outdated styles, to remember the sometimes forgotten musicians of yesteryear (see his ‘Thousand Years of Popular Music’ project for more on that), and to not shrink from the melancholy and desperation that lurks in so many lives, whether they be celebrated or not.

There are other songs I haven’t gone into. ‘Roll Over Vaughn Williams’ (from Thompson’s debut Henry the Human Fly, 1972) was a great statement of intent, with its folk versioning of rock’n’roll rebellion. ‘Mingus Eyes’ (Mirror Blue, 1994) offers a superb label for a character or mood, but doesn’t open on to the world of the great jazz bassist and bandleader in the way that the songs featured above do. As for ‘Here Comes Geordie’ (Dream Attic, 2010), is it about Sting or not? (I assumed it was on first hearing, and other commentary backed this suspicion up.) I find ‘Dear Janet Jackson’ (a novelty number collected on RT) annoying, so won’t comment on it further. ‘Madonna’s Wedding’ (also on RT) is better, though very much of its time (early 2000s). It’s a good example of something folk singers do: take a well known traditional (or trad-sounding) song and put new, often comic, lyrics to it (here, Thompson repurposes ‘Mairi’s Wedding’). Les Barker was good at writing these: see Martin Carthy singing ‘Hard Cheese of Old England’ and June Tabor ‘The January June’.

Such songs remind us of the kind of folk processes that have remained central to Richard Thompson’s songcraft over the last six decades. They also highlight how folk singers love to sing about music and musicians among other everyday tales.

In the beginning there were objects in process and processes which relied on objects. At least that’s how I like to think about it. Especially when people tell me I have to choose between objects and processes. Or when I read ‘The world is made up of subjects, not objects’.1 Or when I’m told that music is a process, not a thing. Or that I should think about a world without objects, a world that is all about verbing and becoming (so no ‘in the beginning’ either), not a world that, nounlike, just is.

I think what many writers mean when they make statements like these is that they’re suspicious of objects thought of as ‘passive props’ (to use James Bridle’s term). Fair enough. So am I. But those of us who are interested in objects enough to write about them at length probably already feel that objects are not passive props, that they are vibrant matter with some kind of agency or capacity for evolution.

The kind of texts where I read these statements are ones I’m often sympathetic to. They speak a language I’m drawn to. I just want to get rid of their binary ‘ors’ and ‘nots’, replace them with ‘ands’: the world is made up of objects which are also subjects; music is a process and a thing; the world is a thing in a state of becoming.

I suppose I want to have my cake and eat it too.

When I find myself thinking about these things (and processes), there are all manner of artists, thinkers, poets and musicians I turn to for inspiration. I like to look for links between them. I enjoy looking for patterns and connections.

Instead of thinking of objects as ‘passive’, I might be inspired to think of them as ‘at rest’. Pablo Neruda could help me here:

It is useful at certain hours of the day and night to look closely at the world of objects at rest: wheels that have crossed long, dusty spaces with their huge vegetal and mineral burdens, bags of coal from the coal bins, barrels, baskets, handles, and hafts in a carpenter’s tool chest. From them flow the contacts of man with the earth, like an object lesson for all troubled lyricists. The used surfaces of things, the wear that hands have given to things, the air, tragic at times, pathetic at others, of such things—all lend a curious attractiveness to reality that we should not underestimate.2

From them flow … There’s that vibrant matter. And it must be at least implicit here that things wear (out) hands as much as hands wear (out) things. Humans and their tools become assemblages. Things are momentarily at rest but have worked, have worn, have been worn and used, have borne and witnessed.

Instead of worrying about nouns and verbs and objects and processes, I might turn to Timothy Morton. As a proponent of object-oriented ontology (OOO) and speculative realism, Morton has felt the need to set up defences against those who wish to do away with object-thinking. In a book review from a decade ago that struck a few notes with me, Morton summarised one line of attack: ‘If you are into objects, you are into objectification’. A bad thing. Morton wanted to trouble the binary, as did Steven Shaviro, the author whose book Morton was reviewing. In Being Ecological (2018), Morton identifies a mode of thinking that places verbs as ‘good’ and nouns as ‘bad’ and connects this to the contrast between writing and speech interrogated by Jacques Derrida. For Morton, ‘Object-oriented ontology is a way of thinking that wants to re-confuse us, much like deconstruction, about the status that we take for granted’.3

In recent months, when I’ve wanted to think about images that offer an ambiguous materiality, or that offer a delicious weirdness to the visual realm, I’ve frequently turned to Remedios Varo. Varo was not an artist whose work I knew until a few years ago. When I encountered it, I was immediately struck by its uncanny, dreamlike imagery, paintings that seemed both ancient and modern, of the real world and of imagined times and places: sensual, saturated, magic realist.

Predating all these figures for me, somewhere nearer the beginning, there was Björk. The Icelandic singer has been a thread running through my listening life, from the noisy fun of the Sugarcubes in the 1980s to the ever-morphing personas and concepts of her solo work.

Still now, when I want to encounter songs about objects and processes, song-objects in process and art worlds being ecological, I’ll go back to Björk.

Pablo Neruda. Timothy Morton. Remedios Varo. Björk Guðmundsdóttir. Four minds out there in a random cosmos, connected by a fifth: mine. What makes me want to link them? I’ve said before that I both seek and follow connections. Is it the remnant of a childhood desire for everyone and everything to get along, for no one and nothing to be left out of place? I’ve lived enough life now to know that can’t happen, that there’s as much division and distinction as there is connection and reconciliation. I know it’s okay to let things be, to not force them together.

And yet I want to. I’d be untrue to myself if I didn’t nurture my personal ecology, to see which strands affect which. The connections that follow are those that keep Björk at the centre because she is a beacon for my project. It would be interesting to follow potential connections between the others (Morton and Neruda via the figure of William Blake, for example, or Neruda and Varo as exemplars of distinct artistic camps in Latin America), but I’m not pursuing those here.

Björk and Morton are the easiest to connect because of references they’ve made to each other’s work and a collaboration from a decade ago. In 2015, New York’s Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) put on the exhibition Björk, a sort of mid-career retrospective with some suggestions of future directions the artist might take. The exhibition was criticised in some quarters for not doing justice to the range of Björk’s artistic vision and for rendering her dynamic processual methodologies in ways that were too static: a focus on objects over processes, in other words.

Not having attended the show, I can’t speak for its effectiveness, though I’m aware from visits to other sites of the challenges in rendering music-based and multimedia work in exhibition spaces. The MoMA event did, however, lead to the creation of an object which has been useful to my project: the fascinating box of booklets that is Björk: Archives.

This box of inspiring texts became a useful reference point as I started to write about songs and objects in earnest. It contains the following documents:

1. Introduction, by Klaus Biesenbach. Biesenbach became Chief Curator at Large at MoMA in 2010 and was the organiser of the Björk exhibition. He summarises the musician’s career and how it might be represented in a museum space.

2. Beyond Delta: The Many Streams of Björk, by Alex Ross. Ross is a music critic for The New Yorker and author of The Rest Is Noise: Listening to the Twentieth Century (2007) and Listen to This (2011). An admirer of his books, I was interested to read how he situated Björk’s music in the broad sweep of modern music across genre and style.

3. Björk Creating: Myths of Creativity and Creation, by Nicola Dibben. Dibben is Professor of Music at the University of Sheffield. As a fellow music academic, I’ve met Nikki a few times and seen her present her work at conferences and symposia. Her book on Björk is excellent, and her related research led to contributions to the Biophilia app (discussed below). For the Archives box, Dibben provides a scholarly account of nature, technology and creation in Björk’s work.

4. This Huge Sunlit Abyss from the Future Right There Next to You, by Björk Guðmundsdóttir and Timothy Morton. Morton is Rita Shea Guffey Professor of English at Rice University and, as I mentioned above, a writer associated with the object-oriented ontology (OOO) school of thought. This part of the Archives box reproduces a series of emails between Morton and Björk, who includes in her invitation to collaborate a line which has since become an endorsement on at least one of Morton’s subsequent books: ‘i have been reading your books for a while and i like them a lot’.

5. The Triumphs of a Heart: A Psychographic Journey Through the First Seven Albums of Björk, by Sjón. Sjón is the pen name of Sigurjón Birgir Sigurðsson, an Icelandic author of poems, novels, lyrics and screenplays. He has known Björk since they were teenagers and has co-written several songs with her. For Archives, he wrote a long poem that traces Björk’s life and work by mapping it onto various landscapes and natural phenomena. The largest booklet of the five, it is illustrated with artwork from Björk’s albums, videos and installations.

The dust jacket of the first booklet is covered in an ingeniously designed timeline of the artist’s life, while the other four have fold-out jackets containing musical notation and lyrics for songs (‘Pagan Poetry’, ‘All Is Full of Love’, ‘Aurora’ and ‘Cover Me’; notation for another song, ‘Black Lake’, adorns the box itself). The other object in the box is a double-sided sheet of stickers based on the covers of singles, albums and DVDs.

I find it a playful and thought-provoking collection of items to interact with. Some of the contents inform what follows.

Björk’s music sheds light on my three main areas of interest regarding the materiality of song in that her songs are about objects and the fascinating relationship between them; they are also beautiful, intricate, strange, shape-shifting objects; and they are presented as part of a broader technological ecosystem that challenges the ways we’ve traditionally thought songs should exist in the world, how they are mediated, what relationship they have with other material objects and media platforms.

Morton touches on this in the 2017 book Humankind: Solidarity with Nonhuman People:

Ideas aren’t colorless and flavorless. They have a specific frequency, a specific smell, they have ways of being thought … [Björk’s] song “Hyperballad” is a classic example: she shows you the wiring under the board of an emotion, the way a straightforward thing like “I love you” isn’t straightforward at all. So don’t write a love song like that; write one that says you’re sitting on top of this cliff, and that you’re dropping bits and pieces of the edge like car parts, bottles and cutlery, all kinds of not-you human prosthetic bits …4

This accords with my own feelings about ‘Hyperballad’ and about other songs whose lyrics highlight our interactions with the object world. But Morton also picks up on my other interest, which is songs themselves as objects:

My favorite version of “Hyperballad” is the Subtle Abuse mix, a twelve-inch remix, the expanded spectral dance version that has much more in it than just it, taking little bits of it and making thousands of copies of them, as if a whole were actually a bagful of eyes that on closer inspection were also bagsful of eyes …

Twelve-inch remixes are neither copies nor separate things, but spectral bags full of eyes that haunt the seemingly individual house of a song. The DJ never weaves the twelve-inch vinyl discs into a seamless whole that’s bigger than them. She weaves a whole lot of partial objects, eyeball bags into a large eyeball bag. A string of Pandora’s jars adding up to one Pandora’s jar, not one to rule them all, but a pretty good place for a night out.

When Björk asks you to remix her song she sends you all the parts, all the sound files, and says have at it. Do anything. Chop it into little pieces and multiply the pieces and rearrange them. Make more out of this than the whole that I made. Show me the wiring under the board of my showing people the wiring under the board.5

I’m reminded here of a line from Baby Dee’s song ‘Safe inside the Day’: ‘a gift that’s bigger than the box it came in’. For me, that describes what a song can be. And Björk has given us many of those gifts.

A third aspect of my songs and objects project is the role of the songholder. As I wrote in my first ever Substack post,

To a certain extent, human songholders can be thought of as tradition bearers, those who take song up, maintain it and pass it on. My use of the deliberately artificial-sounding ‘songholder’, however, is a way of connecting what humans do with song to what machines and other nonhumans enable songs to do. I also like the resonance with words like ‘torchbearer’, ‘keyholder’ and ‘skyscraper’. These words can be thought of as modern versions of kennings, figurative devices used in Old Norse and Old English poetry and also found in Icelandic poetry. Examples abound in classic texts such as Beowulf and in the work of the Viking skald (poet) Egill Skallagrímsson, who uses the wonderful term ‘song weigher’ in his poem ‘Sonatorrek’.

Björk exemplifies the songholder not only in her twenty-first century continuation of what generations of skalds did before her, but also in her interactions with the nonhuman songholders of nature and technology.

The biographical poem that Sjón contributes to Björk: Archives picks up on similar themes, mixing fairy tale, mythology and musical appreciation. It presents Björk as contained in something larger than herself but also as a container for other things, including of course her songs. In the poem, Björk is part of a constellation or ecosystem.

Klaus Biesenbach takes a similar, if less mythopoetical, approach in his appraisal of the artist:

All of a sudden it becomes clear that for all of her career Björk has created a body of work that could be described within the theory of Object-Oriented Ontology, in which the landscape around her, she herself, and the landscape inside of her—her blood, her organs, the sounds made by her and perceived by her—are all one universe of objects and subjects, subjects and objects, robots and humans, plants and animals, stone and volcanoes and oceans at the same time.6

I agree with this observation, which is why Björk is one of the people I always return to when I’m thinking about the relationship between things and processes. Examples can be found across her career. Many of my favourites come from the 2011 album Biophilia, which was the most recent at the time of the MoMA exhibition and Sjón’s psychographic poem.

The example I’ve used most when I’ve given talks on this topic or when I’ve taught my ‘Case Studies in 21st-Century Music’ course at Newcastle University is ‘Virus’. Sjón’s lyrics for the song describe a viral longing or starvation, the desire to join, to spread, to be hosted. This happens through natural and human-made objects: the virus that needs a body, the soft tissue feeding on blood, the mushroom on the tree trunk, the ‘flame that seeks explosives’.

Both Nicola Dibben and Alex Ross highlight the way that the music subdivides and proliferates on ‘Virus’. Ross writes about this in his contribution to the Archives project. Dibben’s analysis comes bundled with the Biophilia app, a technical innovation designed for the then-new iPad, and also downloadable at the time to iPhones. This provided an unusual case of musical exegesis accompanying the musical object at the moment of its release.

The Biophilia app encouraged the idea of getting inside songs, of songs as journeys through space, songs as constellations and as objects in wider constellations. The user would enter via a constellation interface made of song titles. Once chosen, each song ‘star’ would open to reveal description and analysis of the song, differently designed scores, games and animations.

One of the interactive possibilities in the app for ‘Virus’ is to prevent or delay Björk’s voice from continuing the song by swiping the green viruses away from the pink cells. If no virus is present, the music continues on a loop. Once the viruses are allowed to surround the cell, the vocal resumes. In this way, you have to accept the idea of song as virus if you wish to hear the track as written. You have to let the song in.

Here’s app designer Scott Snibbe demonstrating the ‘Virus’ game (including a later part which I haven’t explained above), with an initial summary from Björk:

The stems of Biophilia’s songs were offered for remixing and to educate schoolchildren in music theory. Like the protein that transmutates in ‘Virus’ and like what Timothy Morton says about the remixes of ‘Hyperballad’, Björk’s songs provide compelling studies of the possibility for transmutation to be thematised in song and practised in the evolution of the song object.

Thirteen of the many remixes of Biophilia’s songs were collected on the 2012 album Bastards. The album opens with Omar Souleyman’s take on ‘Crystalline’, one of my all-time favourite remixes. I find the way Souleyman’s C21 variant of dabke melds with Björk’s hymn to crystal growth beguiling and addictive. The Bastards sleeve doesn’t credit other musicians for this track, but my guess is that the all-important keyboards are courtesy of long-time Souleyman collaborator Rizan Said. These added musical elements do to the song what the song describes crystals doing: growing, multiplying, creating new formations. Remix time and geological time may differ, but we’re offered a reminder that all matter is mutating, whether at a speed we can detect or not.

Growth and mutation are key themes of Biophilia, whether in the cellular incursions of ‘Virus’, the multidirectional accumulations of ‘Crystalline’ or the shifting tectonics of ‘Mutual Core’. These songs all rely heavily on metaphor, often connecting biological and geological processes for human behaviours and relationships: ‘I knock on your skin and I am in’ (‘Virus’); ‘we mimic the openness of the ones we love’ (‘Crystalline’); ‘if things were done your way / my Eurasian plate subsumed’ (‘Mutual Core’).

The cover of Bastards is a still from Andrew Thomas Huang’s video for ‘Mutual Core’: Björk as shifting geological strata.

The over of Bastards collages the stratified singer with shots of the Icelandic landscape. I find myself back in the world hymned by Sjón in his psycho(geo)graphic poem. And I’m reminded that what songwriters, singers and songs are doing is bearing witness to the objects of the world, the way they’re arranged, how they sit in landscapes, the relationship they have with each other, how they affect each other.

Sjón’s poem casts Björk as a kind of naïve witness: ‘at all hours nature staged its spectacle for the girl and found its existence confirmed / in her senses’; ‘she was there as nature’s participating audience / its witness’.7

That’s where Neruda comes back in for me. I’d already identified Neruda as a beacon poet for my project with his geological-anthropological questions— ‘Stone within stone, and man, where was he?’8—and his ‘elemental odes’ to the artichoke, the atom, numbers, the Earth and its minerals, wine, his suit, the seagull, maize, bees and bicycles. But I hadn’t thought of comparing Neruda to Björk until I read about Monica Brown and Julie Paschkis’ book Pablo Neruda: Poet of the People in Maria Popova’s ever-inspiring newsletter The Marginalian.

Once I’d got a copy of the book, I was struck by the parallels with Sjón’s The Triumphs of a Heart: a similar way of writing a human life ecologically, a child growing up in nature in a magical and secluded part of the world, at one with the landscape. Of the many wonders of Julie Paschkis’ illustrations, perhaps the most notable are the words flowing through the landscape, as if tree trunks and rivers contained the language humans need to name them. That bond between word and thing is crucial to Neruda’s poetry as it is to Björk’s songs and the ways Sjón, Brown and Paschkis evoke them.

The style of the books matches the desire to evoke a child’s perception of the world. Brown and Paschkis’ is a children’s book; Sjón’s is written as though it were. Björk in interview often presents perspectives that channel a surprise and curiosity about the world that many of us lose after childhood. Neruda, too, was able to hold on to something that had taken root in him as the boy Neftalí Reyes.

In the words of Ilan Stavans, Neruda found the ode ‘the finest way to sing of common things’.9

I mentioned another figure earlier, the Spanish-Mexican painter Remedios Varo (1908-1963). Her paintings offer a surreal vision of the interconnectedness of humans and nonhumans, objects and subjects, the Earth and the cosmos. When I became familiar with them, I often found myself thinking of Björk. I even started imagining some of Björk’s famous costumes and masks as emanating from Varo’s paintings. Having made the connection in my head, I was delighted to read that Björk is an admirer of Varo and Leonora Carrington (another artist who moved from her home country to contribute to the surrealist movement in Mexico City) and that she has a Varo print on the wall of her kitchen in Reykjavik.

I connected Varo to Björk for the reasons I’ve mentioned, but it’s also important to me that Varo repeatedly turned to music as an inspiration for her work. There are many examples I could turn to, but I’ll choose the 1956 painting Armonía (Harmony).

Here’s what Varo had to say about the picture:

The character is trying to find the invisible thread that unites all things, that’s why he’s stringing together, on a musical staff of metal threads, all kinds of objects, from the simplest to a scrap of paper containing a mathematical formula, which is in itself already a great jumble of things. After he manages to put the different objects in their place, by blowing through the clef that holds up the musical staff, a music should emerge that is not only harmonious but also objective, that is, able to move the things that surround him if that’s how he wishes to use it. The figure peeling away from the wall and collaborating with him represents chance (which so often intervenes in all discoveries), but objective chance. When I use the word objective, I understand it to be something outside our world, or rather, beyond it, and which finds itself connected to the world of causes, and not of phenomena, which is our own.10

Causality and phenomena. Those sound like concepts the OOO philosophers like to talk about, but I won’t go further into that here. What I will say is that this universe of things that move or are moved by music that is objective (in Varo’s sense of the term) and harmonious seems to resonate with the Björkian use of things that I’ve been harping on about.

As Lara Balikei puts it in an exhibition catalogue for the Art Institute of Chicago’s Remedios Varo: Science Fictions, ‘Varo made the otherwise invisible perceptible to sight, giving symbolic form to chance, objectivity, and the threads that connect the universe’.11 Balikei highlights the at-least dual aspect of the treble clef on the table next to the composer: ‘not just a facet of musical notation … but also a wind instrument consisting of one continuous metal tube’ (p. 55). Varo’s description of the painting draws attention to the clef as instrument, too, one capable of moving objects within the immediate physical space (and perhaps beyond?). There is a play here, perhaps, on music’s noted capacity to move its listeners. Music has an agency that goes beyond the alteration of the air.

