Smog Play “Dress Sexy at My Funeral”

Listen to this track by baritone-voiced singer-songwriter Bill Callahan recording under the name Smog. It’s “Dress Sexy at My Funeral”, a cut taken from his 2000 record Dongs of Sevotion released in April of that year and Callahan’s tenth release under the Smog name. The record gained critical attention with an 85/100 on Metacritic. Pitchfork declared it to be the 10th best album of 2000 with the NME being more restrained by rating it at 27th best. The album title was notable in both publications, described as “not a typo” and “silly”, respectively. That title is a reflection of the kind of contrast that listeners find therein, with material that matches dry humour and noirishly wry sentiments with lurid imagery and sometimes heavy subject matter.

“Dress Sexy at My Funeral” is a standout on a record that builds on Callahan’s well-established lo-fi foundation and adds a sumptuous arrangement of entwined guitars and bass and drums rhythm section dynamics. The music reflects a decidedly nocturnal feel helped along by Callahan’s Lou-Reed-meets-Johnny-Cash lead voice. It’s all balanced against the starry night sparkle of lead guitar flourishes and ooh-ah backing vocals. Despite the funereal themes, this tune is full of the lifeforce. Lyrically speaking, it’s also full of irreverence that helps to make its seeming contradiction of sombre tones and mood against dry humour and mischievous intent even more impactful.

The song title alone is socially provocative and also evocative of certain literary traditions. It certainly makes good on its promises. This tune really is a set of sexy instructions to a beloved wife on the occasion of the narrator’s passing. Sex and death for the purposes of literary contrast between opposites is nothing new. After all, sex is all about creating and/or celebrating life while being in an intense world of the senses with another person, or people for that matter. Death is about the end of that world without them. Sex is momentary. Death is final – probably, depending on who you ask. If sex is the ultimate in togetherness, then death is the ultimate solitary pursuit.

The angle Callahan takes here within these comparisons in “Dress Sexy at My Funeral” is to place them in circumstances fraught with expectation and rigid rules around how to act and how to feel. Mourners gathering to observe the event of a dearly departed’s passing is a time of long faces and careworn hearts. It’s an occasion when we are confronted by the knowledge that a person we love, or at least have known in some capacity, is gone forever. Somewhere in the background, it’s a time to contemplate the reality that one day we’ll also be gone.

Callahan injects a bit of dry humour into the proceedings to short circuit conventions around all this. Like any form of comedy, this tune undercuts our expectations – just like the title of the album it’s on. But what is there to laugh about at a time like that?

Here lies another source of contrast in this comparison of opposites. With funerals and mourning comes a kind of social orthodoxy of sadness, or at very least observed reverence. No laughing allowed or aloud. But there is a certain amount of benefit to be found in laughter at a funeral. For many, a good laugh from the core of one’s being is just as cathartic as crying. In fact, laughter kicks bereavement and loss in the teeth in a way that crying may not. It’s an act of emotional release. It’s also a physical release that’s much bigger and far older than any social rules that keep us constrained to the narrow spectrum of what grief, or any other experience we have, is supposed to look like.

This brings us back to sex.

Like laughter and humour, reveling in carnal delight is an opposing force against dread, loneliness, and disconnection. For a species so aware of our own mortality, it is a balm to our spirits as much as it is to our physical beings. It reminds us that we’re alive and that moments are meant to be savoured and shared. When this song’s narrator instructs his widow to to wink at the minister and blow kisses to his grieving brothers, this isn’t just for comic effect, although that element is definitely in place. Whether she follows the instructions or not, it’s a way to help her reconsider what the act of mourning can be for her beyond narrow social expectations. It reminds her that her grief is hers to express in any way she chooses. It reminds us listeners of that, too.

The song also introduces another factor that is very much related to all that; memory. Callahan’s language in this song is highly sensual, with lines that are meant to be felt as much as understood. It gives shape to the most treasured thing anyone has, which is their experiences. Dressing sexy at a passing spouse’s funeral here is an extension of a shared memory between them of making love on a beach as fireworks (literal or imagined) light up the sky above them. This one memory, coupled with one of uncomfortable but defiantly vigourous sex on a railroad track, is connected to a time when both of them felt the most alive and the most connected to one another. When Callahan sings about the gravel in her back, listeners can’t help but feel it along with her.

