Heart/break

The close-harmony hymn set to a pulsating synth loop that kicks off Muchacho, Phosphorescent’s latest record, caught me off guard. This was an artist of the warm and full Southern sound, in my head, and this track is very minimalistic. Luckily, he pulls it off well. One song later, everything is back to normal with the long-winding Song for Zula. His previous record has been described as country soul, which made me realize that I really like country soul (or country funk, for that matter). It is a combination unlikely on first glance, and very reasonable upon the next. I would even propose a new genre for Muchacho’s Song: country doo-wop.

You have to really follow the words closely to realize Zula is a song of heartbreak. Of general heartbreak, I think, of something lost beyond a single relationship. “I saw love disfigure me into something I am not recognizing.” He goes on to say love trapped him, and that he has become suspicious, less open to it. It’s a beautiful, smooth song, which makes it all the more tragic – the oldest trick in the book, it puts me to mind of Eleanor Rigby for instance, which is also a string-laden tale of disillusion, but it still works wonders.

Right On / Ride On is really the kind of thing I was expecting here, a continuation of his last record. A sort of straightforward, funky Americana with a lot of heart but not necessarily the storytelling aspect that is so important to the genre. Alternating Right and Ride as the title suggests, I also hear both ‘ain’t nothing will last’ and ‘nevertheless’, and both ‘hate’ and ‘hey you’ to ‘turn him right/ride on’. I am not sure if those quips are on purpose or just ambiguity introduced by my own mind, but I like the idea of it.

This theme of duality, of one thing replacing the other, and back again, is further developed in the next song. ‘I was the wounded master, then I was the slave / I was the holy writer, then I was the page.’ That is what has passed, but what is yet to come can also go both ways: ‘I could be forever or just a couple of days’. And after this, if only to prove my point, we are launched right into another doubly named song, viz. A Charm / A Blade.

The theme of heartbreak introduced in Zula is omnipresent. When it comes to the heart there is no hiding behind metaphors.

Cut my heart but do it fast

You’re telling me my heart’s sick,
and I’m telling you I know

The reference to anhedonia suggests an apathy of sorts has followed from the heartbreak. ‘All the music’s now boring to me,’ is how you know you’re really in trouble (I worriedly call to mind The Libertines, who preached that ‘if you lose your faith in love and music, the end won’t be long’).

The album is bookended by two tracks that sum it all up, that have both the duality and the heartbreak, and show very clearly that this album, as is often with artists, is a psychological process, is about shaking off his blues. Whereas the introduction is an invocation for the sun to rise, a plea, a good forty minutes later the sun is, in fact, rising.

Ease, be easy, oh.

Alone Again Or

The opening track of Forever Changes is such a remarkable thing, the more I think about it. It's so delicately arranged, with that wonderful Mariachi-styled trumpet solo - you'd almost miss the sadness that permeats the song.

The thing that defines it is schizophreny. The title already suggests a lingering, an uncertainty, and the lyrics bring it home. A line as wonderfully optimistic as I think that people are the greatest fun is followed up, oddly enough, by and I will be alone again tonight my dear. The conjuction there suggests there is an obvious causal relation, but I don't quite see it.

Interestingly enough, the double feeling of this, their most famous, song, is symbolic for the band. One of only two songs on Forever Changes written by Bryan MacLean, yet sung by Arthur Lee. MacLean was the outgoing one of the band, and was deeply immersed in the West Coast hippie scene with The Doors and The Beach Boys. Arthur Lee, on the other hand, spent the summer of love as a recluse in his mansion on the hill: sitting on a hillside, watching all the people die. Because of both his distance and proximity to the scene, he foresaw more than anyone how the counterculture movement would implode. It is almost as if MacLean gave Lee part of the lyrics, and the latter appended his own grim observations to it. It's both the beauty, hope and optimism of the idealogy of the times, and the paranoia and disillusion that would follow, all wrapped up in one wonderful three-minute song.

Ojalá

I remember vividly my response when I found a live performance of Ojalá on YouTube for the first time, and was extremely moved, in a very physical and visceral way that I normally never really am by music. Right now I am reading a book by Ben Lerner which concerns having a Profound Experience of Art, and whether such a thing really exists. It is a cynical book, and I am a cynical person, but thank God I have this to hold on to.

Every time I return to Ojalá, the feeling comes back. Whatever version of the song I turn to, it's there. Whether it's Silvio alone on his guitar, as it is in the studio version, or done in a sort of barbershop-quartet style, as on the live record with Pablo Milanés, or completely dominated by the audience, as it is here (and on almost every other live recording).

I am aware that it is probably only partly in the song itself. I undertook a few futile attemps to deconstruct, to analyze what it is exactly that moves me so, but then I realized that would ruin everything. For instance, I don't speak Spanish. I am learning it right now, partly informed by this record (and by Victor Jara, Nacho Vegas, Violeta Parra, etc.) but I am increasingly aware that a stronger grip on the Spanish language might only break the spell. I sort of know what the song is about, and that is enough. I'll let the sounds float, let the few words I recognize be impressed upon me.

Ojalá, I feel, does something peculiar to people. It's not just me. Look at every live video of the song available. People are jumping about as if it were a Faithless show, they are crying. In this video, there is a moment when Silvio realizes he has to hand the baton to the audience. He stops singing mid-chorus, and the song soars away as the audience takes it up. There's no big gestures from the singer, no inflated ego, he is just silently smiling to himself, and then gratefully smiling at the audience. That's all there is to it.