Varo’s weird instrument calls to my mind those deployed by Björk on Biophilia—pendulum harp, sharpsichord, gameleste—and which can be seen in Louise Hooper’s 2013 documentary When Björk Met Attenborough.

As I was writing these paragraphs, it occurred to me that this autumn will mark thirty years since I travelled to Chile to spend a year in South America. One of the first things my hosts in Santiago did was to arrange a visit to Pablo Neruda’s house at Isla Negra, where we perused the poet’s collections of objects—ships’ figureheads, model boats, ships in bottles, shells, bottles, pipes—and listened to the roar of the waves on the rocky Pacific coast. That memory sent me to the attic to dig out photos of the trip; such is the way for a mind always wishing to make tangible connections.

Shortly after that visit, I made the journey south to the city of Concepción, where I would be based on and off for a year. While there, I was given a book containing Neruda’s Veinte poemas de amor y una canción desesperada and Cien sonetos de amor by a charming, earnest young man with whom I enjoyed many conversations. It has been living on my bookshelves ever since I returned to England. Opening it now, I find a bookmark inside, a ‘Recuerdo de Chile’ featuring a gilded and embossed flat-capped Neruda beaming encouragement.

I also find a marker on the page containing the forty-eighth love sonnet. I’m not sure who marked the page, my romantic young friend or romantic young me, but I take it as a sign to read. The poem is about ‘two happy lovers’ who ‘make one bread’, who ‘cast two shadows that flow together’, who hold the day ‘not with ropes but with an aroma’, who ‘did not shatter words; their happiness is a transparent tower’.12 Accompanied by the air and wine, ‘the night delights them with its joyous petals’:

Text within this block will maintain its original spacing when published

Two happy lovers, without an ending, with no death, 
they are born, they die, many times while they live: 
they have the eternal life of the Natural.

Surrendering to this memory, I’m once again grateful that, in the end as in the beginning, there are subjects and objects and things and processes and art that helps us join them all together. And, though I’ve taken time to follow my footsteps, I also know that the connections that exist in this text are the tracks of a human life, not something generated in seconds by a prompt fed into a machine. I remain in it for the slog, not the slop.

Thank you for slogging along with me.

‘How the Landscape Feels (with Music)’, from last July, tried to capture thoughts I had about the places I ran through, and to think about what role sound played in that. As I mentioned then, I didn’t wear earphones while running, wanting instead to tune in to ‘music that’s already inside my head, music coming from an inner jukebox, sometimes as if from nowhere, sometimes prompted by a thought or a feeling or overhearing a word or phrase’.

I returned to this theme recently in ‘Run. Listen. Repeat’. That piece started out as a review of Ben Ratliff’s recent book Run the Song: Writing About Running About Listening, but became as much about my thoughts on running and sound. As I mentioned at the end, I’d just been gifted a pair of running headphones and was looking forward to seeing what changes that brought to my running.

My first runs with planned soundtracks used music I was already familiar with. I’ll write about that another time; basically, there was an album I always knew would be my first choice if I made the switch, and it proved to be as magnificent for running as I’d expected.

This week I decided to run with music that was new to me. I’m glad I did. Not only was the album I chose a great running soundtrack, it also gave me the idea for this post, which may be the start of a new series where I take records for a run to review them. The idea would be to attend to the music as it soundtracks a particular run and to think about some connections between sound, running, landscape, writing and whatever else emerges. Similar to what Ratliff does in his book, but making it my thing.

London-based producer Ryan Lee West, aka Rival Consoles, has released two albums in close succession this year. In June, there was the video game score for MindsEye, followed by the 4 July release of Landscape without Memory. On a recent trial of Qobuz, I’d flagged two of the tracks from MindsEye when I saw them recommended. I’d been aware of Rival Consoles before, but I hadn’t followed West’s releases closely. The MindsEye tracks immediately connected. When Qobuz listed Landscape from Memory as a featured release last week, I added it to my library. And so it became the first album of new music I loaded to my phone as a running soundtrack.

For my run on Sunday 6 July, I chose a 10K route I’d recently started using, a twisted figure of 8 that covers paved waggonways between Longbenton and High Heaton, rougher footpaths between the railway line and the NUFC training grounds, the quickly growing area of the new Autumn Ford housing estate in Benton, a stretch of Wiltshire Drive, and a leafy footpath that leads back to the railway line.

Landscape and memory are favourite themes of mine, especially when I’m on the move. I was therefore drawn to the title of the Rival Consoles album, though it wasn’t the reason I selected it for my run. I chose it because I expected its wordless, synth-based music would provide a motivational soundtrack. And so it proved.

I hadn’t researched the album or listened to it before taking it out on the waggonways. I just pressed play and went. I didn’t note titles until the sixth track. ‘Coda’ gave me pause as its woozy, disorienting intro threatened to mess with my running pace. The previous tracks had seemed to flow smoothly, a mixture of synth sketches and budding beats that locked into my cadence. They did what I’d hoped they would do, made me one with the music and my movement through the landscape.

That doesn’t mean I didn’t notice what was happening in them. Flowy as they are, the earlier tracks got me thinking about moving bodies creating temporary shapes on dance floors, machine tools honing edges or smoothing curves, a metallic keening here ceding earphone space to squelchy puddles of sound there.

I thought of many things I’ve felt before when responding to synth-based electronic music, and which I’ve sometimes criticised myself and other writers for leaning too much into: metaphors of organicism, plant life, aquatic themes, journeys through imaginary places. I’ve decided to not be so hard on us writers for thinking of these kinds of imagery. They are what they are, and this is an album about landscape and memory.

I took the album for a second run on Tuesday 8 July. On this occasion, I started it a bit later into the run as I was with my wife for the first 2.5K. This meant I heard different tracks at different points, which made for a nice contrast with Sunday’s run. This time around I picked up on earlier moments of dissonance than I’d previously noticed, the opening bars of ‘Soft Gradient Beckons’ being one example. Here, harsh sounds saw at each other as a backwash of sound enters and percussive rhythm builds. Momentum established, the track enters a lull two thirds of the way through and the dominant sound becomes an insistent beep. I thought of hospital monitors and the nagging/reassuring electronic pulse in Explosions in the Sky’s ‘First Breath After Coma’.

Again, I’ve previously chastised myself and others for relying on comparisons with other artists when reviewing. Again, I’ve decided to forgive us this indulgence. Translation and comparison are how we make sense of the world, negotiating the new via the familiar, looking for common ways of understanding each other.

On the evening of 8 July, I attended a listening party for the album hosted by Erased Tapes (West’s label) on Bandcamp. West was present to offer insights into tracks and respond to questions. That issue of translation/comparison came up frequently, with listeners noting how certain tracks reminded them of other artists. West joined in, citing Burial and Daniel Lopatin/Oneohtrix Point Never as influences.

Many listeners mentioned space, breathing and flow as key elements they were picking up from Landscape without Memory. I agree. I was drawn into the music by its fine balance of tentative exploration, breathing space, forward momentum and echo. Some sounds enter the mix as if looking for their footing, to then fade away or gain the confidence to become dominant elements.

When running, I’d felt the spaces between the layers of sound, noticing how West doesn’t just ramp things up but lets his songs breathe.

This is probably the place to point out that I’m using bone conduction headphones, meaning my ears are uncovered and I therefore have further layers of sound while I’m running: footsteps, traffic, bicycles approaching from behind.

The most obvious extra layer on my runs is the near-constant birdsong. There is ample space in Rival Consoles’ music to allow those sounds to become an ingredient, and I couldn’t always be sure whether what I was hearing was in the exterior landscape or in the music. That’s especially the case when you have a track titled ‘Gaivotas’ (‘seagulls’ in Portuguese).

During the listening party, West mentioned his technique of reversing previously used musical elements, glitching and slowing while reversing to create warped reiterations. Fragments of melody become timbres and textures.

I get a sense of an ecosystem, each element affecting the others.

Is a landscape from memory a space of constant becoming? Not knowing, I ran on, revelling in the woozy glitches of ‘Jupiter’ that made me question my direction and pace, grateful for the relative unidirectionality of following track ‘In a Trance’ as it provided the impetus I needed for the later stages of the run.

Landscape from Memory is 58 minutes long, the ideal time for a 10K at my pace. That was pure coincidence the first time I took it out, but now I know for future runs and can plan accordingly.

As for the physical landscape I ran though this week, it’s much as it was when I wrote about it last July: ragwort abounding, nettles looming from hedges, the barren footpaths of winter turned to lush green corridors.

I remember it from last year because I took note while running through, because it reached out to me, because I heard it and wrote about it. So much of the landscape we find in writing is drawn from memory. I suppose the same applies for music.

A couple of videos, not related to my run/review but providing more information about the album and other art it connects to.

The first one doubles as a video for Rival Consoles’ ‘Soft Gradient Beckons’ (track 4 of Landscape from Memory) and a documentary about the artist behind the animation, Anthony Dickenson. There are some nice parallels between visual and sonic art here.

Those parallels come through in this ‘making of’ video about the album. West describes the influence of place on his work, as Dickenson does in the video above. They share an interest in bringing collages of work sketched out in different spaces to a final space where it all comes together. West talks of making music ‘like making brush marks on a canvas’.

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This may become a series of posts. If you have any suggestions for records I might take for a run, I’d be pleased to receive them. By ‘records’ I generally mean albums by a particular artist/band, though I’m open to suggestions for compilations or playlists too.

I have shared some of these observations before. I repeat them in the hope that, like a half-decent folk song, they have some life in them yet.

Nine Julys ago, I had the honour and pleasure of participating in the University of Sussex graduation ceremony at which Shirley Collins was awarded an honorary doctorate. In the days leading up to the ceremony, as I prepared my speech, I spent a long time listening to Shirley’s music, often while driving around the beautiful South Downs of Sussex.

I found myself thinking about the relationship between song and place, about how we forge, maintain and sometimes lose connections with the places in which we live, work and travel. I was feeling this keenly at the time as I prepared to move to the other end of the country to begin a new job.

Some of my thoughts during those days are posted below. First, I’m sharing the text of the speech I gave at Brighton Dome on 20 July 2016 ahead pf the conferment of Shirley’s honorary doctorate.

My speech for Shirley Collins’ honorary doctorate

Shirley Collins is a Sussex-based folksinger, folklorist and educator who has contributed enormously to the dissemination of the traditional music of the British Isles and North America.

A major figure in the English Folk Revival of the 1950s and 1960s, Shirley Collins also played an important role in the collecting and recording of folk and blues music in the southern United States. This work, undertaken with acclaimed folklorist Alan Lomax, led to the creation of a valuable archive of vernacular music and introduced the world to figures such as Mississippi Fred McDowell.

As a singer in the UK, Shirley Collins was innovative in her choice of material and her stylistic approach to traditional song, alternating conventional performances of English and Appalachian balladry with fusions that incorporated early music, classical, jazz and rock arrangements. Among her landmark works from the 1960s and 1970s are the albums Folk Roots, New Routes (with guitarist Davy Graham), Anthems in Eden (with her sister Dolly Collins and the Early Music Consort) and No Roses (with folk-rock group the Albion Band). These and other works are considered highly influential in terms of song preservation, reinvention of tradition and the introduction of British balladry to new audiences.

Shirley Collins’s performances are marked by her clear and unaffected singing style. She has described her approach to performance as ‘singing with the same voice you speak with’ and has expressed admiration for those traditional singers who have been able to communicate directly and simply but still with individual style. This style can be described in her own words as ‘straightforward, not necessarily unadorned but very lightly adorned … you’re not selling the song, you’re just singing it’.

This straightforward approach can be found in Shirley Collins’s singing, even when it is accompanied by less conventional instrumentation, as on the 1971 folk-rock album No Roses. As an example of this, I’d like to share a clip of a personal favourite from that work, one that some of the Music graduands sitting here will have heard me play in my first year popular music class. The song is ‘Claudy Banks’, associated with the Copper Family of Rottingdean.

After withdrawing from her singing career at the end of the 1970s, Shirley Collins turned to lecturing, broadcasting and writing. She has given public talks on her experiences of song collecting in America, on the traditional music of Sussex and on gypsy singers in Southern England. In 2005 she published America over the Water, a book detailing her fieldwork with Alan Lomax.

Shirley Collins has been awarded the Gold Badge of The English Folk Dance & Song Society, made patron of the South East Folk Arts network, and awarded an MBE for services to music. She continues to be a touchstone for a wide variety of contemporary musicians, as evidenced last year by the release of Shirley Inspired, a triple album of songs associated with the artist, performed by a diverse range of contemporary musicians. She shows no sign of slowing down, having recently returned to the recording studio to produce a new album of English traditional songs and having also completed a second autobiography.

Revisiting Shirley Collins’ song catalogue

In the days surrounding the graduation ceremony I posted a series of reflections on social media about Shirley Collins’ music and the places it reflected and evoked. They form a log of my feelings at that time as I grappled with an inspiring song catalogue and an upcoming move across the country.

17 July 2016: Shirley Collins & Davy Graham, ‘Nottamun Town’

I started my celebration of the song catalogue with an interpretation of ‘Nottamun Town’, from Shirley’s boundary-pushing 1964 album with Davy Graham, Folk Roots, New Routes.

Graham was the globetrotting, finger-picking composer of 60s guitar standard ‘Anji’. Collins was the Hastings-born, London-based folk singer with the clear, unaffected style that had drawn praise from the likes of Ewan MacColl and Alan Lomax, with whom she’d toured the American south in the late 1950s collecting songs from Bessie Jones, Mississippi Fred McDowell and many more.

‘Nottamun Town’ (Roud 1044) was an old hard-times song—possibly referring to Nottingham—that would be revived by Bert Jansch and Fairport Convention and used as the basis for Bob Dylan’s ‘Masters of War’. This version perfectly showcases Davy’s alternately ringing and pinched, swinging, blues-inflected style alongside Shirley’s crystal clear enunciation of the doomy lyric. On one level, a cold blankness that lets you know that this is a straightforward story, truthfully told; on another, an eerie beauty and a rhythmic pull that draws the listener in to the well of old weird Anglicana.

18 July 2016: Shirley Collins, ‘The False Bride’

This comes from Shirley’s first record for the legendary Topic Records, an EP from 1963 entitled ‘Heroes in Love’. A note on the rear sleeve informs the listener, ‘These songs are not about folk-heroes in any epic sense; just ordinary young men transformed by love’. That phrase ‘transformed by love’ encapsulates so many of the magical, tragic, sometimes farcical mutations that are related in the multilayered folk tradition.

‘The False Bride’ (Roud 154)—also known as ‘The Week Before Easter’ and with variants as ‘I Once Loved a Lass’ and ‘I Courted a Wee Girl’—narrates a typically doomed transformation, as a young man reflects, increasingly despairingly and suicidally, upon the nature of love. Or is it perhaps just his own inexperience and inadequacy, twisted through solipsistic narrative into a woman-blaming fatalism?

Shirley sings it in her unblaming, neutral tone, at service as always to the telling of the tale. As she would explain many years later in a wonderful interview with Michael Berkeley, the ways these songs should be sung is ‘straightforward, not necessarily unadorned but very lightly adorned, and you’re not selling the song, you’re just singing it. It’s just straightforward, plain, simple but subtle.’

Shirley accompanies herself here on 5-string banjo, another simple and subtle device that echoes the techniques used by many of the American folksingers she and Alan Lomax had recorded in the late 1950s. This version of the song is also inspired by a Lomax-related recording of the great Sussex singer and custodian Bob Copper, included in the LP series The Folk Songs of Britain. One of the song’s verses would also provide the title for No Roses, the classic 1971 folk-rock album Shirley recorded with the Albion Country Band: ‘I went down to the forest to gather fine flowers / But the forest won’t yield me no roses’.

As well as the stark simplicity of this recording, I love the record sleeve of the EP, with Shirley looking up and to the side at the words ‘of Sussex’.

19 July 2016: Shirley & Dolly Collins, ‘Geordie’

This recording of ‘Geordie’ (Roud 90) comes from Love, Death & The Lady (1970), the second album that Shirley recorded with her sister Dolly for the Harvest label (the first being the classic Anthems in Eden). It’s a melancholy record, as most attest, with many tales of doomed romance and class conflict. ‘Geordie’ is a great example of the latter, the tale of a man condemned to hang for wanting to feed his family.

As related on the Mainly Norfolk website, this was the third time Shirley had recorded the song. This rendition is notable for the addition of Early Music instrumentation, present throughout the album and its predecessor. The cool, unruffled vocal cuts a straight course through the sad story while the various instruments weave in and out of the arrangement, occasionally threatening to sail off in rebellious counter directions, but ultimately staying true to the thrust of the song. There have been many great renditions of ‘Geordie’ (or ‘Georgie’, as it also appears) captured on record and video. This is one of them.

20 July 2016: Shirley & Dolly Collins, ‘The Sweet Primeroses’

During the University of Sussex graduation ceremony at which she was awarded an honorary degree, Shirley Collins spoke movingly of a life spent in song: as listener, folklorist, custodian, singer. From humble beginnings in Hastings as a daughter of working class, left-wing art lovers and granddaughter of keepers of the oral tradition, to travels in the American South in search of musicians and songs, to her career as singer and writer, the life story unfolded like a compelling ballad.

Modest and mindful of the other graduands receiving their awards, she closed with notes of congratulations and a message of hope for her young listeners. Connecting her life story to theirs, she said ‘I hope you find a passion that sustains you and brings happiness and fulfilment in a more peaceful world. And if things go awry from time to time, just remember these lines from a Sussex folk song: “There’s many a dark and cloudy morning turns out to be a most sunshiny day”’.

Those lines come from ‘The Sweet Primeroses’ (Roud 586), a song associated with the Copper family of Sussex. It became the title of Shirley’s 1967 album, a work described by David Suff as ‘a landmark recording of the English folk-song revival’. It’s a gorgeous rendition, given extra poignancy by the accompaniment of Dolly Collins on portative pipe-organ. In her speech, Shirley stated her wish to share the honorary degree with her late sister.

In her 1967 liner note to The Sweet Primeroses album, Shirley wrote of the title track:

A last song from the Copper family, whose songs sound to me like national anthems – or like national anthems should sound. All the Southern countryside is here, with a grave, stylised account of a formal meeting on a particular midsummer’s morning, the heartbreak of parting tempered with a stoical optimism. Dolly’s arrangement has some of the Coppers’ spirit and some of “the pretty little small birds too”.

For my part, it was an absolute joy to meet Shirley and her family and guests and to spend a good part of the day in their wonderful, welcoming company. It was a day I remember fondly still, not only for the role I was able to play in the event, but also because one of my PhD students graduated that day along with a cohort of undergraduate Music students who I’d enjoyed teaching immensely and several of whom I am still in touch with (I was speaking with one of them just two days ago). It was a high point of my academic career.

22 July 2016: Shirley & Dolly Collins, ‘A Leavetaking: Pleasant and Delightful’

I concluded my July 2016 posts with a track from Anthems in Eden, the classic 1969 album by Shirley and her sister Dolly, accompanied by the Early Music Consort directed by David Munrow. The early music instrumentation—including rebec, crumhorn, harpsichord, viols, bells, rackett—was an innovation that proved influential on other experimental folk musicians of the period, including Fairport Convention and Steeleye Span, albeit that they opted to use rock instruments.

This track, which bears the double title of ‘A Leavetaking’ (‘Leaving-taking’ on some copies of the album) and ‘Pleasant and Delightful’ (Roud 660), is typical of the musical melange of Anthems in Eden. It includes several repeated lines featuring a male chorus, such as ‘And the larks they sang melodious’ (my personal favourite).

It’s a song of leaving and possible return, a departure taken on an otherwise glorious day.

In the summer of 2016, I’d been listening to Shirley Collins’s music while driving around the Sussex countryside and I was reminded of the constant connections between singer, song and place. Happenstantial moments would happen, such as the day I drove past the Eight Bells pub in Jevington while playing Anthems in Eden, then, on arriving at my office and opening a Copper Family CD booklet to check some Collins-Copper connections, I saw a picture of Jim and Bob Copper singing outside the Eight Bells in 1950.