There is a certain amount of defiance to the orthodoxy in this, too; that our physical beings store up our memories as much as our minds do. We don’t tend remember events in our lives like diary entries of cause and effect. We remember how we felt. We remember physical sensations. Sometimes, we experience moods and feelings that come upon us unexpectedly. They may once have been connected to events, but have since become detached from them. Instead, they are encoded elsewhere as emotional remnants that we can still feel physically. Our bodies remember. Our lives are physical as well as spiritual. Social rules and expectations can’t pen them in or constrain them.

The memories and sensations that make up the totality of our lives, and these feelings we’ve experienced, are ours to celebrate. They are treasures and mysteries. They are the only things that really matter. When we’re gone, hopefully someone who shared them with us and therefore knew us best will be there to remember them and conjure them on our behalf, low neck blouses and split skirts up to here and all.

Bill Callahan released the last record under the Smog name in 2005. But he is an active musician and songwriter today, performing and releasing new material under his own name. You can learn more about him and his discography at dragcity.com.

Speaking of Pitchfork earlier, here’s a 2007 interview with Bill Callahan by that very publication. Among other things, the piece talks about the difference in approach between Smog and Callahan himself and why he left that moniker behind.

For more music, check out this Bill Callahan Tiny Desk Home concert from 2020.

Enjoy!

#2000sMusic #LoFi #singerSongwriters #Smog #songsAboutDeath

EELS Play “Last Stop: This Town”

Listen to this track by Los Angeles-based pop music concern headed up by Mark Oliver Everett, EELS. It’s “Last Stop: This Town”, a single from the group’s second LP Electro-Shock Blues released in September 1998. That album was a kind of concept record of sorts, with many of the songs on the record dealing directly with family history, illness, and personal bereavement. These themes are come by very honestly. In the span of months, Everett aka “E” suffered the loss of his sister Elizabeth who died by suicide, and his mother Nancy who succumbed to cancer.

After his losses, E became the only living member of his immediate family. His famous quantum physicist father and Many Worlds theorist Hugh Everett III died in 1982 at the family home. A 19-year-old Mark Oliver Everett was the first person to discover him. Mental illness in his family, estrangement, death, and loss characterized his existence more than most. He even refers to it as the curse in many places in his work even beyond this album. Being of the John Lennon school of songwriting, E drew from his own emotional pain that was still very raw when he set out to follow-up his debut album.

With all that in place, you’d think the new material would come out in morose shades of gray to black, full of mournful lyrics and relentless minor chords. Yet, this song and many others on the album all seem to have a wider perspective than expected. In fact, the songs are expressed in a colourfully varied musical palette, grim in places, but also wistful, and even playful. The video for this song that served the record as a single is downright goofy, with animated depictions of gene splicing that, perhaps indirectly, is yet another ode to his family and to his heritage in the world of science.

Family is as strong a narrative thread as loss is on the album, making them inseparable. Along with his father and mother, E’s sister Liz is a recurring main character throughout. In other places on the record, she’s the principal narrator. Switching up perspectives is what helps E to keep the songs balanced and from being too downcast and monochromatic. In his quest to find peace in loss, it seemed that imagining emotions and events from points of view other than his own freed him up to better examine his own feelings and to express them in artistically viable ways.

In this song, he takes his grief and inverts it in an unconventional way. At least a part of the inspiration for this tune came from Francis, his neighbour and landlady. E had been away to attend his sister’s funeral. He hadn’t informed Francis of the reasons for his trip. But when he returned, she had news for him. First, she informed him that she had a talent for seeing dead people. Next, she’d seen the apparition of a young woman entering E’s abode only hours before he arrived home.

E recounts the story from his autobiography:

“Initially, it really spooked me when Francis told me this and I was feeling a little scared about sleeping in the house that night. But then I thought about the timing of it and I tried to look on it in a more positive, less spooky, light. Kooky or not, I liked the idea of Liz coming to say good-bye one last time, even if she just missed me by a few hours. If there’s gonna be a ghost in your house, you might as well think of it as a friendly ghost.”