Listening to Sussex music and moving through the Sussex countryside, song would echo place and vice versa. Shirley caught this beautifully in her liner note to The Sweet Primeroses album, when she wrote ‘Through these songs I get the same leap in the heart as when I catch sight of a hill figure like the Long Man of Wilmington, or Stonehenge, or the Malvern Hills. Wherever I go in Britain, history seems to press through train windows, and the songs I love best help to celebrate it.’

I thought about this as I prepared my own leave-taking from Sussex. In September I would take up a new post at Newcastle University. I was excited by the possibilities of reconnecting with former colleagues and friends (I’d studied and worked in Newcastle from 2003 to 2012), but was also sad to leave Sussex, my home for the past four years. I’d found the University of Sussex a superb place to work, with wonderful, supportive colleagues. The county of Sussex is beautiful. When the university celebrated a wonderful daughter of the county, I was delighted to be part of that story. It was pleasant and delightful.

Shirley Collins at 90

All that was nine years ago, and much has happened since. Word was already out by the time of the graduation ceremony that Shirley had returned to the recording studio after a gap of over three decades. I alluded to it in my speech at Brighton Dome, though I didn’t mention the reasons for the gap. The event wasn’t about that; we were gathered to celebrate all she had achieved, not the setbacks she’d suffered.

When Lodestar, her first new album in 38 years, appeared late that year, the backstory became part of what made her return triumphant. That story can be found many places online. Rather than repeat it here, I’ll offer a few suggested links for anyone interested in hearing from Shirley herself about her absence from and return to performing:

• An interview with Shirley Collins on Woman’s Hour, BBC Radio 4, 11 November 2016

• ‘Shirley Collins: Heartbreak stole my voice. Singing again is extraordinary’, Letter to My Younger Self, The Big Issue, 3 June 2023

• ‘Shirley Collins recalls she could not sing after breakdown of her marriage’, The Standard, 6 August 2023 [adapted from the episode of Desert Island Discs in which Shirley shared her life story and outs soundtrack]

It was wonderful to witness the critical acclaim for Lodestar in 2016 and to see the joy so many people found in Shirley’s return to recording and performing. And it was delightful to meet Shirley again when she and her band travelled north to play a show at the Sage Gateshead in March 2017.

Lodestar was followed by a second album for Domino, Heart’s Ease, in 2020 and a third, Archangel Hill, in 2023. These albums and the live performances that have accompanied them have cast Shirley inevitably in thee role of elder custodian of folk song. Unlike her early recordings, in which her high clear voice stood mostly in distinction from the people whose songs she had collected on her field trips, now she sounded more like her sources.

Take, for example, her return to ‘Death and the Lady’ (Roud 32443, related also to Roud 1031). Here is the version she recorded with her sister for the 1970 album Love, Death & The Lady:

And here’s the Lodestar version, with a video directed by Nick Abrahams:

As much as we can project such concepts onto singing voices, I hear more experience in the later version, more reckoning with life and death. In Abrahams’ film, the visuals help of course: chicks hatching in skulls, the timeless, implacable landscape, the 81-year-old singer’s face superimposed on a picture of her younger self.

I mentioned in my speech at the graduation ceremony that Shirley has often spoken about singing with the same voice you speak with. I hear more of that in the recent recordings. Where many of her early albums kept the experimentation to the instrumental arrangements and left the singing gimmick-free, there was still a sense of a ‘folk voice’ performance rather than a field recording.

You can hear the closing of the gap between singing and speaking voice on the many live performances that Shirley has graced us with in recent years. The one below is from 2020, at the time she was promoting Heart’s Ease. It was lockdown time and so it’s a ‘Tiny Desk (Home) Concert’. That seems apt for Shirley, whose home in the Sussex town of Lewes is an important part of her identity. The video should start at 4:51, with Shirley introducing ‘Sweet Greens and Blues.

‘Sweet Greens and Blues’ was also a return to earlier material. Shirley’s first husband Austin John Marshall (who also wrote the words) had recorded a version of the song by Shirley and Davy Graham in the mid-1960s. That version went unreleased until 2020, when it was included as a bonus single with vinyl copies of Heart’s Ease.

‘Hares on the Mountain’ (Roud 329) provides what must be one of the longest gaps between an early and late Shirley Collins song recording. The song appeared on her on her debut album Sweet England in 1959 (recently reissued by Moved By Sound).

Shirley returned to the song for her 1964 album with Davy Graham, Folk Roots, New Routes. The most recent version is from the 2023 album Heart’s Ease.

I continue to find it inspiring to hear a voice reattach itself to a song after such a long time. To think what was happening in 1959 and what has happening in 2023. To listen again now, on the occasion of Shirley Collins’ ninetieth birthday. To wonder at the continuum that songs and voices offer.

So now to conclude and to finish my song (Roud 1206)

In closing this celebration of Shirley Collins, I want to mention a few other resources that are well worth exploring: further links in the chain, evidence that many were keeping Shirley in mind during the long silence between her 1970s recordings and her 2010s renaissance.

There was David Tibet of the band Current 93, who released a compilation of Shirley’s music on his Durtro label in 1992 and who encouraged her return to live performance in 2014.

Another David, David Suff, reissued Shirley’s music on his Fledg’ling label, including the acclaimed box set Within Sound in 2002.

There have been excellent articles and book chapters over the years about Shirley’s music. I particularly like those by Rob Young (for Uncut and for his book Electric Eden) and Jude Rogers (‘Our Shirley’ for Hole & Corner, various pieces for The Guardian and The Observer, the ‘Gilderoy’ chapter in The Sound of Being Human) and Stewart Lee (his liner notes for Lodestar and several pieces preceding them, not all easily linkable).

In 2014, the team of Fifth Column Films (directors Tim Plester and Rob Curry) and Burning Bridges (producer Paul Williams) created a Kickstarter to fund The Ballad of Shirley Collins. The film was released in 2017 and is available to watch on Vimeo. The funding project also led to Shirley Inspired, a collection of recordings by contemporary artists of songs Shirley had recorded. At the time I pledged to support the project, the album was only scheduled to be a digital release; later, it became a triple album released by Earth.

As I mentioned in my speech at the graduation ceremony, I used to regularly play my Sussex students the version of ‘Claudy Banks’ that appeared on No Roses, the 1971 album by Shirley Collins and the Albion Country Band. It’s an album I’ve also enjoyed discussing with my colleague Matthew Ord, whose recently published Sound Recording in Post-War British Folk contains a brilliant analysis of another track from the album, ‘Murder of Maria Marten’.

I draft a post on specificity in song. I recall a text I started some time ago called ‘The Penguins Steal the Show’. I realise it’s 45 years to the month since the release of Nic Jones’ Penguin Eggs, one of two musical references that inspired my title-in-waiting.

I rename my essay, knowing I want to stay culturally specific. That means sticking to British songs or to songs that mention places where I’ve spent time, though neither of my penguin-referencing songs quite fit that bill. Could any song I know well be a place I’ve spent time? I suppose so, and vice versa.

I’ve lived in enough songs to call them home.

But I still want to turn the volume down on US-centred specificity. I’ve consumed a lot of that (haven’t we all?), and I’ve a habit of getting things wrong when I speak about some of my favourite US artists, like that time I didn’t know that moccasins were water snakes in a Guy Clark song.

Specificity doesn’t always translate, and that can feel good. Things get lost in translation, and that’s mostly okay where popular song is concerned. It’s not diplomacy.

Specificity doesn’t always translate, and that can feel bad. It can feel exclusive, divisive, like you’re not in on the joke, not a member of the club. Doesn’t our online culture thrive on endemic division? Don’t we rely on binary oppositions to sell our hot takes? Does specificity help or hinder that?

I’m still thinking through these and other questions as I write. There will be contradictions.

To return to Richard Dawson and what I said in that conference at Falmouth University:

I’m tempted to read ‘Nothing Important’ and its long companion piece ‘The Vile Stuff’ not so much as personal autobiography, but something closer to collective or regional autobiography. I mean something to do with those regional references that appear in many of Dawson’s songs. We shouldn’t take them too literally; there’s that point that Dawson makes about Newton-by-the-Sea, that listeners can translate specific reference points into their own local versions. But it still seems important to me that its these details rather than those that illustrate the songs.

That passage also appears in one of my Substack posts about Richard Dawson (‘Nothing But Things’), while the Newton-by-the-Sea reference links to another one (‘I Can Feel It In My Molecules’). I’d suggested to Richard that the place name makes the song special for an audience familiar with North East England; he’d replied that ‘everyone’s got a Newton-by-the-Sea somewhere near them’.

Some commenters from outside the UK have mentioned that Dawson’s references can be hard to follow. So I think specificity can point in different ways: to the reference point itself and an audience’s familiarity with it; and to a vaguer gesture towards something that means something to someone and that someone further from that orbit might transliterate to a more familiar situation.

I can’t be 100% sure a British audience will get all the references I pull out of a Richard Dawson song. I still felt the need in my Falmouth talk to explain what a Ringtons plate was. I thought I was on safer grounds with Highland Toffee and Ladbrokes pens. You can’t take these things for granted, though.

In the Q&A that followed my talk, when it seemed the topic of specificity and British culture had struck a note with my audience, I mentioned Dawson’s recent song ‘Gondola’ and how it explores the everyday mundane by weaving TV references into the thoughts and feelings of its protagonist, an unfulfilled grandmother:

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Good Morning Britain, a soft-boiled egg
Piers is on Lorraine, shooting pains down my left leg.
Holly & Phil can pay your energy bills, 
dead wasp on the windowsill,
the last drops of Blossom Hill,
hailstones on the bus up to Lidl.

These lines will have more meaning for listeners who recognise the references to UK daytime TV shows and their hosts. They paint a picture of a person viewing the world through a mediascape, of the merging and saturation of the media world and the immediate physical world. And the despair inherent in seeing the world through Blossom Hill-tinted glasses.

The juxtaposition gets darker in the second verse:

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Cash in the Attic, A Place in the Sun,
a very long-overdue phone call from my son William,
Deal Or No Deal Or No Deal Or No Deal Or No Deal,
Box number 17 is opened to reveal
a wound that’s never healed

Like other songs on End of the Middle, ‘Gondola’ is quietly devastating, a glimpse of the forlorn hopes that exist within the everyday.

There’s humour and play, though. Dawson isn’t laughing at his characters, but he’s having fun as a songwriter: lining up the TV show references, finding the musicality in ‘deal or no deal’ and coupling it to rhymes (‘reveal’, ‘heal’), mixing the mediated and the mundane.

There’s a video for ‘Gondola’ which adds extra layers for interpretation, especially around the unrealised dreams of the protagonist that give the song its title. Commenters on YouTube note how Dawson wrings universal themes out of specific details, which is my reason for mentioning the song here too.

Another coincidence. End of the Middle was playing on my car stereo as I drove to the Falmouth conference. Then it finished and the next album on the SD card came on: Artefacts: Sacred & Profane, by St. James Infirmary, a band from the North East with links to Richard Dawson.

St. James Infirmary is the name given to various permutations of people working with the Ashington-based musician Gary Winston Lang. Artefacts is a 2023 album that features several prominent NE musicians. As I was driving, my specificity radar picked up the opening lines from the song ‘Northumberland Rapture’: ‘I saw the Virgin Mary at the crossroads / Between the Spine Road and the A19’.

The Spine Road is the A189. It starts just south of the River Tyne, runs close to where I live (Longbenton), then runs north towards Ashington. Where it meets the A19 is about five miles from my house. I’ve never seen the Virgin Mary there, but I appreciate the reference.

Artefacts also includes a version of a song I wrote about last year, Nev Clay’s ‘Cuddy’s Cave’. It’s a recitation of places, people and cultural events associated with the North East that has gone through many versions, each bringing out new specificities. The song’s references to places I’ve spent time—from the Free Trade Inn to the Wilko on Shields Road—remind me how our specificities intersect with those of others.

This kind of regionally specific reference always grabs me. They don’t have to be local to where I’ve lived. ‘Northumberland Rapture’ and ‘Cuddy’s Cave’ put me just as much in mind of Billy Bragg’s ‘A13, Trunk Road to the Sea’, a song that names Wapping, Barking, Dagenham, Grays Thurrock, Basildon, Pitsea, Thundersley, Hadleigh, Leigh-On-Sea, Chalkwell, Prittlewell and Southend, all places I’ve never been.

Bragg’s 1980s ‘translation’ of ‘Route 66’ makes some neat swaps for the original, especially in its opening lines where ‘if you ever plan to motor west’ becomes ‘if you ever have to go to Shoeburyness’. There’s a YouTube clip of Bragg explaining to a German audience how it seemed necessary to adapt the song to a geography he could understand better; he’s also aware of the irony of his non-English fans struggling to follow his version.

Courtney Barnett’s Sometimes I Sit and Think, and Sometimes I Just Sit was still recent when I visited Melbourne in 2015 (for another conference; I was speaking about Janis Ian and Nina Simone). Its opening track ‘Elevator Operator’ had already made an impression on me, but it came to mean so much more once I’d encountered its lyrical references: the 96 tram line, Swanston Street, the Nicholas Building.

I came to appreciate the Melbourness of the song and its video. And the best Vegemite reference in a song since Men At Work’s ‘Down Under’.

I’ve not listened enough to the new Half Man Half Biscuit album to gauge its use of specificity in relation to the band’s previous releases. Considering where I was presenting my Dawson talk, though, I have to note the appearance of ‘Falmouth Electrics’ and its mention of Redruth, the town where my dad lives.

I was thinking about the band because there’s a point in my Dawson talk where I say ‘there simply aren’t that many songs which feature Phillips-head screwdrivers, bars of Highland Toffee, Woolworth’s price stickers, trolleys and snooker cues’. I half-expected someone to respond by saying, ‘what about Half Man Half Biscuit?’.

You might say The Fall, too. Both bands have plenty of super-specific cultural references deployed over large song catalogues, and fans who love to quote them. In HMHB’s case, there’s a longstanding and thriving community of fans who transcribe the band’s lyrics and discuss their takes on the songs and differently heard lyrics. Fans of The Fall do the same, of course.

Complementary specificities. Or, as The Half Man Half Biscuit Lyrics Project puts it, ‘Pop Songs Picked Over By Pedants’.

Below is a list of HMHB songs that were in top ranking as fan favourites during a 2023 poll.

The titles alone give a sense of the specific topics broached by the band. Of course, there’s a wealth of extra detail in the lyrics. I could be here all day selecting, so I’ll restrain myself by picking some lines from the songs above as examples:

For when you’re in Matlock Bath you don’t need Sylvia Plath / Not while they’ve got Mrs. Gibson’s Jam — ‘The Light at the End of the Tunnel (is the Light of an Oncoming Train)’

There’s a man with a mullet going mad with a mallet in Millets — ‘National Shite Day’

It’s a cricketing farce with a thickening plot / Act One, Scene One – Brenda Blethyn gets shot … Oh the mummers, the poppers / The Best Of The Coppers — ‘We Built This Village on a Trad. Arr. Tune’

Speedwell, campion, jack-by-the-hedge / Orange-tipped butterflies, Bradley Dredge / I’m about a thousand miles away / From Claire Jenkins’ gin reports / And Stuart Bell and dull Adele / And Janet from Accounts banging on about turmeric — ‘Oblong of Dreams’

Ground Control to Monty Don / The testimonial silver’s gone — ‘Every Time a Bell Rings’

While I feel there are some clear differences between Richard Dawson’s lyrics and those of HMHB’s Nigel Blackwell or The Fall’s Mark E. Smith—Dawson’s approach to his characters and their situations is empathetic rather than critical—they are all brilliant at using the detail of everyday, mundane life to provoke emotional responses.

In this, they could be examples of the ‘boring’ social realism that Glenn Fosbraey has written about in a summary of British songwriting that jumps from the Kinks’ 1968 album The Kinks Are the Village Green Preservation Society to later acts such as The Smiths, The Streets, Niko B, Lady Leshurr and Yard Act. As Fosbraey says of The Streets, ‘[Mike Skinner’s] songs about Playstations, London Underground travel cards, cans of Carling, bottles of Smirnoff Ice, smoke-reeking jeans, McDonald’s and KFC documented the lives many of us were actually living’. This reads like a more culturally translatable set of lyrical objects, but the everydayness is the point here.

Is this the place to mention CMAT’s ‘The Jamie Oliver Petrol Station’, with a title that sounds like it’s from the Half Man Half Biscuit songbook, from an album called Euro-Country (and all the issues of cultural translation that brings up), and with a lyric that goes ‘This is making no sense to the average listener / Let me try to explain myself in a few words’?

I’m drawn to specificity, but I’m not saying it’s the be all and end all of song. Ambiguity in song can also be wonderful: blurry words, muddy mouths, foggy textures.

I’m focussing on words in songs here, but specificity is equally about musical settings. Why this note and not that one? Why that modulation? Why use harpsichord there? Why that sample? What was it about the take with the broken vocal that made it the one? Such song moments, as I’ve written previously, are puncta erupting from the studium of their setting. I’ll return to more of them in future posts.

Specificity in song may not always be about precision. Or rather, it may be precision in word choice rather than meaning, or some other form of precision. When I explored the sound of nonsense in my 2015 book of the same name, I was interested in precise choices in word and sound, but it was how they precisely played with sense and meaning that made them stand out for me.

One type of ‘nonsense' I discussed in the book was slang, which has often found its way into popular music. I used the example of ‘Slang Like This’, released by True Tiger in 2011, in which British grime MC P Money repeats a string of slang terms—‘bredrin cuz bredrin bradda bredrin safe bredrin’—that have come to the UK from the Caribbean. Instead of exclusivity, P Money argues that slang brings different audiences together around his music and this sense of community is echoed in the song’s video, in which a diverse range of people are seen mouthing the lyrics.

A version of the song by north-east-based rapper Aems, entitled ‘Geordie Slang Like This’ attempts a similar strategy, with a video showing people from the Newcastle area mouthing the Geordie terms.

Specificity in song may relate to topicality, as in many protest songs. Phil Ochs preferred the term ‘topical singer’ to ‘protest singer’, and many of the songs he sang have details that, when they were written, were ‘all the news that’s fit to sing’. But it’s not topicality I’m chasing here, not the ‘here and now’ so much as the ‘this not that’.

List songs, which I’ve written about extensively, may trade in specificity, but they provide such an abundance of specific items that each one risks getting lost as a punctum. That said, musical decisions can highlight some list items more than others; ‘Leonard Bernstein’ is always going to stand out in R.E.M.’s ‘It's the End of the World as We Know It (And I Feel Fine)’.

Equally, a list song may benefit from curiously specific turns of phrase. I think about ‘These Foolish Things’, one of the songs that set my Songs and Objects project in motion. I’ll leave it to Neil Armstrong (not that Neil Armstrong) to quote some of the lyrics, not least because he provides some interpretive specificity of his own:

Are there any more evocative lyrics in the popular songbook?

A cigarette that bears a lipstick’s traces, an airline ticket to romantic places, and still my heart has wings, these foolish things, remind me of you.

It’s clear we’re not talking here about a crumpled roll-up or an easyJet to Magaluf. In ‘These Foolish Things’, the singer is surrounded by reminders of a lost lover—’Oh how the ghost of you clings’—and enumerates them in a long list of vivid images such as ‘the sigh of midnight trains in empty stations’ and ‘the waiters whistling as the last bar closes’. These are, insists the singer, ‘foolish’ things—he is trying to make light of the enormity of his loss. But he’s not fooling anyone.

Listening to the new album by Little Simz, I’m reminded that specificity in song may also be about biography. Many tracks—especially, but not exclusively, diss tracks—trade on the audience’s knowledge of the artist, their life, their traumas, achievements and disputes. Generally, though, I’m more interested in what makes Simz a culturally specific and brilliant rapper than I am in the details of her current beef with Inflo, even if it’s the beef that’s given the album meaning for many critics and fans.