~ Mark Oliver Everett, Things Your Grandchildren Should Know (2008)

As he says, kooky or not, the idea was a comfort in the middle of a grieving period. It was also the spark of an intriguing idea: what if the dearly departed felt a similar sense of grief in leaving the dearly bereft behind? What if they wanted to say goodbye to their loved ones and the world as much as those who remain to grieve their passing?

This empathetic perspective informs the lyrics. The music is supportive by never being sombre. In fact, “Last Stop: This Town” is more celebratory than funereal. Music box celesta, cheerful beats, a Kurtis Blow sample, and lighthearted vocal interplay punctuate its Sixties girl group melody. There’s even a subtle melodic reference to Scottish folk song “The Bonnie Banks o’ Loch Lomond”, another bright tune about love and loss thought to date back to the 1740s and Bonnie Prince Charlie. That reference handily suggests that the weight of bereavement was never an easy one to bear.

Importantly, “Last Stop: This Town” doesn’t trivialize how difficult saying goodbye to a passing loved one is. It doesn’t shy away from the troublesome thoughts that often arise when we experience the burdensome and overwhelming feelings caused by that loss. The opening line hits as hard as anything associated with that experience: You’re dead but the world keeps turning. This line contains an ocean of feelings and thoughts. How dare the world continue as normal when I’m in so much pain? Why isn’t the hole in my life obvious to everyone? In this world of billboards and factories and smoke, where can I find any source of comfort now that you’re gone?

E seems to find that comfort in storytelling and in the imagination. In writing this song, he gives shape to his grief. He paints a picture of his sister as a person who isn’t really gone, but is just on a long journey somewhere else. Whether he believes that or not is immaterial. By writing a song about her last errand before flying away from the world forever, he’s immortalized her. He’s preserved her essence in his world and freed her of the torment he knew she felt in her own. By making her a part of his song about grief, he’s taken steps to freeing himself, too.

With this song and the record off of which it comes, EELS solidified their sound. E made a habit of writing songs about hard subjects with lightheartedness, candour, and respect for how difficult and sometimes absurd living in this world so often is. In doing so, he does what artists are meant to do; allow us to connect to our own stories and feelings with greater clarity through their art. In so doing, this song helps make us feel less alone as tides turn one way or the other in our own unpredictable lives.

EELS is an active musical vehicle today, with a lineup that’s revolved around E’s songwriting. You can learn more at eelstheband.com.

You can read this interview with E on American Songwriter from 2013, a few years after the EELS record Tomorrow Morning came out. That release was the last in a trilogy of albums that in turn came out before he released Wonderful, Glorious. In it, and among other things, he talks about the inherent optimism and sense of gratitude in being alive in his music even though he’s often pegged solely as a writer of bummer rock.

Enjoy!

#90sMusic #Eels #MarkOliverEverett #songsAboutDeath #songsAboutLoss

Robyn Hitchcock & The Egyptians Play “The Yip! Song”

Listen to this track by former Soft Boys turned neo-psychedelic trio Robyn Hitchcock & the Egyptians. It’s “The Yip! Song”, a cut taken from their 1993 record Respect. The album is the tenth record with Hitchcock’s name on the cover and the sixth with his stalwart backing band The Egyptians consisting of drummer Morris Windsor and bassist-keyboardist Andy Metcalfe. By the time of this record, they were at the end of their contract with A&M and it was the last time to date that the “The Egyptians” name would be formalized on an album sleeve along with Hitchcock’s.

Working with producer John Leckie (XTC, The Stone Roses) they approached making the record in the style of late Sixties and early Seventies British folk bands. To wit: they gathered at one house, Hitchcock’s on the Isle of Wight, and then rehearsed and recorded the songs with their families in tow. They laid down the vocals in the kitchen, and the instruments in the living room.

Despite the down-home setting, Robyn Hitchcock was not in the best place in his life at the time. Along with the pressure of being a singular and decidedly non-traditional artist on a major label with lots of expectations placed upon him, he’d lost his father to cancer; the writer and cartoonist Raymond Hitchcock. Some of his grief over that loss came out in the songs. This one is the most vivid example.