Penguin Eggs, the 1980 masterpiece by folk singer and guitarist Nic Jones, is one of my all-time favourite albums in any genre. As well as opening with a spellbinding version of ‘Canadee-i-o’ (inspiring Bob Dylan to record the song a decade later) and containing several more ‘trad arr. Jones’ numbers, there are songs by Harry Robertson and Paul Metsers.

Jones recorded Robertson’s ‘Wee Pot Stove’ as ‘The Little Pot Stove’ and his ‘Ballina Whalers’ as ‘The Humpback Whale’. Both songs are packed to the gills with imagery from Robertson’s experiences as an engineer on whaling ships in South Georgia and Australia. The song about the little iron stove provides Jones’ album with its title and was one of two songs that inspired my title for this piece.

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We live it seven days a week
Cold hands and frozen feet
Bitter days and lonely nights
Making grog and having fights
But there's salt fish and whale meat sausage
And fresh penguin eggs a treat
Then we struggle on to work each day
Through the icy winds and sleet

These are the lyrics as I hear Jones sing them. They are not the ones listed on Genius (which are wrong), nor are they Robertson’s original lyrics (which can be found on a website dedicated to his legacy). I’ll leave the detailed discussion of those variants to the folk at Mainly Norfolk and Mudcat Café; the lyrics above are the ones I know and love, the ones I sing along to whenever the song comes on, that set the context for my delight in hearing about grog, salt fish, whale meat sausage and, above all, penguin eggs.

I said earlier that I wanted to stick to examples whose cultural references I was familiar with. What to make of ‘The Little Pot Stove’, then, set as it is in Leith Harbour? That’s Leith Harbour in the South Atlantic, not the port near Edinburgh.

I’ve tasted grog and salt fish, but not whale meat sausage or penguin eggs. They’re easily understandable song items, though, and I relish the vivid detail. The lure of the unreachably exotic, perhaps? An appealing contrast to the mundane specificity I was discussing earlier.

Or do I home in on the penguin eggs because they provide the album’s title? Possibly. I think I’d have noticed them anyway in Robertson’s or Jones’ performances, but that singling out adds something. Jones and his audience clearly think so too; witness the way he raises his hand at this point of the song in this rare late performance, and again here, where the line elicits a roar of recognition from the crowd.

(For anyone unfamiliar with Nic Jones and interested in why it seemed miraculous to see him performing again in these concerts, it’s worth reading his biography, watching this documentary or listening to this profile.)

There are many lines that jump out at me on Penguin Eggs. Here are some from ‘The Humpback Whale’:

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Back in to Ballina we steered, tied up and stowed the gear
All hands headed for the pub, and we filled ourselves with beer

And here’s Jones singing them:

It’s that ‘filled ourselves with beer’ line I love. There are so many ways to talk about getting a skinful, but this one has a glorious clunkiness.

With Jones’ songs, it’s as much about musical arrangement and voice as it is lyric. While I admire Robertson’s detailed songwriting, it’s Jones’ delivery I cherish and which, in turn, increases my admiration for Robertson’s imagery.

My other penguin-referencing lyric is by Townes Van Zandt. It’s from his song ‘Two Girls’:

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Now it's cold down on the bayou
They say it's in your mind
But the moccasins are treadin' ice
And leavin' strange designs
The Cajuns say the last time
That this happened they weren't here
Oh Beaumont's full of penguins
And I'm a-playin' it by ear

There are those moccasins again, the ones that tripped me up in Guy Clark’s ‘The Mud’. Here at least I’m going to risk assuming a double meaning: the tread of footwear on the surface of the ice; water snakes treading frozen water. Either could leave a strange design.

But it’s the penguins I’m here for. Suddenly Beaumont is full of them, and I don’t need to have been to Beaumont to appreciate this as a standout image.

Once again, the penguins steal the show.

Last July, I posted a text called ‘How the Landscape Feels (with Music)’, an attempt to connect my newfound practice of running with the fresh lease of life my writing had gained, and to say something about my relationship with landscape and music.

When I wrote that piece, I was training for the 2024 Great North Run. Much has happened since then. I ran the Great North Run and enjoyed it. So strange to run along motorways I’d driven so often, to have freedom of the roads from the city to the sea. So exhilarating to have those legendary Northeast crowds cheering us all on, to finish with a sense of achievement.

I got the bug. I started the new year with a 10K trail run around Druridge Bay on the Northumberland Coast. In bright January weather, we ran around lakes and along the beach. In February, I ran a half marathon up the Northumberland coastline from Craster to Bamburgh. A few weeks later, I completed the Lisbon Half Marathon.

These felt like memorable achievements in and of themselves, but they were also stepping stones towards my major challenge for this year, which was the Edinburgh Marathon. This was my first marathon, something I couldn’t have imagined doing a year ago, something I still wasn’t sure I could do even after weeks of longer and longer training runs.

I did it. Not as quickly as I’d liked, but I made it. I felt good for half the race (perhaps I’m a half marathon runner?). We were blasted by gale force winds and hail storms on the final stretches. It was brutal, but the crowds lining the route were amazing and helped me pick up speed for the final push through Musselburgh.

That was three weeks ago, and now I’m back to regular runs around my local neighbourhood. Getting back into writing has taken longer, but it seems appropriate that my first piece in a month should connect to something that was taking up increasing amounts of my time during the first half of this year. And that it should be a version of a text I meant to publish weeks ago, something that started as a book review, then veered into something else as I racked up the miles through the woods and waggonways of North Tyneside.

To the book. Given my interests and my attempts to connect them through writing, it’s no surprise that I was intrigued by the appearance earlier this year of Ben Ratliff’s book Run the Song: Writing About Running About Listening. It’s what I was reading in the run-up to Edinburgh, along with some other books about songs which I’ll cover in a future post.

Ratliff’s book has many quotable sentences and passages. Here are some of my favourites, which I think explain his project.

1. On the shakuhachi player Takahashi Kuzan:

You can listen into another’s breathing and lose track of your own, just as you can assume another’s stride. Kuzan’s breathing is careful and imposing, even while it is barely there. To the extent that he’s become the bamboo, his playing reminds me of the day, a month or so after I began running, when I realized I hadn’t thought about my breathing once—when a runner’s breathing, which can seem to be everything, became nothing. (p. 64)

2. On Ratliff reconciling himself with the music of Alice Coltrane, which had previously ‘pushed [him] out’ of its orbit:

Running has clarified things. Because the direction of Alice Coltrane’s music doesn’t change course decisively, I feel as I run that I am not simply reacting to its positions, I am moving with them. If I still sometimes find the music dense, if I can’t get into the spaces of it, I can run alongside it. (p. 67)

3. On trying to understand his students’ reliance on earphones when navigating the streets of New York:

I think they talk this way because they have learned that older people will disapprove of the fact that they are walking around with earphones on all the time, and they better have an inarguable response to the disapproval … If they characterize listening as armour, as a defense against a world that is hostile to them, which it is, then I’ll understand that they’re bracing themselves against the force of the world that older people—me—have made for them. (p. 74)

4. On the challenges of writing about music (something that frequently preoccupies me, as I’ve related before):

Music is difficult to write about, for the simple reason that it must always be caught up with. Music moves from here to there; it is running away from us. The fact that it runs away from us is a source of joy but also of displeasure: a song can drive you crazy, or beguile you, or perplex you, or threaten you. For this reason, many ignore its motion, or are asked to, and write about music (or are asked to) as if it were a finite historical event, which has to mean something; it’s better if that something can be sharpened to a weapon-like point.

Amen to that one.

As much as I found myself agreeing with, learning from and being inspired by Ratliff’s book, I was also curious to note where our running and listening paths diverged. This seemed more evident in the first half of the book, and I started making notes about perceived differences in our experience, only to find out later these were not always as significant as I’d initially thought. That’s partly about the course the book takes. Like a run, it offers an initial landscape that subsequently and subtly adapts to something a bit different.

For example, there was a stark contrast placed early in the book between running while playing music through earphones (which Ratliff does) and running without music (which I have been doing), which was described as running in silence. I felt sure that Ratliff was as well aware as anyone (and perhaps more than many) that not running with music playing in your ears doesn’t equal running with silence. I thought again about the sounds I hear when I’m out on my routes: birds, vehicles, human voices, dogs, footsteps, the hum of electricity cables overhead and to my side, the wind in the trees, running water, the sea, the voices in my head, my breath.

Connected to this, I was curious about the related ideas of running-as-chaos and not following a script. Ratliff contrasts chaos (which he initially seems to favour) with repetition, routine and the kind of formalised training an event-focussed runner might do as preparation for a race. But for me, the chaos comes from the myriad voices, thoughts and sounds I find rushing through my head precisely because I don’t have a prepared running soundtrack. However last-minute or random Ratliff’s listening choices might be, they still constitute a track to run along.

Even if you run the same route every time, are you really running the same route? I thought about John Cage’s compositions and his writings on silence and repetition. Running is, of course, repetition. There’s little that’s more repetitive than putting one foot in front of the other, over and over again. I’d go as far as to say that to really listen to the ground beneath your feet and the space you move through, you need to go over it repeatedly.

There are subtle variations that only come through when you get to know a territory well. Thinking of my most-repeated long run, I know where certain tree roots will emerge as hazards, where a trunk that arches over the path is just high enough for me to pass through without stopping or slowing, the anticipation of an approaching set of steps that will sap the energy from my legs, the foreknowledge that I will soon be enveloped in a lush green corridor, that I will switch from rough ground to soft to smooth, the points I’m likely to encounter more people or none. And the sounds, of course, never fixed the same way in the same spaces, but still subject to tendencies, likelihoods, expected sonorities and those that seem out of place.

Reading the first half of Run the Song, I felt the absence of a deeper engagement with ‘silence’. I should have realised that Cage would show up eventually, and he does (p. 118), at which point Ratliff also refers to Susan Sontag’s 1969 essay ‘The Aesthetics of Silence’. These passages are as compelling as Ratliff’s account of his more explicitly musical soundtracks, and I felt us drawing closer together as runners and thinkers about sound.

I sometimes felt that Ratliff had a romantic view of running which I envied. By ‘romantic’, I don’t mean the association with earphone listening and ‘main character syndrome’ that Ratliff refers to by way of a New Romantics example (p. 71). More like an eschewing of the trends, practices and paraphernalia that are now associated with running as lifestyle and competitive sport.

Ratliff doesn’t train for or enter running events, nor does he measure running data. I’ve done all these things in the past eighteen months. The reason I say I sometimes envied the freedom he’d created from all that was because I could easily imagine myself as someone who got into running in ways similar to those Ratliff outlines at the start of the book. Like him, I took up running in middle age (later in middle age in my case) at the suggestion of someone else and with no great expectations of changing my life. Unlike Ratliff, however, I became involved in a more socially structured running practice, first by weekly involvement in one of my local parkrun, second by taking up my wife’s suggestion to enter the Great North Run.

For me, this became about accountability: being part of a small group who travelled to and from parkrun together, following a semi-structured training plan to increase my chances of completing the half marathon. And so it continued, with me designing day trips or weekend breaks around running events like those I mentioned earlier. At some point during all of this, caught up in the enthusiasm that attends a newly discovered interest, I acquired decent running shoes, a FitBit and other bits of equipment.

When I say I envy the romanticism I glean from Run the Song, it’s largely because, if you’d have told me even two years ago that I would become the kind of person who wore any kind of sportswear beyond trainers, let alone a hydration vest, fitness tracker and hi vis gloves, or who steered nearly every conversation with colleagues to running, or spoke earnestly about heart rate, inclines, trail shoes and personal bests, I’d have had to sit down for laughing.

I think part of why I dived into all that stuff was a fascination with just how foreign it was, how other it felt to most of what had previously dominated my waking hours. I was interested to see myself become that person, curious to see what he did.

As I say, it’s been about accountability for me, about challenging myself to do something and keep doing it. As I’ve written here before, my discovery of running began at the same time that I took up new practises of daily writing and regular sharing of what I’d written (i.e. this Substack). At a time when, professionally, the opportunities for new achievements and the kind of goal-setting that would make them reachable were drying up or excluding me, running and writing felt like something I might control.

There has still been great freedom in both. Here is where I connect back to the possibilities to be found in repetition, to how I find freedom in structures and patterns. I have applied more discipline to my writing in the last eighteen months than at any time in my life and yet I’ve been able to steer that writing to a range of topics that are freer than before: looser, more organic, closer to the kinds of patterns and connections my mind has always wanted to follow.

The same goes for running familiar tracks. Threading my way yet again along the twisting woodland paths of Seaton Burn, feeling the now-familiar cold blast of air as I emerge from the woods to meet the clifftop paths between Seaton Sluice and Whitley Bay, recalling the speed I’d picked up on the firm, flat stretch from Silverlink to Shiremoor, wondering if I can muster that pace again as I hit the seafront promenades of Cullercoats and Tynemouth: within predictability, I found the freedom I’d been seeking.

Unlike the quotations I’ve taken from Ratliff’s book, I’ve signally failed to write about music in this post. That’s okay. There are plenty of song posts planned. For now, I’ll leave a link to last year’s running piece (which almost wasn’t about music either) and I’ll note that my days of running without a prescribed soundtrack may be coming to an end. As I finish writing this, my wife has bought me a pair of running headphones as an early birthday present. I got them today. I’ll run with them tomorrow. Let’s see what changes that may bring.

While writing about Portuguese music nearly two decades ago, I became fascinated by the number of old records I’d see in the UK that featured versions of songs derived from fados. The two most common were ‘April in Portugal’ and ‘Lisboa Antiga’ (sometimes rendered as ‘In Old Lisbon’). I told the story of the former song in my last post, and it will make further appearances below. I may write about ‘Lisboa Antiga’ later. But I also want to venture beyond the southwest of Europe in this essay to explore the wider world of holiday or souvenir records, a subgenre of easy listening, light or mood music that flourished in the 1960s, though with a longer and still ongoing history.

The records I’m writing about here are the kind of thing I used to find a lot when scouring British charity shops. They have something in common with the exotica records of musicians such as Les Baxter, Martin Denny, Yma Sumac and Arthur Lyman, though they’re far less likely to be collected, revered or seen as cool or culturally redeemable. Some have a kitsch appeal, but many lack even that.

There were, I think, a few things that drew me to these records. One was the promise (seldom fulfilled by the music unfortunately) that these records could successfully evoke a sense of place, whether that was an imagined or remembered location. That was also something I’d found interesting in the far more successful evocations of fado recordings, and it was that connection to a country and city so close to my heart that had got me intrigued by these records in the first place.

Another reason was a long-held fascination with music of other countries. While it was obvious for anyone with a modicum of phonographic literacy that these would not be authentic field recordings, traditional tunes or ‘world music’, there was still something alluring to me about records that promised to expose me to the sounds and experiences of other countries.

That exotica connection also played a part. I recall stumbling across Arthur Lyman’s Taboo Vol. 2 in the mid 1990s and wondering what on earth (or elsewhere) it was. Drawn by its lurid cover and promise of ‘exotic sounds’, I bought the LP, took it home and got my first proper introduction to exotica. Around the same time, various labels were issuing compilations of this kind of music as part of a broader lounge/tiki/exotica revival. I didn’t really get the American cultural context of tiki culture or its ironic revivals, but I was intrigued enough to follow up on the music of Martin Denny, Yma Sumac and other exotica artists.

One thing I found interesting about exotica and holiday records is that the LPs were essentially concept albums, mostly predating those rock albums that usually get written up as being the first of their kind. The concepts behind the albums were established not only through thematic connections between the songs, but also through the vital role of the record covers and liner notes.

While I tended to buy exotica records for the total package—music, covers, liner notes, labels—I started buying cheap examples of holiday records in my local charity shops mostly for the covers and liner notes. This is because the music on them was typically not my cup of tea (or glass of Liebfraumilch). It was mostly generic easy listening music played by orchestras, all swooping strings and deracinated arrangements.

In the early 2000s, I started scanning the sleeves of the records I’d collected and posted them on a blog, usually without further commentary. I called it ‘Vinyl Vacations’. I had plans to build a research project from it, but I took other directions with my research and teaching and abandoned the blog to work on other things. The most I’ve done with the material since then is to write about some of it in the occasional journal article or book chapter and to use the records as examples in a university class I ran for several years called ‘Global Pop’.

I’ve enjoyed following the work of other people with an interest in this area of pop memorabilia. In recent years that has included a series of books published by Janet Borgerson and Jonathan Schroeder: Designed for Hi-Fi Living: The Vinyl LP in Midcentury America (2017); Designed for Dancing: How Midcentury Records Taught America to Dance (2021); and Designed for Success: Better Living and Self-Improvement with Midcentury Instructional Records (2024). These books analyse album covers and liner notes as examples of how the LP format taught consumers about things like home entertainment, interior design, travel, dance, leisure and all kinds of other activities.

As the authors put it in Designed for Hi-Fi Living,

midcentury record albums played the role of advice column, cultural guide, and travel brochure, as they promoted postwar consumer lifestyles and celebrated iconic sites, sounds, and tastes of featured locations. And travelers, whether actual or armchair, were offered a comforting position from which they might enjoy a sense of belonging, rather than exclusion, in otherwise unfamiliar places and spaces.

I agree with Borgerson and Schroeder that many covers were designed to teach sophistication and cultural awareness. At the same time, many of my examples I collected in the UK have covers that are not design classics, nor models of sophistication. There is an abject quality to some of them, a point I’ll return to later.

Like Borgerson and Schroeder, most of my examples are mid-century ones dating from the 1950s and 1960s, though I’ve also explored how the holiday record legacy has evolved in the digital era. In my classes, I typically include sessions on how YouTube and Spotify playlists continue ideas and tropes that can be found in much earlier analogue recordings and broadcast media.

While most of the records I’ve considered feature instrumental numbers, I’ll start this tour in more familiar waters, with well-known singers who got caught up in the jet setting holiday fever of the 1950s and 1960s. Given that many of the instrumental albums featured well-known songs shorn of their lyrics, it makes sense to start with some examples that still contain words.

Classic examples here include Frank Sinatra’s Come Fly With Me (1958), Bing Crosby’s Holiday in Europe (1962) and Tony Bennett’s If I Ruled the World: Songs for the Jet Set (1965). These albums presented themselves as tourist itineraries. The rear cover of Come Fly With Me depicted a ‘flight plan’ (the songs), a ‘flight log’ (notes on the songs) and listed the pilots as Sinatra, Billy May and Nelson Riddle. If I Ruled the World had a similar table on the rear jacket listing ‘Departure … Notes … Destination … Time’.

I’d also include Nat King Cole’s To the Ends of the Earth in this group, though this was a posthumous compilation from 1969 that gathered place-themed recordings by Cole from across his career rather than a pre-planned concept album. Cole is shown with a camera on the cover, modelling the sightseeing tourist. He sings in Italian and French as well as English, adding to the air of cosmopolitanism the album conveys.

Crosby’s Holiday in Europe may have come after Sinatra’s Come Fly With Me, but the older singer already had form with travel-themed albums (and movies). As far back as 1939, two of his Hawaii-related songs had featured in an album of five 78RPM discs released by Decca as Music of Hawaii. The following year saw the release of a Crosby-only selection of Favorite Hawaiian Songs, while 1947 brought El Bingo: A Collection of Latin American Favorites. Nearer to the period I’m discussing was the similarly Latin-themed El Senor Bing (1961) and, preceding that, Bing in Paris and Around the World with Bing! (both 1958).

All these albums came with notes that promoted the places the music was celebrating or sourced from. El Bingo and El Senor Bing traded on Crosby’s position both as someone who was revered enough to be familiarly nicknamed in Latin America and as someone who was an exemplary celebrity traveller or vacationer. The rear cover of Around the World tells us that ‘Bing belongs to the world’ and describes him as a ‘sophisticated world figure’ who ‘retains a quality which is unobtrusively but unshakably American’.

I picked up on Holiday in Europe when I saw it in a charity shop partly because it’s a holiday record and partly because it includes Crosby’s recording of ‘April in Portugal’. When I was collecting holiday records, I was more likely to go for those with Portuguese songs on them for reasons my recent posts should make clear. I suppose for a while I became like Clarence, the record collector profiled in Evan Eisenberg’s book The Recording Angel, who would ‘collect anything with Clarence on it’.