One of the reasons “The Yip! Song” is so compelling is because it doesn’t sound like a song about loss or mourning at all, at least not on first listen. For one thing, the tone of it isn’t exactly elegiac as you might otherwise expect. Instead, it’s downright confrontational and very much in-your-face as a kind of amped up psychobilly-folk assault. Only the dreamy and psychedelic bridge brings it into the realm of Hitchock’s usual Syd Barrett-esque psych-pop homebase.

Some things in “The Yip! Song” are very much expected – at least as much as anyone can say that about Robyn Hitchcock’s work. As in a lot of his songs, the barrage of juxtaposed imagery is lurid in places and decidedly absurdist. This is after the initial yip! yip! yip! lyrical opening that takes us by surprise and also instantly captures our attention as listeners. Otherwise, “The Yip! Song” namechecks British wartime singer Vera Lynn (Lynn Lynn Lynn Lynn …), which is also pretty far off of the usual lyrical map. Hitchcock sets that reference alongside images of hospital trolleys and surgery. So, what gives with all that? And why might this song be called “The Yip! Song”, anyway?

Raymond Hitchcock, Robyn’s father, isn’t strictly at the center of this song in any overt way and certainly not by name. But elements of his life and experience certainly are, including the lines about Vera Lynn (Lynn Lynn Lynn, etc.). He was a part of Britain’s wartime generation and when Lynn’s voice heard over the airwaves soothed the troops during a harrowing period of history. She was a symbol of an era now passed.

But these are peripheral details to what’s really at the center of this song made up of a collage of imagery rather than a straight narrative. That’s nothing new in a Robyn Hitchcock song, either. Neither is the theme of perception, in this case how an old man dying in his hospital bed fifty years after World War II ended might be externally interpreted by the songwriter and understood by his audience. This question of perception and meaning as death looms is a pretty big one, not to mention what becomes of a person’s experiences in a world they once knew that is now gone.

What listeners can pick up here almost right away is the song’s raw emotional undercurrents that go beyond just an expression of sadness at a loss. There’s anger here, too – quite a lot of it, in fact. There’s even fear at the thought that as one lays dying with the totality of their lives behind them, they might be reduced to a jumble of fragmented memories that don’t add up to a meaningful conclusion. This is all while doctors and nurses yip yip yip around as they do their jobs, with the significance of those memories and impressions of a life going entirely unacknowledged.

Yip Yip Yip Yip Yip Yip Yip Yip Yip Yip Yip Yip Yip Yip Yip Yip Yip Yip …

There isn’t any other available language to express these troubling feelings in any definitive or comforting way. With implications this big and overwhelming, the response might just as well be a series of yips. These are in the forms of the tasks in which we engage in times like these to keep us busy and distracted. They could be in the thoughts we have about what we’ve lost. It could be in the context of pondering the meaning of our own lives, if any, and what it will mean to others once we’re gone.

In pulling out shards of images that connected Hitchcock to the memory and identity of his father, this confrontational song about death suggests those things he’s confronting in himself; his fears, his confusion, his doubts about what mortality and the state of being alive really mean. It rests on thoughts about what he’s expected to do to even begin to address all that as the life of someone important to him ends.

Yet at the same time, the song holds a saving grace, too. “The Yip! Song” makes it OK for him not to have any answers to anything. Because of how overwhelming it is to him, and to anyone, yipping his way through it is just as valid a response as any. Therefore, it’s an anthem for us as listeners to embrace in the very same way.

This, among many other reasons, is why Robyn Hitchcock is such a singular songwriter. With splashes of colour and chaos, “The Yip! Song” illustrates the mystery of human consciousness, existence, loss, and grief. It’s one of his most powerful artistic statements, far from a sombre or maudlin treatise on death and mourning as it is possible to be. As such it is all the more provocative, even if the background of the song isn’t immediately apparent on first listen.