Crosby’s ‘April in Portugal’ opens the album with confident ease, his phonogenic croon delivering Jimmy Kennedy’s lyric like a whispering serenade. As for the rest of his vacation, Crosby spends most of his time in France (five songs), followed by Italy (three), Greece (one), Germany (one) and Spain (one). Though we might expect more destinations from a twelve track album, there’s enough here to provide a sense of Crosby’s cosmopolitanism. The liner notes tell us that ‘Bing’s unique charm dismisses the barriers of language, culture and geography with the casual aplomb that is so characteristic of everything he does’. As with other albums in my holiday record collection, the aim of the liner notes is to present the artist as a comfortable, confident connoisseur of global culture, someone whose ‘casual aplomb’ and way of being in the world the average consumer might envy or wish to emulate.

The cover of Sinatra’s Come Fly With Me is an anomaly among the singer’s run of concept albums of the 1950s and 1960s. Where many of those had placed Sinatra in the foreground or background of street scenes, barroom vignettes, dance floors or celebrations of young love, this one has him inviting a female companion aboard a waiting plane. In the background stands a TWA jet, a bit of product placement that apparently infuriated Sinatra when he saw it. The producer George Martin, who was present for some of the Come Fly With Me sessions, reported the singer’s reaction in his memoir All You Need Is Ears:

Sinatra’s view was that Capitol were ripping him off by doing some private deal with TWA. The innuendo was that if the record went out like that the Capitol executives would get free publicity, free fares, or free something-or-other. Whatever the truth, Sinatra’s attitude was plain—TWA were getting a free advertisement out of his face. Soon after that he left Capitol and set up his own Reprise label.

Billy May’s arrangements for Come Fly With Me are upbeat, bringing sunshine to these globetrotting tales (May, by the way, also handled the arrangements for Crosby’ s El Senor Bing). In his excellent book Sessions with Sinatra, Charles Granata describes Come Fly with Me as ‘one of the jauntiest Sinatra albums of the period’. Of the opening title track, written for the project by Sammy Cahn and Jimmy Van Heusen, Granata writes ‘[It] is a lofty affair that is the perfect vehicle for Sinatra’s languid, breathy vocals, so evocative of the feeling of flight’.

The song’s lyric also has a jaunty quality. I’ve always liked the song, but I feel it’s the quality of the arrangement and Sinatra’s singing that pulls me along rather than silly lines like ‘let's float down to Peru / In llama land, there's a one man band / And he'll toot his flute for you’. It’s hardly ‘One for My Baby’, but then we’re getting the brushing-all-that-melancholy-off Sinatra here: blue eyes and blue skies rather than the long blue moments of the wee small hours.

Like Crosby, Sinatra gives himself to us as the world-traversing sophisticate, whether sourcing exotic booze in Bombay or contemplating a flying honeymoon en route to Acapulco bay. Other destinations on the album include Hawaii, Brazil and Capri. There are the common associations between times, seasons and places: Moonlight in Vermont, Autumn in New York, April in Paris, London by Night.

I have a UK mono release of the album, meaning that the first side ends with ‘It Happened in Monterey’. This song replaced ‘On the Road to Mandalay’, an adaptation of Rudyard Kipling’s poem that appeared on the original US release. Kipling’s daughter Elsie Bambridge, acting as executrix of the poet’s estate, had the song banned in the UK due to her intense dislike of it.

When I wrote recently about the versions of ‘April in Portugal’ by Bert Kaempfert, George Melachrino and Manuel and the Music of the Mountains, I explored how notions of ‘Portuguese-ness’, ‘Latin-ness’ and more general ‘foreign-ness’ were vital aspects of the music’s meaning and the way it was presented to an assumed Anglo-American public. By the time of that tune’s ascent into easy listening ubiquity, the development of jet travel was opening up new possibilities for tourists. If the singer-centred albums by Crosby, Cole, Sinatra and Bennett were still suggesting a globetrotting actor who was more able to define the jet set than the average person, the mostly instrumental albums that I class as holiday records removed that celebrity aspect somewhat, making the imagined places seem more reachable.

A sense of luxury still attended these records, however. Mantovani’s Continental Encores (1959) was a lavish affair, a genuine ‘album’ in that its gatefold cover incorporated an eight-page booklet featuring colour photographs of European tourist destinations (complete with glamorous young tourist couples) and gushing notes describing the ‘journey in sound’ contained on the record: the combination of music and recording technology, we are told, can bring Europe into our living rooms, or ‘to put it another way, it can now be employed to take you out of your home, and lead you gently by the ear to familiar or imagined places.’

Like the use of glamorous locations in films of the period, this type of holiday album presented itself, above all, as an account of something that other, more sophisticated people were doing, or that gifted musicians could make you believe you could do. These were other people’s holiday albums, which listeners were invited to peruse and to imagine being a part of.

It’s worth distinguishing between souvenir records and armchair travel records. While the former allowed tourists to purchase a sonic memory of their trip—a potential future nostalgia trigger—the armchair travel album played on the understanding that music could be escapist or nostalgic even if you hadn’t had the direct experience of the places being evoked. These aspects were often combined, as in the liner notes to Continental Encores, which contained the following two observations:

Of course, the comparative ease of Continental travel these days has helped to introduce us to French, Italian and German tunes which in the ordinary way might never have reached these shores had they not been stowed away in the memories of English holiday makers, wistfully returning from unimagined sunshine.

[…]

bring out the liebfraumilch, the frankfurters, and the apfelstrudel, and settle back in your arm-chair, for a detour that takes in O mein papa and Mutterlein, better known to us as Answer me. Also a sweep to the warm South West for the pleasure of seeing April in Portugal.

This mixing of experience and fantasy, actual and virtual travel, is reflected in Mantovani’s musical arrangements, which swoop and swoon around their source material, swelling it beyond familiar proportions or particular geography. The place this music most authentically evokes is the one we find on all the arranger’s albums: the Mantovaniscape.

Again the liner notes explain this as a deliberate objective:

To be effective, this kind of playing has to be done with tremendous skill, for the human ear would not be satisfied and convinced by the flat side of real life. The mere playing of a tune from some place or other is not quite enough. If, in the yellow-grey days of winter, we are to be carried to the spring warmth of the Iberian Peninsula, a group of musicians sawing away at April in Portugal is insufficient transport; the warmth must be in the playing, not merely implied in the title.

And so with all the tunes in this album, Mantovani produces a sort of heightened impression of the places he takes us to in his music.

Another way that real and virtual travel was combined, in the UK at least, was in the use of bands at holiday camps to provide nostalgic music appropriate for holiday moods. One such bandleader, Eric Winstone, released an eight-track EP in 1958 entitled Holiday Time, made up of two sections: ‘Holidays at Home’ and ‘Holidays Abroad’. Once again ‘April in Portugal’ was included, leading off a medley of choral and orchestral arrangements that included ‘Wonderful Copenhagen’, ‘Vienna City of My Dreams and ‘Arrividerci Roma’ [sic]. The liner notes referred to the ‘carefree, happy-go-lucky atmosphere … maintained throughout’ and to Winstone’s ‘long-established reputation for creating and dispensing happiness, nostalgia and escapism’.

As I mentioned, holiday records share several similarities with the more heavily chronicled world of exotica and ‘space-age bachelor pad’ music in that they provide what Joseph Lanza, in his book Elevator Music, calls ‘an environmental recreation’ or ‘whirlwind tour’ based on exotic stereotypes. As Lanza notes,

Despite their vaunted weirdness, exotica and space-age bachelor pad music are almost invariably placed in the murky miscellany with the Mantovanis and [Hugo] Winterhalters. They took mood music as far as it could go but, in turn, provided a flashy doorway into the larger easy-listening manse that may seem less ‘cool’ at first but gets equally (if not more) beguiling on closer listen.

Indeed, it’s hard to distinguish between Muzak, mood music, easy listening, exotica, space-age bachelor pad music, lounge and holiday records; they all constitute Lanza’s ‘murky miscellany’. Like exotica pioneer Les Baxter, mood music outfits such as The 101 Strings and the Mystic Moods Orchestra went for feeling and mood rather than authenticity, providing an explicit fakeness, a refusal to be enslaved to the aura of the original even as their record labels and album covers promised authenticity. The basic sonic template for all such groups was interchangeable from the representation of one locale to that of another. Many featured what Borgerson and Schroeder call ‘the all-purpose European symphonic sound’ (Designed for Hi-Fi Living, p. 166).

Holiday records present the exotic, but not the spectacular exotic associated with Baxter, Denny, Lyman and Sumac. Where exotica indexes impossible fantasies beyond the borders of the wildest orientalism, holiday records showcase reachable but romanticised destinations, even if they do often settle for armchair representation. Where exotica focuses on the fantasy of adventure and the nostalgically misremembered dangers of elsewhere, the holiday record trades in the possibilities of leisurely travel and tourism and in cultural misrepresentations of a more modest kind.

Where the holiday record does trade on excess and spectacle is in its frequent recursion to massed instruments. Recalling the ‘heightened impression’ praised in those Mantovani liner notes, there seems to be a need to go for more than ‘the flat sound of real life’. Why have just a few guitars visit a locale when, like Tommy Garrett, you can have fifty? Garrett wasn’t the only person to take guitars on holiday: Buddy Merrill did too. Arthur Ferrante and Louis Teicher took pianos.

Taking instruments to new places, or having instruments evoke those places, was tied in to ongoing developments in studio sound, most obviously stereo recording. Like many of the functional, pedagogical or mood-based LPs that appeared during the 1950s and 1960s, records that focussed on holidays, trips and global tours would connect the success of their ventures to experiments in sonic technology.

To take another instrument-focussed travel record as an example, Percussion Around the World by the International ‘Pop’ All Stars offered a global tour that was facilitated by the clear stereo separation of the various instruments. As the liner notes explained,

The magic of PHASE 4 recording has brought us this superb long playing album … whose sonic brilliance and precision is truly ‘world-wide’ …

This album does more than just hold a selection of tunes denoting far away places. It attempts to capture not only the colour of a locale—which is done with a judicious use of the instrumentation—but it attempts realistically to excite the spirit native to the place from which the song originates. To hear ‘Volare, therefore is to be in Italy, to hear ‘Auf Wiederseh’n’ is to be in Germany. France can’t be more closely portrayed than it is in this LP’s interpretation of ‘Poor People of Paris’, and the list extends to such far-off places as China, Greece, South America, Austria and India.

The album contains a version of ‘April in Portugal’, of course, but I said I would venture further afield in my examples, so here’s the primer for ‘Japanese Sandman’ followed by the track itself:

In thinking about what holiday records do, I find myself drawn to the metaphor of the postcard. As examples of visual and textual representation, the comparison seems apt. Postcards do several things. They mediate between senders and receivers. They promote and represent places. They do so in ways that are reductive, essentialised, sometimes ironic and knowing, at times sophisticated, at others cheap and tawdry.

The postcard one sends to family or friends says as much about the sender and receiver as it does about the place being represented on the front and the experience being reported on the rear. Postcards may be bought for oneself, of course, in which case they play the role of souvenir. They are objects which connect the here and now of buying and sending to the then and there of receiving or remembering.

Postcards are objects purchased in the knowledge of a future moment in which the present will have been reported on or recalled. They are both prescriptive and transcriptive. They are prescribed because a network of actors—photographers, illustrators, designers, manufacturers, printers, distributors, retailers—has anticipated the need for the purchase (a need, of course, saturated in ritual and precedent) and also because the postcard buyer has anticipated buying the postcard as part of their travelling experience. Postcards are transcribed because the same network of actors has attempted to get something of a place and an experience down on paper. It has committed itself to an act of documentary. Postcards imagine remembering.

Holiday records are comparable. I’m struck by how many variations on a theme there are, just as with postcards. There are attempts at sophistication, as in some of the George Melachrino and Mantovani albums, and there are cheaper, more garish examples.

This may sometimes relate to the extent to which the album is marketed as an artist-centred one or an activity-centred one. For example, there are multiple versions of Portuguese holiday music arranged by the Basque-born bandleader Shegundo Galarza, who spent most of his career in Portugal. The album Holiday in Portugal contains instrumental versions of several fados, including the ubiquitous ‘Lisboa Antiga’ and ‘Coimbra’. Vocals are removed from these arrangements, we are told, because visitors might find them ‘somewhat strange in their language and emotional intensity’.

For the braver soul or the connoisseur, vocal versions of the same tracks are made available on an album called Fadista’s Choice. The instrumental versions are also issued on the collection Musica de Portugal, which removes reference to Galarza and the Portuguese guitarist Jorge Fontes from the cover in favour of a recreation of a Portuguese postcard. The album Holidays in Portugal, meanwhile, contains some of the same songs but is a distinct collection, again aiming for the cheap and cheerful postcard aesthetic.

The brochure is another metaphor for considering the holiday record. Holiday brochures, of course, attempt to portray the holiday experience and to paint places in the best possible light. Mantovani’s Continental Encores is one example. A more modest one is this album featuring the fado singer Lidia Ribeiro, which was privately released by the Hotel Estoril Sol and Casino Estoril as a way of promoting their businesses, as well as that of another hotel in Lisbon.

I’ve paired Ribeiro’s record above with the ‘Holiday Abroad’ series that was a collaboration between RCA Victor and the Belgian airline Sabena. Borgerson and Schroeder discuss this series and other examples of business synergies between record and travel companies.

Holiday records have never really gone away, it’s just that they are much less likely to be records these days. In their book Music and Tourism, Chris Gibson and John Connell trace the processes of virtual tourism and vicarious journeys from the holiday records of the 1960s to ambient and new age records and CDs and to what became, in the 1980s and 1990s, the genre of world music. And, as I noted in my fado book, it was easy to find examples in the world music sections of shops of what passed for holiday CDs in the early 2000s, with titles like Bar Lisbon, Bar Istanbul, Bar Bombay, Café Italia, Café do Brasil, Café Arabia.

The holiday records of the 1960s were very much part of the vinyl LP boom, where the long-playing format lent itself to grouping songs together via concepts and themes. This idea was easy to continue in the CD era. In the streaming era in which we now find ourselves, this function has been taken up via the playlist.

Nostalgia is immune to format, while format is often intimately connected to nostalgia. At the heart of the phonograph—imagined by Thomas Edison in the nineteenth century as a dictation and memorial device—is a desire to create and revisit old haunts. With each subsequent development in phonography, we find related desires, ways to summon moods and affects and to posit journeys to remembered and imagined places.

Leonieke Bolderman’s book Contemporary Music Tourism: A Theory of Musical Topophilia (2020) has productively analysed how people use playlists in services such as Spotify to imagine and plan voyages before travelling, to accompany those trips and then also to recall them later. ‘Music can be like a book or painting’, Bolderman writes,

something to be pondered over, forming the start of developing elaborate imaginary worlds. However, music experienced in its unfolding over time can also be a tool to set the mood and atmosphere of a place, used more instrumentally to enchant the physical world with that which is not present.

Music is about connection to and disconnection from the listener’s environment: for Bolderman’s interviewees, ‘Music … was used as a tool to literally tune into or out of a landscape’. This matters because we often think about music in terms of location, but we should also consider it in terms of dislocation. The dislocative possibilities of music allow it to both seem to be about or connected to particular places while equally detachable from them. Music makes us feel in and out of place.

For all the continuities, however, holiday records of the kind I once collected are anachronisms now. We’re far enough removed from the moment of production and reception that it’s hard to discover what the producers of these records intended, how the records were received and what people actually did with them. One reason I’ve found so many of these records in charity shops, house clearance auctions and other sites of the unwanted is that their original purchasers were either no longer interested in them or, more likely, no longer with us. The records themselves are ‘exhausted commodities’, to use Will Straw’s term.

Holiday records traded on escapism and nostalgia, but it was less certain whether they could become objects of nostalgia themselves. Despite the occasional lavish products released by the culture industry, one cannot easily imagine something like Continental Encores being released now; as an object seemingly forever indexed to the past, it has a nostalgic mystery to it. To take a humbler example, whenever I see a copy of Music from the Greek Islands by Tacticos and his Bouzoukis in a charity shop, I think of my parents’ ownership of this record and the holidays they took in Greece. This works by association, too, meaning I can feel that familial tug when seeing other Greek holiday records.

Mostly, though, these records have become homeless objects in a way that seems to mock their once brazen attempt to sell the pleasure of travel.

I sometimes wonder whether these kinds of records have the potential that exotica records showed to become objects of interest to those concerned with what culture discards on the road to canonising other tastes. It would also be interesting to explore notions of kitsch and abjection along the routes sketched by theorists of material culture or chroniclers of the pop’s bizarre pasts. Many of the records I own are not strange enough to make collections like Juno & Vale’s two volumes of Incredibly Strange Music, but there’s an overlap.

I wonder how the holiday records in my collection present a nostalgic reflection on leisure time itself, of travel and a certain (mis)understanding of the world.

They are representations of nostalgia, especially when considered as complete packages with liner notes, covers and marketing. They may be more important as representations of a general nostalgia than as souvenirs of particular experiences. The tourists depicted in the sun-drenched pages of Mantovani’s Continental Encores represent a general index of youth, travel, cosmopolitanism, wealth and leisure, but also a nostalgia for a time when this might have been possible.

As Edward Casey once observed, nostalgia has more to do with imagination than memory, and therefore employs invention and a priori speculation rather than accurate documentary history. What persists as documentary history in these records is a reminder that they presumably responded to a felt need of the times in which they were produced. It’s easy for us to dismiss the gushing liner notes that I’ve quoted here as baseless hype. But I suppose the distance between reality and what was being aimed for was clear back then too.

Enough people were convinced to take trips with Mantovani, George Melachrino, Eric Winstone, James Last, the 101 Strings and others to keep these musicians selling records for years. When I came to them secondhand, I should have known they were never going to be portals to alluring destinations. Despite what the notes to Percussion Around the World promised, I wasn’t going to experience the native spirit of place.

What I was getting was a connection to an earlier record buyer. Someone had purchased this musical safari in cardboard and vinyl, housed it for a while, then left it behind. I was collecting yesterday’s abandoned dreams and illusions.

There’s a tangential link to Sinatra in the post I’m planning for next week, which will be on holiday and souvenir records. Today’s post is a kind of set-up for that one and also concludes my recent run of April-themed posts. And yes, I know it’s May now. But in my mind, it’s still April in Paris, Portugal and The Waste Land.

This essay is part of my occasional series of song itineraries. It’s about one of the biggest hits of 1953, and it discusses where that song came from and where it subsequently travelled. The cast of this story includes an iconic fado singer, a world-famous jazz trumpeter and singer, a pioneer of exotica, a Bollywood movie, a Yorkshire-born bandleader masquerading as a Corsican, and the man who wrote the lyrics to ‘Teddy Bears’ Picnic’.

The song is ‘April in Portugal’, though it began life as ‘Coimbra’. Here’s what happened.1

From ‘Coimbra’ to ‘April in Portugal’

Portuguese composer Raul Ferrão wrote the music to ‘Coimbra’ at the end of the 1930s but the tune lay dormant until 1947, when, with the addition of José Galhardo’s lyric, it was performed by actor and singer Alberto Ribeiro in the film Capas Negras. The film’s female lead was played by Amália Rodrigues, a rising star of fado in Portugal and abroad. It was one of several acting roles taken by Amália on her path to becoming the preeminent fado singer of the twentieth century and the most famous Portuguese popular music artist in the world. (My ‘All of This Is Fado’ posts provide further background to the genre and to Amália Rodrigues).

‘Coimbra’ appears in the film as a serenade delivered by Ribeiro’s character to Amália’s. It’s what I call an ‘associative’ lyric in that it’s mainly a list of features associated with the historic university city of Coimbra. Capas Negras is set amongst the students and faculty of the university, and the town is one of the main ‘characters’ of the film, not only in the depiction of its scenery but also through several mentions of Coimbra in the script. The song fits with this theme by hymning the ‘Coimbra of the Choupal [a tree-lined avenue] … of songs … of doctors’ and declaring the city to be ‘the capital of love in Portugal’.