“The Yip! Song” seems to originate from the dark recesses of the songwriter’s heart. This is not in any kind of self-regarding way. Instead, it suggests that sometimes feelings around big events cannot be understood or expressed by conventional means. Sometimes, absurdity is best met with absurdity. Reminders of this provide a unique and valuable comfort of their own.

Robyn Hitchcock is an active singer, songwriter, touring musician, memoirist, and record label owner today.

For more background on the Respect album and where Hitchcock’s head was at the time, watch this 4-minute interview filmed around the time the record came out.

Last year, Robyn Hitchcock wrote an autobiography of his experiences as a teenage music fan in the year 1967. You can check out reader reviews and impressions of Hitchcock’s story set during a formative year in his life right here.

You can catch up with his recent activities, merch, and Patreon links at robynhitchcock.com.

Enjoy!

#90sMusic #RobynHitchcock #RobynHitchcockTheEgyptians #songsAboutDeath

Listen to this track by former Byrd, CSNY alum, and all around singer-songwriting rock survivor David Crosby. It’s “River Rise”, a single from his 2021 album For Free, his eighth and final solo album in his lifetime. That record was the last release in a run of albums that saw Crosby finding his musical mojo again. This creative resurgence came with the help of several collaborators, including his son James Raymond who was instrumental in enabling Crosby to increase his output and maintain an exceptional level of quality while doing so. Along with vocalist Michael McDonald, Raymond co-wrote this song with his dad while also serving as a primary musician and producer.

After a series of incidents and relationship breakdowns over the latter years of the 2010s, the chances of Crosby collaborating with any of his former musical partners were slim to none. Even he knew that. But in partial thanks to Twitter (RIP) and by other means, he was able to make several connections with contemporary musicians including Michael League, Becca Stevens, and Michelle Willis who were simpatico to Crosby’s refashioned melancholic folk rock with jazz overtones style. These younger players and writers that came to be known as The Lighthouse Band were among the new blood that helped Crosby to realize his sound to greatest effect, setting him on a course to a late-career renaissance.

By the time For Free came out at the end of an incredible five-album run between 2014 and 2021, Crosby had honed his vision for what he wanted his music to sound like. “River Rise” was the lead single; a culmination of a whole era that found him operating as a recording artist on his own terms. This was despite any baggage left over from his days in CSNY and any recent conflicts with former bandmates. In addition to that, this song acknowledges a key factor that drove his tremendous level of artistic output during the last stretch of his life; mortality itself.

In many interviews of the period from 2014’s Croz which was his first solo effort in twenty years by then, and then on to the string of full-length releases that followed it, David Crosby aimed his world-famous (or even infamous) candour at himself. He was a man in his mid-to-late seventies. He was a recovering heroin and cocaine addict. He was diabetic. He’d been a liver transplant recipient. He’d had multiple heart attacks and operations. How much time could he possibly have left? Crosby was firm in his belief that it was impossible to know, but also that the numbers were against him.

Even to the question put to him in the excellent 2019 documentary David Crosby: Remember My Name, “do you ever wonder why you are still alive?”, he answered with a gravely bewildered: “I don’t know. No idea, man.” With so much love for music giving him a sense of purpose, so many ideas for songs, and with the burgeoning belief that the true answer to that interview question was simply his passion for making music as his life’s purpose, Crosby’s course was clear; that he should write and record as much music as he could before the clock ran down and his time was up.

Importantly, this clear mandate didn’t result in music that sounds throwaway, hurried, or half-finished, but rather the opposite. This is largely thanks to his talented collaborators including his son. This song, “River Rise” is a sterling example of what they were able to do together, with pristinely timeless production and fine details in the arrangements being the order of the day. Crosby’s undiminished lead voice matched with Michael McDonald’s signature backing vocal sounds as if they’d sung together for decades. Balanced arrangements ensure that those voices are central and clearly heard, conveying lyrics that seem like a summing up of all of David Crosby’s motivations by the end of an exemplary run of creativity to win over critics and fans alike.

“River Rise” is an expression of gratitude as blended with Crosby’s trademark sense of defiance. The object of his defiance is his own eventual end. But it’s also railing against the worry that goes along with that, and against the anxious rush he may have felt at times to do what he felt driven to do, knowing that the end was likely coming soon. None of that impacts the centered contentedness of this song that expresses a poignant and wistful appreciation of the single transcendent moments we all get to experience if we take the time to notice we’re in them.

“The golden light surrounding
A sea of humanity
And the wind has its own language
Spoken by the trees
Diamonds shine forever
Underneath the twilight sky
As the day grows dim
I start to believe always one more try”

~ “River Rise”, David Crosby

As fractious as his relationships with his former bandmates in CSNY and The Byrds had become, along with his tendency to speak first and be sensitive second, Crosby’s voice in this song and on others during this period communicates a high level of self-knowledge. It also reveals the heightened senses of a man who knows that he is in the twilight of his own life. This emphasizes his acknowledgement of the natural world’s fine details that he will soon cease to experience. This isn’t a source of despair but rather one of great appreciation for what his life has allowed him to see and do and create. That makes this song about mortality that much more life-affirming.

While he making this late career run of albums, David Crosby became something of a social media raconteur, regaling audiences of multiple generations with stories of his career, peppered with the snarky remarks and blunt opinions for which he was well-known. Speaking of “blunt opinions”, Crosby regularly judged the quality (or lack thereof) of his followers’ rolled joints shared via images on social media platforms. He even had a semi-regular advice series hosted by Rolling Stone called Ask Croz, on which he gave some pretty on-point insights on a variety of subjects.

But on January 18, 2023, the river finally rose to take him. By then, his purpose in making great music with almost literally his last breath was more than realized, with that music ensuring that his voice will be heard long after his departure.

For more on the For Free album, read this review on the NME on which the themes of the songs and Crosby’s own insights help to shine a light on his creative state of mind during that time.

Also, have a listen to this 31-minute interview with David Crosby on NPR conducted around the time For Free came out. The conversation finds him reflecting on his career, his motivations for writing, recording, and performing, the state of the music industry, and even a story about Steely Dan’s Donald Fagen who also contributed a song to the record. As a highlight, Crosby hints at his work on yet another set of two records which we can only hope will become posthumous releases.

Finally, check out the David Crosby with The Lighthouse Band Tiny Desk Concert filmed in 2019. It’s a sample of the kind of sound they crafted together to help make Crosby’s creative output what it is from the middle 2010s to his final days; harmony-drenched, atmospheric, dreamlike, wistful, but also fierce.

Enjoy!

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#2020sMusic #DavidCrosby #singerSongwriters #songsAboutDeath

Listen to this track by anthemic folk-pop benefactors from Garðabær Iceland, Of Monsters and Men. It’s “Little Talks”, a single from their 2012 record My Head is an Animal. They released the album months before in Iceland, and introduced it to the world later in the spring of that year, with this song as the lead single. Hooking into the kind of a large-scaled hyper-folk style of a similar ilk to The Lumineers and Edward Sharpe & the Magnetic Zeros, this single scales the heights of glossy 2010s pop music while drawing on a melody that sounds much older, in places reminiscent of a folk ballad rather than a modern pop song.

“Little Talks” preceded the release of the album, appearing as the opening track on 2011’s Into the Woods EP and standing out as a unique radio single. Its success and that of the eventual full-length debut album made significant impact on the Billboard 100 in North America, being the highest charting single by an Icelandic artist on that chart. This was in addition to top showings in the UK, Ireland, and Australia. Not too shabby for a debut single from a band outside of all of those regions. As per usual, the song’s innovative video helped to elevate it, being a fantastical depiction of sky-ships, divine beings, and yes, monsters and men. In retrospect, it looks like a visual metaphor for being in a touring band.

As much as the band’s name and their first video evokes fairy tale mythology, the song “Little Talks” hints at very real-world struggles that are decidedly more well-traveled as pop song subjects. This doesn’t mean that the song doesn’t have storytelling angles that create a sense of ambiguity, of course. This cut includes a whiff of the supernatural, just to make things interesting.

“Little Talks” is a duet between lead vocalist Nanna Bryndís Hilmarsdóttir and guitarist and singer Ragnar “Raggi” Þórhallsson, each singing a character that frames the song as another one of the little talks referred to in the title. Its appeal starts with how happy and joyous it sounds. The dual vocals play in the space between affection and melancholy and hold a down-to-earth charm that is attractive and instantly relatable.