‘Coimbra’ might have travelled no further. It wasn’t a significant hit with audiences beyond the movie theatre. Amália maintained a fondness for the song, however, and kept it in her concert repertoire. Performing in Ireland in 1950, she met the French singer Yvette Giraud, who had two of Amália’s songs adapted to French by the chanson writer Jacques Larue. One of these was ‘Coimbra’, re-titled ‘Avril au Portugal’, for which Larue provided a new lyric to Ferrão’s music rather than translating the original. The new song became a nostalgic glance back at a fleeting romance voiced by a French traveller to Portugal.

Giraud’s recording was a hit in France and the song’s popularity spawned other versions by Elyane Dorsay, Anny Gould and Yvonne Blanc. It was common practice at the time for music publishers (in this case, Chappell) to capitalise on a successful tune by having artists on different record labels record simultaneous versions.

A Dutch recording of the song appeared soon after, titled ‘April in Portugal’ and with lyrics by Jack Bess which I believe are a Dutch adaptation of the French chanson. The version released by Metropolis Amusements-Ensemble, with a vocal by Jan Verbraeken, is styled as a bolero, further internationalising the tune.

Following the success of ‘Avril au Portugal’, in 1952 Chappell approached the Irish-born, New York-based songwriter Jimmy Kennedy (author of the lyrics to ‘The Teddy Bear’s Picnic’) to write an English version called ‘April in Portugal’, a title which was already in use by some bands. Kennedy took on the job but refused the title, wanting to avoid becoming known as a writer of ‘geographical songs’. Instead, he wrote a song called ‘The Whisp’ring Serenade’, whose lyric bore no mention of any place other than poetic allusion to the moon and stars.

The protagonist of the song recounts a tale of falling in love with a piece of string music, which comes to act as a surrogate for a lost lover: ‘old ecstasy returned / I lived and loved and learned / but then you went’.

The song remained both a self-referential serenade and a tale of memory and longing, but all references to Portugal had vanished. Georgia Carr’s recording (with Nelson Riddle’s orchestral arrangement) is arguably the standout version of this point in the song’s journey.

Despite heavy promotion of Carr’s recording and a version by Rino Senteri that mixed Larue’s and Kennedy’s lyrics, ‘Whisp’ring Serenade’ was not a commercial success. Chappell offered Kennedy an ultimatum: either rewrite the song as ‘April in Portugal’ or the publisher would find someone else to do the job. Convinced by the generous fee on offer, Kennedy quickly wrote the new version, in the process creating one of the most popular songs of 1953.

Bigger than ‘Blue Tango’

The biggest hit version of ‘April in Portugal’ came not from a singer, but from an instrumental arrangement by Les Baxter, who took the tune to no. 2 in the American Billboard chart in 1953. Freddy Martin’s orchestral arrangement had appeared earlier, but it was Baxter, a rising star of what would come to be known as ‘exotica’, who made the impact.

I’ll come back to Baxter’s version later. For now, let’s stay with the song’s onward journey. By April 1953, when Vic Damone’s recording was advertised in Billboard as being the ‘first version with new lyrics’, ‘April in Portugal’ was well on its way to becoming ubiquitous in the USA; in fact, Damone’s version had to vie with several vocal renditions, including those of Louis Armstrong (who also provided a trumpet rendition of the melody), Eartha Kitt (who combined the French and English lyrics) and Tony Martin.

The song was also a hit across Latin America the same year, with Spanish-language and instrumental versions (from mambo to tango) being produced by Perez Prado (based in the USA by then), Oscar Alemán and Bobby Capó. As ‘Coimbra’, the song had already been a notable success in 1952 in Brazil, where there was no need to change the Portuguese lyrics.

Amália didn’t miss out on the popularity of the song, appearing on Eddie Fisher’s American show ‘Coke Time’ twice in July 1953 and performing a version of ‘Coimbra’ that combined Galhardo’s original lyric with Kennedy’s English version.

Over the following decade, more versions followed from Xavier Cugat (1957) George Melachrino (1958), Bert Kaempfert (1959), Manuel and the Music of the Mountains (1961), Bing Crosby (1961) and Joe Quijano (a ‘chachacha-twist’ version from 1963).

The song’s global reach was evident with the 1956 Bollywood film Bhai Bhai, in which the character Sangeeta (played by Shyama) danced and lip synched to Geeta Dutt singing ‘Aye Dil Mujhe Bata De’ (written by Madan Mohan and Rajendra Krishan). In the middle of the song the familiar music to ‘April in Portugal’ appears (just after the 20-second mark in the clip below; the full movie clip can be seen here).

There was also a Japanese language version of the song, courtesy of Yvette Giraud, the French singer who had done as much as anyone to set the song on its international journey by performing ‘Coimbra’ as ‘Avril au Portugal’. Having gained a sizeable audience in Japan, Giraud re-recorded some of her most popular numbers in Japanese.

In 2004, the Portuguese record label Tradisom released a CD entitled Coimbra – April in Portugal – Avril au Portugal, featuring 24 versions of the song selected from a list of over 200 known to compiler José Moças. Besides several of the aforementioned recordings, the collection included others by Liberace, Caetano Veloso, and a version in Italian sung by Amália in 1974.

Time, Distance and Longing

Outside of the more dance-oriented instrumental versions of ‘April in Portugal’, the one constant amongst the myriad recordings of the song is a sense of longing. This association begins with the original song, with its romanticised depiction of Coimbra, students, youth and love. As a city, Coimbra had long maintained such associations, not least through the tradition of black-caped male students serenading young women from outside their windows (the source of the ‘capas negras’ of the film). In a 1931 review of fado recordings from Coimbra, the British folklorist Rodney Gallop was keen to connect text and context by describing the city, where, ‘[o]n full-moon nights you may see the students in their black gowns wandering through the dim white streets, and hear them singing to the silvery accompaniment of the guitarra the haunting strains of the fado chorado’.

As I wrote recently, one of the principal aspects of fado is saudade, the famously untranslatable Portuguese term that describes variations of nostalgia, yearning, and longing. ‘Saudade’ is the last word in the lyrics of ‘Coimbra’, meaning that the song resolves with a direct reference to this typically Portuguese framing of nostalgia.

In terms of metre, verse structure and so on, even allowing for certain differences between the Lisbon and Coimbra fado styles, ‘Coimbra’ is not a traditional fado. By mid-century, however, the growth of fado canção (‘song fado’) had made distinctions between fado and other popular styles blurry, and Amália more than anyone would develop this lack of easy distinction.

Whether in the Coimbra or Lisbon fado styles, the guitarra portuguesa is essential. In Capas Negras, Alberto Ribeiro is shown playing a guitarra while he sings ‘Coimbra’, but he’s not heard doing so; the music comes from orchestral strings on the film’s soundtrack. When Amália performed the song in her subsequent concerts and recording sessions, the guitarra returned and she typically performed it in a conventional trio style (voice, guitarra and viola [Spanish guitar]). The vocal style, too, could be heard as fado—Coimbra-style for Ribeiro, who stays closer to bel canto; Lisbon style for Amália, who offers a typically grainier vocal—though again there’s potential vocal slippage between fado and other song styles.

Ultimately, the song became a fado because it was part of Amália’s ‘Portuguese’ repertoire, distinct from the rancheros, flamencos, chansons, Hollywood show tunes and canzone Napoletana that she also performed. But all the while, gaps were opening up: between tradition and commerce, between original and adaptations, between the targets of nostalgia that the song was aiming for.

From ‘Fado’ to Holiday Record

The many versions of ‘Coimbra’ and ‘April in Portugal’ take on the baton of nostalgic representation and, through further slippages, produce new meanings. Of the early non-Amália versions of ‘Coimbra’, Les Baxter’s might, surprisingly, be the closest to fado because it uses what Baxter later recalled as ‘Brazilian mandolin’. The instrument, presumably a bandolim, provides the melody in the first part of Baxter’s ‘April in Portugal’, before the tune settles into a more conventional string arrangement. It’s both ‘exotic’ and indexically linked to Portugal and the guitarra portuguesa because of the similarity of the bandolim’s tone and playing style.

Baxter would later claim that the style he adopted for ‘April in Portugal’ would provide a template for much of his subsequent work, though that work would aim at representing far more mythically fantastic and unreachable locations than the Iberian Peninsula. Indeed, Baxter was a pioneer of the exotica style that would be taken up by musicians such as Martin Denny, Arthur Lyman, Yma Sumac (with whom Baxter worked), Sondi Sodsai and Juan Esquivel.

Esquivel, by the way, released a startlingly arranged ‘April in Portugal’ on his 1958 album Four Corners of the World.

Les Baxter’s version of the song did much to establish it as an instrumental standard and many other bandleaders and arrangers would incorporate it into their repertoires. In 1953, Percy Faith included ‘April in Portugal’ on an EP and LP entitled Percy Faith Plays Continental Music. It can be taken as a sign of how widely Ferrão’s ‘fado’ melody had travelled by this point that the liner notes describe Faith’s arrangement as ‘unusual, in that it slides over the customary tango setting and reverts to the original conception, with an interesting role assigned to the percussion’.

I’m not sure what this ‘original conception’ was, though the use of military drums throughout the arrangement signals that it has little to do with fado, which rarely includes percussion. Also of note from the title of Faith’s record and its liner notes is the use of the term ‘continental music’. The notes maintain that ‘not until very recently has the European song had much success in America’, but that, ‘with the success of The Song of Moulin Rouge, April in Portugal and Anna, at substantially the same time, an interest … sprang up’. They conclude with the observation that ‘the grace and sophistication, the cheerful zest, the sweet nostalgia of these songs show that for years Americans have been overlooking a rich and inexhaustible source of melodic refreshment’.

The marketing of music as ‘nostalgic’ was a common feature of the time and signalled one way in which musical representations could be heard as a kind of prescribed memory trip. I’ll say more about this in my upcoming post on holiday records, of which Faith’s LP is an example.

Another aspect to note from the liner notes to Faith’s LP is how he, as bandleader, is cast as uniquely gifted to bring the diversity of the world’s music to the understanding of a less-travelled audience. A similar process is at work in the liner notes to the 1955 Les Baxter album Kaleidoscope, which collected the original hit version of ‘April in Portugal’ for the first time onto a LP. The text glosses the song’s biography in such a way to suggest that, prior to Baxter’s rescue, its survival was almost accidental.

What turned out to be his greatest seller was originally written by a young man in Portuguese East Africa [a reference to Ferrão’s military career] as a tribute to his school. The song found its way to Portugal and France and became a continental hit. In England it was known as “Whispering Serenade,” and under the same title it flopped in this country. Les revived the song under its original title, gave it a rich, rhythmic treatment, and the record broke wide open, carrying the song to the top spot on the Hit Parade.

Baxter is also praised for his eclectic taste and his cosmopolitanism:

Les is a wandering eclectic, a man of unceasing musical curiosity. he travels all over the world, at every opportunity, searching out the strange, the interesting, the beautiful in music … Les takes it wherever he finds it, mixes the sounds on his own musical palette, paints musical pictures that delight and intrigue with their original colorations.

Myth relies on some connection to reality. Amidst the fairly typical hyperbole, then, we find untruths (Baxter was not an experienced traveller and apparently never left North America), half-truths (Chappell had recognised the hit potential of ‘April in Portugal’ before Baxter’s recording) and reasonably accurate information (Baxter did indeed adapt his myriad influences to his own style, making for a certain uniformity to his music, or an artistic vision, depending on one’s view). Accuracy, as ever, is one of the first things to be sacrificed on the altar of hype.

We can witness a similar process at work with the release, in 1959, of German bandleader Bert Kaempfert’s album April in Portugal, the liner notes of which proclaimed:

This album comprises a collection of some of the most popular and delightful music of and about Portugal … authentically interpreted in the lush orchestral style of Bert Kaempfert and his orchestra.

To the encyclopedist Portugal is a republic in the south-west part of the Iberian peninsula – the world’s largest producer of cork; according to the travel bureaus, it’s a tourist mecca; to the Portuguese themselves, its home sweet home.

Songwriters, on the other hand, like to expound on the traffic-stopping appeal of The Petticoats of Portugal. They find special appeal in Les Lavandieres Du Portugal (Washerwomen of Portugal), and the elegant Fadistas (men-about-town). In essence this sparkling collection magnificently captures the flavor of April in Portugal.

It’s difficult to recognise the authenticity of which these notes speak, given the distance between the sound of Portuguese music and what Kaempfert offers. As with most Kaempfert albums, it’s easy to connect the melodies to their well-known vocal or instrumental originals, yet the similarity of style removes rather than revives the original texts and contexts (a process amplified on this album by the prominent use of Spanish guitar and castanets, providing a sonic dislocation to a non-Portuguese ‘Latin-ness’). The liner notes, meanwhile, read as though someone with little or no experience of Portugal has written them. Reference to ‘the encyclopedist’ may be a rhetorical device, but it also suggests that the writer has merely gone to an encyclopaedia for information. This experience of the world from a distance would appear to be connected to the aims of the music, with listeners being invited to ‘close your eyes and listen’, suggesting that the journey to be taken is virtual.

Kaempfert, an exponent of mood music and easy listening, sits in a different camp to exotica artists like Baxter, Denny and Lyman. Fellow orchestrators George Melachrino and Geoff Love recorded versions of ‘April in Portugal’. Melachrino was an artist associated with mood music due to a series of albums designed with specific functions in mind, including Music for Dining, Music for Reading, Music for Courage and Confidence, Music for Daydreaming and Music for the Nostalgic Traveler.

Like many other bandleaders, Melachrino released a version of ‘April in Portugal’ in 1953. He returned to the tune on Lisbon at Twilight, a 1958 album which contained twelve instrumentals based on Portuguese themes and arrangements of fados. Intriguingly, the album also featured the Portuguese guitarist Raul Nery, a composer in his own right and an accompanist to many major fado singers such as Amália. Nery, who flew to London to record with Melachrino’s orchestra, contributes two compositions to the album, and provides guitarra accompaniment (and solo lead) to all the tunes, including ‘April in Portugal’.

The liner notes to the album, which describe fado as ‘nostalgic little ballads telling of death, disappointment, drownings, stabbings and general heartbreak’, give an accurate enough account of fado practice (addressed to an American audience, despite the album’s UK provenance) before observing that Melachrino’s record will cost ‘approximately $450 less than the round-trip economy-class air fare between New York and Lisbon’.

The version of ‘April in Portugal’ that appeared on the first album by Manuel and the Music of the Mountains in 1960 could not make such claims to authentic fado practice. However, like Les Baxter’s version, it provided a prominent role to an unidentified string instrument, providing a gesture towards fado.

If there was deception here, it lay in the character of Manuel himself. When the group scored its first hit in 1959 with ‘Honeymoon Song’, a story circulated that the mysterious Manuel was the Corsican-born son of an Italian mother and Spanish father and had begun his career in Portugal. In fact, Manuel was soon unmasked as none other than Geoff Love, the Todmorden-born, UK-based bandleader who was simultaneously enjoying success with lush arrangements of film and television themes. The story appeared on the back of a 1961 EP featuring ‘April in Portugal’, where the author explained that Love ‘felt that such exotic-styled music would stand a greater chance of success if it were performed by an artist with a similarly exotic, authentic-sounding name’.

As with Kaempfert, it’s difficult to gauge quite what Manuel was being authentic to. The cover of the EP, for example, depicted cacti growing in a desert, with mountains in the background, while Manuel’s name could equally reference the Iberian Peninsula or Latin America. While a later album liner might claim that Manuel’s first recording was ‘evocative of all that was Mexican’, the tendency for his records to depict various tropical scenes (sparkling coasts, waterfalls, carnival processions), combined with musical selections from around the globe, suggests that the authenticity being aimed for was mainly a general ‘foreign-ness’ imbued with exotic undertones. The album Blue Waters put it well when it declared:

Everything is here for the would-be adventurer in sound. Time and distance are no object. A warm clear mountain stream; a vast expanse of unblemished blueness above; and the subtle hint of a breeze. The music of Manuel is working.

The Nostalgia Gap

If there’s a representational slippage between actual and virtual tourism, between places and the representation of places and between vacations and their evocation, so there is a gap between described nostalgia and prescribed nostalgia. It’s as if nostalgia is something pre-programmed into us and available by affective triggers other than those of directly lived personal experience. Put another way, nostalgia plays on experience, the kind of recognised ‘universal’ experiences we can all tap into, even if we have to then map them onto personal experience.

There’s also a slippage that takes place between the associations conjured by music, memory and place. Melachrino’s Lisbon at Twilight pairs twilight with reflection, while all versions of ‘April in Portugal’ arguably tap into a chain that connects April to romantic reflection, to remembered Springs, to Paris, to love and to a fixed perfect moment. This was one reason Jimmy Kennedy had been loath to write a song called ‘April in Portugal’, feeling it would be compared with the already famous ‘April in Paris’. Perhaps he needn’t have worried, because this association was likely a major factor in his song’s success.

Besides widening the gap between the original musical representation of a city and its object of nostalgic desire, one effect of the multiple derivations of ‘April in Portugal’ was to render versions of the original Ferrão/Galhardo song into authentic fados due to their proximity to source. Thus, the semi-ethnomusicological record label Monitor (later to come under the administration of the Smithsonian Institute alongside the more famous Folkways) could release a series of fado and folk music albums in the 1960s with titles like April in Portugal, Holiday in Portugal and Lisboa Antiga.

‘April in Portugal’ and ‘Lisboa Antiga’ would become staples on the kind of holiday records I’ll write about next time around. I’ll venture beyond Portuguese-themed songs and there will be many ports to call at. I hope to see you on board.

Playlist

For anyone wishing to follow up on the versions of ‘April in Portugal’ that I wrote about here but didn’t link to, here’s a YouTube playlist that gathers several of them.

He could not abide the ends of days: it was one thing he had no control over. So he made an enemy of the clock, of merely human time, each night’s feeble apocalypse: that dire moment when the ring-a-ding bell must be wrapped in cotton wool and stowed away.

—Ian Penman, ‘Swoonatra: The Afterlives of Frank Sinatra’

Like all great stars, he was susceptible to the twin temptations of flattery and mythomania. But in the end, his finest work takes place at the midnight hour, when he tells the bartender that it’s a quarter to three and there’s no one in the place except you and me.

—Pete Hamill, Why Sinatra Matters

April felt like coming out of dreams. Spring finally arrived in northeast England. The birds multiplied. Daffodils succeeded snowdrops and were followed by tulips and snake’s head fritillaries. The days got longer, something you can’t help noticing in this part of the world. It felt like an odd time to be contemplating the long hours of the night and those indoor spaces where it’s always dark. That’s where I found myself, though, revisiting the gloom of the wee small hours, and all because of an anniversary I’d flagged several weeks before.

I began the month listening to Patti Smith’s ‘April Fool’ and that led to three posts on Smith’s later work. Before May brings its promises of starting over, I have two more April-related stories. One, slightly postponed by the Patti series, is about ‘April in Portugal’, a major hit of the early 1950s that wore its travels and changes in ways that are worth recording. Before that, though, I’m spending some time with an album that appeared seventy Aprils ago.

Frank Sinatra’s In the Wee Small Hours emerged from the long nights that served as its inspiration, and from those spent crafting its sonic perfection in the studio, to face the light and the public in April 1955. It was Sinatra’s third album for Capitol, following Songs for Young Lovers and Swing Easy (both from 1954). Where the first two were eight-song affairs released as 10-inch records, Wee Small Hours doubled the length to sixteen tracks, appearing as two 10-inch records, four 7-inch EPs and, importantly, as a single 12-inch LP.

The LP, which had appeared in the late 1940s and came of age during the following decade, was a technological event that helped to secure Sinatra’s persona and was arguably as crucial to his mature art as the microphone had been to his early career. It allowed for the concept album, which allowed for the crafting of time and narrative and brought cohesion to his major projects.

If we consider In the Wee Small Hours as a concept album, it’s as well to start with the cover, which depicts Sinatra in suit, tie and hat, leaning nonchalantly against a building on a night-time street. We see him from the side, left profile. He’s not looking at us but at the ground in front of him, lost in thought. His preoccupation extends to the lit but neglected cigarette held between two fingers of his right hand, down by his side and almost out of the frame.

Sinatra’s positioned to the right of the frame. The rest of the cover is taken up by the blue-lit, deserted street, with a prominent lamppost to the left. The lettering on the cover carries Sinatra’s name, further identifying him in case his familiar face and ‘uniform’ were not enough. The album title, meanwhile, reinforces the time of day depicted in the picture, recognisable despite the stylised buildings and lights: in the wee small hours, all lowercase, the last three words in much larger font than the first two.

The general blueness of the cover evokes a noir world but also plays on the general sense of blueness that was a pervasive mode of melancholy by this time. As Richard Williams has noted, ‘No colour has so saturated music over the last hundred years, while permitting so many shadings’. In the Wee Small Hours, in both title and cover imagery, is a fine example of what Williams calls ‘the blue moment’.

Will Friedwald notes the album’s jazziness, highlighting frequent deviation from melody and much playful musical exploration. Friedwald suggests that the musical dynamism somehow contradicts the moody, static film noir aspect of the cover, though I would argue that the noir world is also a jazz world.

If there’s a contradiction between the cover of Sinatra’s album and its contents, it’s the suggestion that the singer is outdoors, whereas the mood is one of being indoors with the lights dimmed.

The picture provides continuity, though, taking its place in a series of Sinatra album covers that feature the singer as detached observer of the world around him. The year before, he’d stood by another lamppost watching the young lovers for whom he’d offer his songs. The following year he’d be a ghost-like figure haunting a new pair of swinging sweethearts (initially, in the 1956 cover, facing away from them; on subsequent versions, looking towards them, still removed from their world). Later albums will place him alone at the bar while other patrons carouse, or paint him as a tragic jester, hiding his tears behind the make-believe of comforting those same carefree couples.

To the songs of In The Wee Small Hours. The title track is the opener. It’s narrated in the second person throughout. The ‘you’ who’s lying awake, thinking of an absent lover, the repentant whose ‘lonely heart has learned its lesson’, could be the singer addressing himself, but it’s also a shared ‘you’, a description of the type of person who, it seems, always has to relearn this lesson.

The realisation that the wee small hours are the time you miss your lover most of all could come from immediate experience—the autopsy of a newly dead relationship—or from longer, accumulated experience, the knowledge that this happens repeatedly, that it’s always this time of the night, or morning, when the feeling returns.

Placing ‘Mood Indigo’ after the title track strengthens the sense that we’re hearing from an experienced loser in love; the lines ‘you ain’t been blue / till you’ve had that mood indigo’ seem to speak from a place of repeated rejection and dejection, a site of endless blue moments.

While these songs evoke disappointment in such a predicament, ‘Glad to be Unhappy’—a song memorably performed by Billie Holiday on 1958’s Lady in Satin—finds the narrator wallowing in the perverse glee of being down. He has unrequited love ‘pretty bad’ but feels that ‘for someone you adore, it’s a pleasure to be sad’.

The fourth song on the album, Hoagy Carmichael’s ‘I Get Along Without You Very Well’ (also memorably performed by Holiday, and later by Nina Simone), attempts another perspective on absence. This time we get a narrator who initially tries to fool himself, and the listener, into thinking everything’s alright, that he can find balance and normality in life after the relationship. But the truth of the song lies in the list of exceptions to this newfound ability to get along: ‘except when soft rains fall’, ‘except when I hear your name’, ‘except perhaps in Spring’.

These songs establish the blueness that pervades the sixteen tracks of In the Wee Small Hours. The hue isn’t always monochrome. As Friedwald notes, the strings, horns and piano sometimes dance ahead of or between the lines, throwing in a sense of jollity that might seem at odds with the aura of doom that pervades the stories being voiced. I think these sounds can be heard as the background bustle of normal life that continues apace around the singer as he narrates his tales of woe, or as the party in the bar that must go on despite the despondent man in the corner pouring out his blues, or the wedding party that’s in full swing while the ancient mariner delays a guest outside in order to unburden himself of his past and his guilt.

Sinatra’s barroom raconteur anticipates another who will appear nearly two decades later on Joni Mitchell’s album Blue, an old romantic who’s ‘cynical and drunk and boring someone in some dark cafe’. The tinkling piano that plays behind Sinatra in ‘Glad to Be Unhappy’, meanwhile, anticipates the piano playing ‘Jingle Bells’ that lurks behind Mitchell’s otherwise gloomy ‘River’ and, prior to that, Nina Simone’s interpolation of ‘Good King Wenceslas’ into her version of ‘Little Girl Blue’ (a blue moment that Sinatra himself had essayed on Songs for Young Lovers).

As Sinatra sings these hymns to doomed love, he highlights the importance of rhythm in singing. In up-tempo numbers from other albums—‘You Make Me Feel So Young’, ‘Young at Heart’, ‘I’ve Got You under My Skin’—rhythm is crucial to the vocal delivery; the voice has to keep to time, to stay rhythmic and melodic, in order to deliver the lines effectively. What I hear on a lot of Sinatra’s slow ballads, and in particular the doomier songs of In the Wee Small Hours, Close to You (1957), Only the Lonely (1958) and No One Cares (1959), is a severe loosening of the rhythm.

The sense of losing time seems to echo what can happen when drunk or depressed, a feeling of being liberated from temporal norms. This is another thing that connects Sinatra to Holiday, for this freeing of the rhythmic line is one of her legacies. From the listener’s perspective, it’s more difficult to follow, and to sing along with, these meandering songs.

I feel Sinatra’s upbeat songs sound the way they do because having to stay on top of things demands a kind of business-like efficiency. I don’t mean that Sinatra’s sunnier songs are short of vocal brilliance. Far from it. They’re all about brilliance, meaning both excellent vocal technique and light-filled disposition. It’s just that, with the gloomy songs, consummate control comes with a side order of excommunication, as if the singer’s been released from the everyday time of bearing up.

Sinatra is still displaying mastery amidst the vulnerability, his singing suggesting that voice can deliver a reliability that romantic relationships cannot. When he stretches the first word ‘straying’ in the line ‘like a straying baby lamb’ (‘Glad to Be Unhappy’), when he elongates the first syllable of ‘ages ago’ in ‘Last Night When We Were Young’, or when he provides an emotional uplift to ‘Oh, the night!’ in ‘This Love of Mine’, he is escaping the vulnerability of which the lyrics speak by showcasing deft control of breath, tone and phrasing.

If this is a victory for the singer, it’s not necessarily so for the listener seeking solace, reflection or identification. And it’s the listener who is likely to spend the most time with this material in this order, merely by playing and replaying the album. That there are sixteen songs on In the Wee Small Hours makes us feel we’ve spent a long time with Sinatra, that we’ve shared a long night of the soul.

Sinatra would ask us to spend more such nights with him, on subsequent albums Close to You and Only the Lonely. When these albums are discussed together, as they are in Will Friedwald’s book Sinatra! The Song Is You, they can be seen as presenting different emotional hues:

Wee Small Hours was hardly all gloom and doom, apart from ‘Last Night When We Were Young’ (and even that bears a pregnant-with-hope pause); it suggests a dark point that we hope will be followed by the dawn. Close to You depicts that sunrise, with Sinatra’s protagonist refusing to wallow in self-pity but rather taking a self-deprecatingly bittersweet look at his own romantic foibles. The singer then painted what many consider his greatest ballad collection, Frank Sinatra Sings for Only the Lonely, in colors so pitch black that no light could possibly escape.

This is partly achieved, as Friedwald records, by the loosening of the tempos of the songs and by the use of rubato in places. The result is a kind of drift, reminiscent perhaps of a drunken night of maudlin self-reflection. In such times the mind goes wandering and, with some songs on Only the Lonely, it seems this wandering is adopted by the restless body too as it goes in search of places of escape, only to find sites of painful memory. That place might be the bar (as in ‘Angel Eyes’) or the small cafe that ‘only the lonely know’ (‘Only the Lonely’), or it might be the streets of the city that tempt you to lose yourself and let your footsteps trace out a new map of existential despair.

‘It’s a Lonesome Old Town’ is one such song, the singer wandering the wastelands of his town and his mind. Friedwald connects this wandering to the voice and its instrumental accompaniment: ‘the two voices, Sinatra and his shadow, [trombonist] Sims, wander about this godforsaken landscape aimlessly in search of love but finding only an abyss of nothingness.’

This sense of nothingness is also there at the closing of ‘Angel Eyes’ when Sinatra sings ‘excuse me while I disappear’, a line which reflects on the protagonist in the song’s lyric who’s been drinking himself into oblivion and encouraging those around him to do the same. It’s also a reflexive moment for Sinatra, who does indeed disappear as his voice brings the song to a close.

‘Good-Bye’, closing the first side of Only the Lonely, is an excellent example of Sinatra’s vocal dynamics. I wrote about it last year in my post ‘Sixteen Song Moments’, focussing on the part where the mellow reminiscence of the song’s studium is punctured by Sinatra bellowing ‘but that was long ago’, then dipping back to melodic reflection for ‘you’ve forgotten I know’.

‘Spring Is Here’, another melodrama from Only the Lonely, centres on a repeated ‘Nobody loves me’ refrain. As in many popular songs, Spring is presented as the season of hope, a time when one should be delighted by the world. But it cannot delight Sinatra’s protagonist, who’s alone. The rediscovery of the world that one can experience with a partner has disappeared. The following ‘Gone With the Wind’ intensifies the mood of loss. The album closes dramatically but enigmatically with ‘One for My Baby’, a performance described by Roger Gilbert as ‘an intricate vocal dance of defensive bluster and wounded retreat’:

If Sinatra’s first impulse as a young singer was to master breath control so that he could produce long, continuous, legato lines free from artificial pauses, his second impulse was to learn where to put the pauses so that they could speak as forcefully as the words. But it’s the way the very grain of his voice reveals precisely how and where his contradictory selves are joined, shows us the seam or scar that connects and divides swinger and loser, that makes this record such a monumental work of expressive art.

Mastery may be experience’s gift, but it’s also born of a desire to overcome vulnerability and anxiety. Compulsive repetition of acts of mastery can lead back to a position of vulnerability. This tension presents itself in the figure of the man-of-experience slumped at the bar, well illustrated in the musical worlds explored by Sinatra and Hank Williams. David Brackett writes of Williams:

The very phenomenon of the ‘vulnerable’ male (an image circulated widely at the same time in Tin Pan Alley popular music as well), frequently perched on a bar stool in a honky-tonk, constituted one of the recurring figures of the honky-tonk style. If the expression of loss does carry with it conventional associations of femininity, then the use of those conventions by males is something of a convention itself during the period of Williams’ ascendance to popularity.

It’s interesting to note Brackett’s connection here between honky-tonk and Tin Pan Alley. And it is also worth noting that the image Brackett describes has continued to have a long history in the period since Williams’s heyday. Indeed, the cowboy provides a crucial mytheme for several popular song genres, from rock through reggae to hip hop. Cowboys and cowboyism have long provided male rock (and other) musicians with a romantic role model of the loner, the outlaw or the man true to himself. While Frank Sinatra may not have obviously presented himself as such, there is something cowboyish about his late 1960s persona and his posse of Rat Packers.

Cowboyism, while supposedly basing itself on the image of the ‘real’ man, also evokes notions of play, and this connection marks a paradoxical position of vulnerability in which the man becomes a child again. Vulnerability and projections back to more innocent times were staple features of several Sinatra’s concept albums, such as Where Are You? (1957), No One Cares (1959), All Alone (1962), September of My Years (1965), Cycles (1968), A Man Alone (1969) and Watertown (1969). Chris Rojek suggests that, even though Sinatra went through a variety of stages in his career, at a certain point he seemed to remain the same man:

Between the ages of 38 and 70, that is, during the period between 1953 and 1985, there was a sense in which Sinatra decided to put the ageing process on hold. In these years he was a sort of middle-aged adolescent.

I would add to this a suggestion of a constant dialogue between the ‘vulnerable’ qualities associated with the youthful Sinatra and those associated with the confident mastery of his middle age. Roger Gilbert writes of a similar relationship between ‘the swinger and the loser’ in Sinatra’s work. This is something that continues into the 1960s, by which time Sinatra seems prone to a certain amount of repetition when exploring these tensions.

I’ll return to that topic and that era later in the year when I plan to publish another Sinatra anniversary essay, this time about September of My Years. To close this piece, though, I want to connect two things I mentioned earlier: Sinatra album covers and the album as an invitation to share time and mood with a singer.

I talked about the iconic cover of In The Wee Small Hours as an invitation to an extended blue moment. But my own vinyl copy of the album is the one reissued in the UK and New Zealand in the 1970s (and again the following decade). It has an alternative design that eschews the original street scene for a domestic interior.

I like the way Ian Penman describes this sleeve’s ‘line-up of allegorical objects’ in his brilliant ‘Swoonatra’ essay:

At the centre of the front-room still life is a stately radiogram, anticipating our own scene of listening. A thick onyx ashtray, already lined with butts. A clear Pyrex cup … Art Deco clock, reading somewhere around 2.39 a.m. LIFE magazine with a Marilyn cover. Selection of shiny LP sleeves scattered over the rug. Best of all—there among them is the original US sleeve of In the Wee Small Hours! All these hallowed objects add up to something like an Eisenhower-era retouch of Dürer’s Melancholia: alchemical union under the cold urban stars.

Penman has one thing wrong here. It’s not the original US issue of the album that features in the new line-up, but a 1962 abridged version of the album with only twelve of the original tracks. (For a rigorous, audiophile-focussed history of the various lives this album has had, see Matthew Lutthans’ account of his favourite album).

The general point holds, though, that this strange packaging brings a shift of focus from the singer to the listener. The listening space becomes iconic, nostalgically recalled as a mid-century modern set-up, the sort of ambience Joseph Lanza writes about so well in his book Elevator Music.

It’s no longer about a singer alone in the street, the saloon or the studio. It’s about you, the listener, and what you need to do when that mood indigo comes creeping. You don’t think about the lover who has gone. You don’t wait for the call. You don’t spend time wondering whether your heart has learned its lesson. You put the needle on the record, or you press ‘play’. You recall what Pete Hamill called ‘the music that Sinatra loved most, the music of the hours after midnight’. And you sink back into the early morning sound of seventy Aprils ago.

Patti Smith’s 2012 album Banga, though steeped in loss, elegy and mourning, does not merely present retellings of the tales told in other late chronicles by or about the artist. Rather, it suggests that Smith is finding new ways to look forward.

If critics in the late 1990s wondered, as Victor Bockris noted, when Smith’s ‘professional mourning’ would end, Banga shows the wealth of other interests the artist has for her writing. That said, I’d argue that Smith’s earlier life writing projects still pervade Banga when the album is heard through the filter of the late chronicles I discussed previously. Smith’s ‘real’ lateness is an intensification or thickening of her life story, a combination of the anticipated lateness of her early work and the arrived-at maturity and proven ability to be singer, rock star and icon.

We can read some of Banga’s key moments similarly, hearing ‘Amerigo’ perhaps as a rock and roll narrative, or ‘Maria’ as an elegy for Robert Mapplethorpe. The latter figure certainly saturates much of Smith’s work, past and present. In the ‘deluxe’ edition of Banga—designed as a book containing text, photography and sound, with the CD almost an extra at the back—references to Mapplethorpe appear not only in Smith’s liner notes, but also via the addition of a bonus track entitled ‘Just Kids’, based on material from Smith’s memoir. There are also less explicit references, such as how the description of the boat voyage undertaken by Smith and Lenny Kaye while preparing the album calls to mind that undertaken by the character M (Mapplethorpe) in The Coral Sea.

The memory project of Banga can be broadened further, however, to include references Smith may not have had in mind; such is the nature of the intertextuality she herself invites. ‘Amerigo’, about the discovery of the New World, communicates its debt to adventure by the slowing and quickening of pace, altering the dynamics of the string accompaniment at key points to move from full sail acceleration to complete lull, a becalming after a storm.

The lull brings near silence, broken only by the thin keening of a violin, then Smith’s urgently whispered imperative: ‘Hey, wake up, wake up’. Rising in wonder, the song gears up again, gathering wind behind its sails once more. On arrival at his unexpected destination, Smith has Amerigo Vespucci express his awe at the people he witnesses: ‘such a delight to watch them dance, free of sacrifice and romance […] free of all the things that we hold dear’.

The narrative is not free of romance, however, for it carries the romantic overtones of many observers of the New World who saw only innocence or noble savagery. In this aspect, Smith has crafted a lyric that is reminiscent of the tone of voice found in many of the narratives of the voyages left by sailors, priests and others involved in the navigation and subsequent conquest of the Americas.

This is also a tone that used by writers of fiction attempting to recall the wonder of that time, such as Alejo Carpentier and Juan José Saer. Both authors explored what Smith calls ‘words that have not been written / words from the New World’, albeit with rather more playful and less romantic visions of the colonial encounter.

In The Harp and the Shadow, a fictionalised account of Columbus’s voyages of discovery. Carpentier’s Columbus is asked to describe the world he has discovered but can find no words to do so because of the total difference between all he sees here and all he previously knew. He feels equally that ‘things that have no names cannot be imagined’ and that ‘words would not reveal the thing, if the thing were not already known’.

Saer’s novel The Witness, meanwhile, plays with classic accounts of the colonisation of the New World by having a sixteenth-century Spaniard caught and kept prisoner by a South American tribe solely so that he can be released and act as witness to the tribe’s existence and destruction:

They wanted me to reflect like water the image they gave of themselves, to repeat their gestures and words, to represent them in their absence, and, when they returned me to my fellow creatures, they wanted me to be like the spy or scout who witnesses something that the rest of the tribe has not yet seen and retraces his steps and recounts it, meticulously. Threatened by everything that controls us from the dark and keeps us outside in the open until the day we are plunged by one sudden capricious gesture back into the indistinct, the Indians wanted there to be a witness to and a survivor of their passage through this material mirage; they wanted someone to tell their story to the world.

Saer challenges those romantic notions of the New World that saw it as a lost Eden and its inhabitants as innocent or naïve beings with no desire for fame or permanence.

There’s also a connection, in my mind, to the work of Walter Benjamin and Roland Barthes. Through the medium which allows the (re)discovery of the past—in this case, the text—we come to know the past and its meaning for us in the present. The text becomes both the witness and the medium that allows for time travel. As Barthes writes:

Death, real death, is when the witness himself dies. Chateaubriand says of his grandmother and his great-aunt: ‘I may be the only man in the world who knows that such persons have existed’: yes, but since he has written this, and written it well, we know it too, insofar, at least, as we still read Chateaubriand.

With the importance of the witness as medium noted, we could return to ‘Amerigo’ by considering the role that Smith’s voice plays in the narrative. While it may be possible, for much of the song, to follow the ‘film voiceover’ illusion of conflating voice with character rather than actor (allowing here for the additional forgetting of gender difference), the illusion collapses when the track moves from Vespucci’s address to the king to ‘I gotta send you just a few more lines … from the / new / world.’

Here, Smith’s Americanisms shine through, from the anachronistic ‘gotta’ to the way she drawls the lines in her best Dylanesque. Suddenly, ‘new world’ takes on a different meaning as we shift back to the familiar tones of Patti Smith, a voice from the new world of twentieth century rock music.

My points about memory and witnessing can apply to other aspects of Banga. As Barthes notes, the act of writing is crucial to memory, and words can act as keepsakes of the departed. At the conclusion of Just Kids, Smith recalls the hard decisions around which of Robert Mapplethorpe’s possessions to hold on to and which to auction. She breaks into this recollection with a startling observation about writing:

Why can’t I write something that would awake the dead? That pursuit is what burns most deeply. I got over the loss of his desk and chair, but never the desire to produce a string of words more precious than the emeralds of Cortés. Yet I have a lock of his hair, a handful of his ashes, a box of his letters, a goatskin tambourine.

Remembrances of those who have died serve as reminders that they once lived and that the world in which they lived once existed. This is partly the point of Just Kids and partly the point, it seems, of Smith’s many elegiac songs. We might hear ‘Maria’ as an elegy for a world that no longer exists and for those who peopled it; it may therefore be as much about Robert Mapplethorpe as it is about Maria Schneider. Once the connection is made, the line ‘white shirt black tie’ can be heard as a reference to Mapplethorpe’s famous picture of Smith on the cover of Horses.