This is a song about Big Feelings and its success relies on how well the band balance the musical colours that help to express them. It shimmers with positivity, despite the hints of heavy themes which that same positivity never dismisses or downplays. This provides a compelling sense of contrast that can be found in a lot of great pop music. It’s masterfully realized.

The setting seems to contradict the dynamics of two lovers exchanging words, that being an old and empty house in which the female narrator dislikes living, implying that she lives there alone. So who is this soothing male voice that floats into the narrative as a response to her musical call and a gentle presence in her life in which she otherwise feels disquieted and restless? Is she really hearing his voice? Is he really there? Is this a haunted house story of a woman who loves and is loved by a spirit? Or is this simply a song about memory, loss, and the human tendency towards wish fulfilment that our beloved people are still around even when they aren’t?

The hints are there that all is not what it seems. Even the ghostly voice suggests your mind is playing tricks on you, my dear. Does she believe him? Do we? The truth may vary indeed in this song, raising a lot of questions about who the characters really are and what’s really happening in the story.

For a band who trades in folk stories and fairy tales as a template for writing pop songs, this ambiguity in the story is built right into that very approach. In so many of those kinds of stories, the lines between what’s real, what’s not, and the metaphorical value one can find in between is where we find the real strength of the narratives.

The core of this story is about the common feelings associated with the cost of love; that when we love someone, we get a proportionate amount of pain in losing them in parallel to the pleasure of having their presence in our lives. If we cherish them with all our might while they’re still with us, then we’ll feel the emptiness of their absence all the more when they’re gone.

For better or for worse, that’s the deal.

“Little Talks” is also a call to other themes wrapped up in that and also recurring in folk traditions. Death, isolation, memory, and mourning are stalwart themes in ballads and verse that are centuries old, full as they are of widows, orphans, shipwrecks, and dying too young. It seems that these dark subjects continue to hold a fascination for humanity across eras and epochs. Maybe this is because they are so primal as things that we fear as we seek vital connections with others, clinging onto those we love as best we can.

There’s another factor to consider, which is the reason that folk traditions and subject matter extend even into modern pop music like this song; that even in our dread of loss, we know we aren’t alone. The path is well-traveled and we have the stories to prove it. If the heroine of any folk tale just who lost everything dear to her can generate the strength to tell her story to us, it must mean she survived the experience, too. And if she can, why can’t the rest of us?

“Though the truth may vary
This ship will carry
Our bodies safe to shore …”

– “Little Talks”, Of Monsters and Men

“Little Talks” positions this theme of survival and the necessity of moving on even after a great loss with great subtlety and even compassion. As a slice of pop music heard on the radio, it contained hidden depths. Far from being just a stylistic riff to call attention to itself, it represented folk traditions in an authentic manner. It revealed itself as an example of why human beings tell stories in the first place; to make the dark side of human experience less lonely for everyone.

Of Monsters and Men are a going concern today. For more information about them, check out ofmonstersandmen.com.

Enjoy!

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#2010sMusic #FolkPop #indieFolk #OfMonstersAndMen #songsAboutDeath

There’s an alternate universe where as a typically angsty millennial teenager I discovered #TheMountainGoats instead of #BrightEyes, but here we are…

https://youtu.be/zNm-tWPArDM

#music

CW: #sadsongs #songsaboutdeath #LGBTQ

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#Loudwire
10 Songs About Death That Help the Healing Process, Chosen by Spirit Adrift's Nate Garrett
Music can always help manage emotions.

https://loudwire.com/songs-about-death-help-healing-spirit-adrift-nate-garrett/

#SongsAboutDeath #SpiritAdrift #Healing #NateGarrett #MetalMusic #Relief #Loudwire

I'm so behind on music I don't even know if they still write hit songs about how to deal with entities tied to Death.

Don't Fear the Reaper, Don't Pay the Ferryman and Lady in Black style things.

#BlueOysterCult #ChrisDeBurgh #UriahHeep #SongsAboutDeath