Because my response to Banga has been so focussed on ideas of adventure, exploration and a strand of New World imagery that focuses on lost innocence, I also can’t help hearing lines from ‘Maria’ as evoking similar themes: ‘at the edge of the world’; ‘I knew you when we were young’; ‘we saw ourselves: raw, excitable’; ‘we didn’t know the precariousness of our young powers’.

The song could equally work as a companion piece to the foreword Smith wrote for her collection Early Work in 1994:

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Youth untested, unbridled. Our hustling smiles.
Our lively limbs. We were as innocent and
dangerous as children racing across a mine field.
Some never made it.

For me, these lines echo those found in the opening section of Hart Crane’s poem ‘Voyages’:

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O brilliant kids, frisk with your dog,
Fondle your shells and sticks, bleached
By time and the elements; but there is a line
You must not cross nor ever trust beyond it
Spry cordage of your bodies to caresses
Too lichen-faithful from too wide a breast.
The bottom of the sea is cruel.

The sea is too loud and the children too far away for the narrator to deliver this message (‘could they hear me I would tell them’); all the poet-narrator can do is recall the seduction of the ocean with its promises of ‘caresses’. That seduction proved deadly to Crane himself; his own sea voyage culminated in a suicidal leap from the deck of a ship into the Gulf of Mexico on 27 April 1932.

In following such anarcheological traces, I’m reflecting a practice of association that Smith herself frequently uses, the experience of art mixing sometimes uneasily with the experience of life. Immediately after reporting Mapplethorpe’s death in Just Kids, Smith writes of listening ‘to the aria from Tosca with an open book on my knees’, which can be read as a way of aestheticising a key moment (something that Smith’s critics accuse her of doing too readily) or of looking to art for comfort.

Or both. Increasingly, I feel that it may be near impossible to mourn a person, thing or event in an artistic text without turning those things into beautiful objects of one kind or another, or at least evoking the artistic tropes that can do that transformative work. Art, like adventure, is a way of turning formative and transformative things into evocative objects.

Soon after the Tosca passage, Smith describes a trip to the coast to work through her mourning:

Up and down the deserted beach I walked in my black wind coat. I felt within its asymmetrical roomy folds like a princess or a monk. I know Robert would have appreciated this picture: a white sky, a gray sea, and this singular black coat […] I stood looking at the sky. The clouds were the colors of a Raphael.

This recalls a passage in The Coral Sea, in which Smith describes the sea as being like a Rothko painting. Here, art comes before nature, a theme echoed elsewhere in the book and presented by Smith as an attitude adopted by M himself: ‘Art, not nature, moved him’. This and other passages connect, for me, to an oft-quoted observation by André Malraux:

An old story goes that Cimabue was struck with admiration when he saw the shepherd boy, Giotto, sketching sheep. But, in the true biographies, it is never the sheep that inspire a Giotto with the love of painting; but, rather, his first sight of the paintings of such a man as Cimabue. What makes the artist is that in his youth he was more deeply moved by his visual experience of works of art than by that of the things they represent.

Malraux also refers to musicians tracing their inspiration back to a concert they witnessed when young and writers to poems, books or plays they encountered at an impressionable age. Smith narrates many such experiences in Just Kids, including a visit to the Museum of Art in Philadelphia, the sight of the Rolling Stones on television, and the discovery of Rimbaud’s poetry.

We should be wary of attributing to Smith an over-reliance on art over ‘reality’, for there is plenty of real life to feed into her story. As she told Thurston Moore in a 1998 interview, in response to a question about realistic depictions of life, ‘I’ve lived reality, so why go see it on the movie screen?’ Yet she seems drawn to recognising an aestheticisation of life in others and to highlighting ways in which art is itself an adventure. M’s voyage on the Coral Sea, learning about light and space and the magic of objects, also concerns the desire to fix transience (a favourite theme of Malraux’s), to capture the beauty and fragility of an autumn leaf or a blooming flower in, and for, art.

When, in ‘Constantine’s Dream’, we reach the plea ‘Let me die on the back of adventure’, it is tempting to hear it as Smith talking to us, her listeners. The rendering invisible of the author via the narrator does not work the same way in song as it tends to in film and literature. It may frequently and convincingly do so in folk music, but not in the medium in which Smith works, for rock and roll has always exaggerated the conflation of the ‘I’ of the narrative and the performer. Lines about dying on the back of adventure and bringing words from a new world thus become Smith’s visions, pleas and wishes as much as they do Piero’s, Vespucci’s, or Columbus’s.

Metaphors of adventure, even when applied to conquistadors and fifteenth century artists, may ultimately be about the adventure of rock and roll. Or, if that’s too grand, rock and roll may be the late twentieth century artistic vehicle par excellence for Smith and her fellow navigators to pursue the adventure of creation and discovery. Certainly, for Smith, rock and roll was the next logical step for poetry in the twentieth century. Poetry had long been a leap of faith for many. In the hands of modernists such as Hart Crane and Vicente Huidobro, it became an exercise in free-fall. For Patti Smith, it was a stage dive.

Malraux’s observation on the relationship between life and art transforms into one about adventure and chronicle. Perhaps what thrills is not only the sense of adventure in its immediacy, but the siren-like pull of the chronicle of adventure, the lure of the elegiac tone we find in the best told tales. When we read, at the start of Saer’s The Witness, the line ‘What I remember most about those empty shores is the vastness of the sky’, whose voice are we hearing? Is it the unnamed witness, hardened by years and softened by nostalgia? Or is it Saer, the storyteller, offering a lure to his readers to enter the sweet sea of his prose?

Piero della Francesca, in the words of André Malraux, ‘might be symbol of our modern sensibility, our desire to see the expression of the painter, not that of the model, in his art’. Artistic expression comes to the fore often in Smith’s work, as in a passage from the closing sections of Just Kids, where innocence is filtered through experience and an elegiac, almost pathetic tone overwhelms any neutral account of lives led:

We were as Hansel and Gretel and we ventured out into the black forest of the world. There were temptations and witches and demons we never dreamed of and there was splendour we only partly imagined. No one could speak for those two young people nor tell with any truth of their days and nights together. Only Robert and I could tell it. Our story, as he called it. And, having gone, he left the task to me to tell it to you.

We can read into this a critique of the many biographies that have told and retold the story of the years leading up to Horses. We can discern the testimonial imperative. I was there, Smith tells us, and the story will resound through my voice. Mapplethorpe had asked Smith to tell their tale to the world, and she waited to find the voice with which to do so. Witnessing, Smith reminds us, is not only the taking-in of experience; it is also carrying, bearing witness, and finally, when the time comes, unburdening.

We can also hear the voice of the seducer, the voice that, in its most beguiling tone, invites us to adventure, to set sail upon a sea of possibilities and, like April fools, to ‘ride like writers ride’.

Back to life again.

Retrospection

Having offered, in my last post, an initial account of Patti Smith’s Banga that emphasised adventure, I now turn to retrospection, memory and the past in relation to Smith’s life and work more broadly. To do that, I need to discuss the moment in the 1970s that cemented her reputation: the release of Horses. While I’m not discussing that album at length here, I have to note its inescapable presence. Nearly everything Smith has done in her post-Horses career has seemed to refer to that seminal album.

The retrospection I’m thinking about has occurred partly due to, and partly despite, Smith herself, who continues to emphasise her other artistic practice and her ambitions for future projects. But mention of her pioneering debut album is never far from other commentators’ accounts when describing current work.

Another reason for mentioning Horses is that I wish to emphasise how, for all its ambition, Smith’s debut album was a work grounded in its creator’s own fascination with paying tribute to the past. It’s in the Janus-faced combination of future and past, of the merging of adventure and memory, that we find the most continuous thread of Smith’s art.

As I mentioned in last week’s Banga post, the first decade of the 2000s was a fruitful period for Smith in terms of artistic production across a range of media. It was also a time for others to re-evaluate and canonise her work. Several biographies appeared, as well as book-length critical analyses that presented variations on the theme of the Patti Smith story, especially the period surrounding her debut album. Published shortly before the millennium, Victor Bockris’s biography of the artist took the story up to 1998 in an account that also served as a memoir of Bockris himself. A biographer of Andy Warhol, William Burroughs and Lou Reed, amongst others, Bockris had been a participant in the New York poetry and punk scenes in which Smith had first found fame.

Bockris’s biography joined an earlier one by Nick Johnstone, which was subsequently updated. Dave Thompson’s 2010 biography brought the story up to the Dream of Life film and Just Kids. Joe Tarr’s 2008 book The Words and Music of Patti Smith offered a more academic account of Smith’s life and work and contained some of the most detailed and convincing interpretations of Smith’s art to be published. Two books ostensibly about Horses—Philip Shaw’s 33 1/3 entry on the album and Mark Paytress’s Patti Smith’s Horses and the Remaking of Rock ’n’ Roll—contained extensive biographical material covering the period before and, in one case, after Smith’s landmark album.

All these texts, along with other canonising processes, have contributed to the re-creation of Horses as an event. To a certain extent, this had always been the case, but an additional element was the retroactive reinforcement of Horses as an unsurpassable moment that accompanied accounts of Smith’s entire career. Even Just Kids, while mainly about Smith’s relationship with Robert Mapplethorpe, reads partly as a teleological account of the creation of her first album. Paytress, despite claiming not to be writing a biography of Smith, spends half of his book setting up a context for the arrival of Horses that requires a significant amount of biographical and other cultural and historical information. Smith’s early life one becomes a narrative that led inevitably to her debut album. Shaw, despite his book appearing in a series devoted to individual albums, spends more time on context than text, a process that only intensifies the ‘eventness’, or the weight, of the album. Tarr, while covering a broad range of Smith’s work, also posits Horses as an event. The weight of Horses is such that it has become a culmination of what led to it and a point of continual reference after its appearance, as Paytress makes clear when describing Smith’s 2005 Meltdown performance as ‘a celebration of an alternative tradition where all roads led invariably to Horses, the inspirations that lay behind it and the imprint it has left’.

The weight that Horses must bear means that, for some critics, little that Smith has done since the 1970s can really compare. Going against those critics who praised Banga on its release in 2012, Jim Farber found the album compared poorly to its 1975 predecessor:

While “Horses” presented a new-fangled wild child, full of sex, attitude and danger, “Banga” suggests a self-styled Mother of Us All, out to nurture, savor and memorialize anything she can get her hands on. Nearly every song on the CD salutes or eulogizes someone who’s either imperiled, lost or, in Smith’s mind, worthy of canonization […] It’s a slog of overawed images, bloated by angels, gods, devils, oracles, baptisms, salvations, laurels, saints, icons, and sisters of mercy.

What Farber seems to miss in this account, however, is the extent to which Horses was itself a memorialising event and Smith an elegist from the start of her career. As Tarr observes, ‘Much of Smith’s work has been a tribute to artists and musicians who have inspired her, building on their ideas and work, interpreting their classics, mourning their loss, imagining their epiphanies and dark moments’. This is as true of Horses as of subsequent work. The album opens with death and resurrection, its infamous first line—‘Jesus died for somebody’s sins but not mine’—acting as a prelude to a piece of rock and roll archaeology as Smith and her band tap the 1960s classic ‘Gloria’ for unexploited treasure. As Mark Paytress comments, if Smith’s religious references work as a method for ‘putting her own martyrs, those who’d died in the name of rock’n’roll, to rest’, then the act of musical revival serves as

a thrilling new-for-old moment, up there with Presley’s baton-passing routine with the old hillbilly boys, and the Stones’ trade-off with the bluesmen of Chicago’s South Side. And, like both Elvis and Jagger, Smith possessed a voice that lifted the material out of the grave and into the future now.

Throughout Horses, Smith displays what I call early or expected lateness, and this is clear in several ways. First, she entered the public sphere at the time of rock’s lateness, a period when, according to both contemporary and subsequent accounts, rock and pop had entered a time of maturity following the ambitious experiments of the 1960s (Tarr and Paytress, not untypically for writers looking back on this period, make much of the sloth of rock in the early to mid-1970s).

Second, Smith was (and remains) a ‘subject’ to rock in that she started as a fan of 1960s rock stars, came to understand her own artistic subjectivity in ways made possible by rock music and was committed to an open display of critical fidelity to the possibilities of rock.

Third, and closely related to this issue of critical fidelity, Smith began her rock career via various acts of mourning for rock’s ‘martyrs’: Brian Jones, Jimi Hendrix, Janis Joplin, Jim Morrison.

Fourth, Smith herself was older than was typical for new and emerging pop/rock stars and carried with her a sense of urgency, which she made vocal in interviews of the time.

Smith shared some of these aspects with Bruce Springsteen, her contemporary and occasional collaborator. While Springsteen was born later than Smith and therefore entered the public sphere younger, he still embodied—in musical style, lyrical preoccupation and performative zeal—a sense of critical fidelity to rock that could only have come about through a second or third generation subjectivity. Smith and Springsteen, both rock archaeologists, were seen as heralds of rock’s future directions. Both embraced a sense of adventure, voiced in terms of escape and giving oneself up to the body, in infinitely unfolding freefall poem-songs married to electric guitars and propelled by rock machinery. Paul Williams captured this twofold nature when he wrote of Smith as being

the herald for a new moment in rock and roll, third generation. She quotes Chuck Berry by quoting the Rolling Stones; lights candles to Hendrix and Jim Morrison; writes crazed brilliant anarchic poetry using “land of 1000 dances” as a lyrical and spiritual reference point.

I’ve used the terms ‘archaeology’ and ‘treasure’ deliberately because they might help us think of looking back as a kind of adventure, a quest for something buried, nearly forgotten, perhaps not yet known, but remembered or imagined by the archaeologist. Smith brings past and future together in her fieldwork, laying out a plot, demarcating reference points, positing possibilities based on existing knowledge and guesswork.

We also find those processes in improvisation. Tarr relates that Smith and her band would use the term ‘fieldwork’ to describe the simple rock templates they used as the basis for extemporisation.

Archaeology is also about time travel, darting between classical times, the sixteenth century, the nineteenth or the twenty-first. I like what the media theorist Siegfried Zielinksi does with the term ‘anarcheology’, which he borrows from Michel Foucault via Rudi Visker. Zielinksi defines the term as a search for certain sources that lead to unexpected paths:

A history that entails envisioning, listening, and the art of combining by using technical devices, which privileges a sense of their multifarious possibilities over their realities in the form of products, cannot be written with avant-gardist pretensions or with a mindset of leading the way. Such a history must reserve the option to gallop off at a tangent, to be wildly enthusiastic, and, at the same time, to criticize what needs to be criticized. This method describes a pattern of searching, and delights in any gifts of true surprises.

Zielinski’s account of the anarcheological process and the gift of surprise calls to mind improvisation again, while its nod to ‘anarchy’ recalls the punk scene that Patti Smith helped foster in the 1970s. It also fits well with Sandy Pearlman’s description of Smith’s first album:

If poetry like music is born of invention, adventure, of paradoxical limitless individuation, then the first principle of Patti’s excellent adventure [with] Horses was to bet the ranch on a poetic language that directly transforms itself by means of clearly counterintuitive unstaged leaps of word faith, that wind up being perceived at the other end of the combinatorial wormhole as inevitable intuitive logic.

Such ‘leaps of word faith’ are clear throughout Smith’s work, with Banga being no exception. One example would be the inclusion in ‘Constantine’s Dream’ of the ‘coincidence’ of Piero dying in the same year that Columbus reached the New World. A verbal leap at this point allows Smith to indulge her fascination with significant dates while setting up a narrative shift, and 1492 becomes a portal through which musicians and listeners travel to a new stage in the track’s development. This is anarcheology, a willingness to be distracted, to take alternative routes based on emerging possibilities.

In his account of Smith’s work, Tarr frequently uses the term ‘landscape’, which again seems pertinent to archaeological processes because it establishes the notion of a field, something to fill with or empty of objects or people. The canonisation and remembrance of people and the fetishisation of objects have been important factors in Smith’s work. We might conceive of that work and its field as representing an iconscape, a perspective upon the world seen from iconographic reference points, be they religious figures, rock and roll pioneers, or magical relics.

Walter Benjamin also reminds us of ways in which memory can be archaeological when he writes that ‘Language has unmistakably made plain that memory is not an instrument for exploring the past, but rather a medium. It is the medium of that which is experienced, just as the earth is the medium in which ancient cities lie buried.’ The site where we dig for or through memories is important:

Epic and rhapsodic in the strictest sense, genuine memory must therefore yield an image of the person who remembers, in the same way a good archaeological report not only informs us about the strata from which its findings originate, but also gives us an account of the strata which first had to be broken through.

This, again, is a process which takes place in poetic and musical improvisation, the shamanic breaking-through to the other side hymned memorably by Jim Morrison, one of Smith’s influences.

Age, experience and narrative self

Reviews of Banga and the concerts that came in its wake frequently mentioned age, either expressing surprise that Patti Smith was more alive than ever or comparing her, in mostly favourable ways, to contemporaries. Because of Smith’s age and the longevity of her career, the ever-expanding discourse around her allows for a greater intertextuality based on various reference points in that career. Equally, Smith herself promotes connections between age, time and experience with her interests across the arts and her many reference points. As listeners and interpreters of her work, meanwhile, we can make more connections, even if they are not ones the artist intended or would sanction.

For Victor Bockris the ‘late’ Patti Smith went through several personas: in the mid-1990s ‘there were elements of the rebellious punk poet, the grieving widow and sister, caring single mother and committed (a)political activist’, and ‘by 1996 she had metamorphosed from an entertainer into that position Richard Hell had prophesied in his 1974 essay on “celebrity as an art form”. Such a character is a living piece of American history, a walking icon’.

Like most accounts written about what were essentially middle-aged rockers in the 1990s and early 2000s, we have to take all this with a chunk of salt, especially for those musicians who are (thankfully) still with us twenty or thirty years on (I wonder if any age-sensitive archaeologist of 1980s-1990s music journalism has the patience to sift through the many ridiculous claims made about ageing musicians in those years, especially those made about women). But we can take from it the notion that Smith provides an exemplary case of life narrative as adventure and of the self as an open work. She emphasises this with ongoing art projects and by connecting herself to tradition(s). The continued mourning and fascination with memory objects, talismans and magic numbers are all ways of maintaining a chain of experience and affect that stretches from the remembered past through the reflections of the present to the ambitions of the future.

Ageing and the accumulation of experience can be a continuation of the adventure of life, as Smith hints in the subtitle to the 2006 edition of her collected lyrics: ‘Lyrics, Reflections & Notes for the Future’.

Episodes of Smith’s life and the lives of those close to her reverberate through the late chronicles, whether self- or other-authored, and such episodes come to shine like the objects she collects and treasures. A particular story about Smith holding her baby sister Kimberly while witnessing a barn fire features in some of the late chronicles and in a piece from Woolgathering called ‘Nineteen Fifty-Seven’. The poem ‘Kimberly’, which first memorialised this event, also became a song on Horses, thus marking a continuation of certain biographical features over the long range of Smith’s career.

The focus on particular moments and images—a notable feature of Just Kids, The Coral Sea and many of Smith’s poems and songs—calls to mind Roland Barthes’s notion of the ‘biographeme’. In Camera Lucida (a book partly ‘about’ Robert Mapplethorpe in that the latter’s photographs and Barthes’s comments on them appear in it), Barthes notes his fondness for ‘certain biographical features which, in a writer’s life, delight me as much as certain photographs; I have called these features “biographemes”; Photography has the same relation to History that the biographeme has to biography’.

Smith follows a similar line of thinking when refracting such moments through the perspectives of fashion and style:

The pursuit of style has always been a spirited part of the work process. Images that inform the work or the movement of the work. Baudelaire’s cravat. June Christie’s careless ponytail. A raincoat a la Camus. Bob Dylan’s snap tab collar. Black capris like Ava Gardner.

In her writings, Mapplethorpe becomes immortalised, or frozen, as the boy who loved light and placement, while Kimberly remains the babe wrapped in swaddling clothes.

This post has been a bridge between my first run-through of Banga (last week’s post) and my return to it (next week’s), a bridge which I felt had to contend with the weight of Horses. I’ll come back to some of this imagery next week, when I’ll read Banga in connection to Just Kids, Robert Mapplethorpe, and Smith’s ongoing memory work.