Music To Feel Connected Pt 1
To start off this week of posts, I wanted to share some of the music and performances that brings me back to the visceral emotions and headspace of being alive. These aren’t all happy songs or pieces that makes me feel good but rather, music that connects me to myself, in all the joy and pain and anger and hope and everything in between that comes with being alive and present to the world.
Not - Big Thief
This first track is from Big Thief and it’s about what something isn’t, only being about to describe it by what it’s not because you can’t capture what exactly it is. It’s called “Not”. I’m a sucker for when a singer’s voice breaks cause they’re emoting and singing so hard and that happens here with lead Adrianne Lenker a few times. If you’ve listened to her solo material or other Big Thief songs, you know her style tends toward more soft spoken and lilting, which makes the aggression and passion in this performance all the more hard hitting. I don’t know what she’s singing about, but it doesn’t matter when the music grabs you by the throat like this.
Take It Easy My Brother Charles - Jorge Ben Jor
Take It Easy My Brother Charles is sung entirely in Portuguese by the legendary Jorge Ben Jor except for the single refrain “Take it easy my brother, Charlie.”
I have no idea what this song is about and I’ve purposely never looked up a translation. The energy and vibe of this song is full of so much joy and energy that I don’t want to risk intellectualizing it by knowing what it all means. Detached from context, the little English there is in the song loses all meaning and just flows beautifully and playfully on top of the exuberant rhythms and through Jorge’s instinctively brilliant melody. This song makes me wanna dance from the moment those iconic bass notes hit my ear. It perfectly embodies a lightness in life that cuts through everything else and makes the world seem just a little brighter for its brief duration.
4 Degrees - Anohni
There’s a moment some 2 minutes and 35 seconds into 4 Degrees where the music cuts out almost leaving just a softly sung chorus of “I wanna burn them, I wanna burn them.” This lasts for only about 10 seconds before Anohni’s voice returns in full backed by sharp sudden violin stabs as she sings the lines “I wanna burn the sky, I wanna burn the breeze / I wanna see the animals die in the trees.” It’s a moment that years later still makes me cry every time I hear it. The propulsive pounding violence of the song up until this point is brutal as she bluntly cheers on the burning of the world due to climate collapse: “And all those rhinos and all those big mammals / I wanna see them lying, crying in the fields / I wanna see them burn, it's only four degrees.”
The song turns the politics of climate change around - instead of protesting or demanding action, Anohni positions herself as someone gleeful for the end of the world and in doing so, illustrates just how horrifying the reality of climate collapse really is. It’s a song without relief. There’s no catharsis or safety to be found. It’s just a drum beating toward the end of everything drawing stark images of animals screaming for the last drops of water while fish float dead in rivers. In its unrelenting ferocity, Anohni makes the horror of climate breakdown palpable and immediate, offering - however grimly - an emotional inroads to something often too abstractly terrible to really grasp. It offers the catharsis of facing a horrible truth together, recognizing something awful for what it truly is but doing so in solidarity and with a connection to others equally ready to fight to prevent the horror from continuing any further.
Wolf Like Me - TV On The Radio
Turning into a werewolf as a metaphor for fucking - that’s the premise of Wolf Like Me by TV On The Radio. There’s nothing more to the song, no greater metaphor or themes. This is a song about raw wild sex so passionate and ferocious it can only be described as being as transformative as turning into supernatural beasts tearing into each other through the night. It wouldn’t work if it were anyone else - on paper it sounds like a concept album by an 80s hair metal band - but then they go on Letterman and deliver the most visceral raw energized performance I’ve ever seen air on national television and you can’t help but be sold on this metaphor. While everyone else is writing about sex as a sensual spiritual act or a pure carnal pleasure, TV On The Radio has always approached it is greater than the sum of all its parts - something transcendent and joyful and chaotic and fun and wild and loose and transformative and physical and playful. This performance captures the adrenaline fueled experience of being alive - full of blood and pain and sweat and joy and excitement and surprise. It’s the opposite of intellectual detachment - it’s pure visceral presence in the moment and it’s sublime.
“My heart’s enflamed my body’s strained but god I like it”
Reckoner - Radiohead
If you’ve talked to me for more than 10 minutes you know I’m a Radiohead fan. My friend Anne and I have an ongoing podcast dedicated to the band and at this point we’ve recorded well over 100 hours worth of episodes. I could write a thesis paper about any one of their albums off the top of my head. They are a band of great significance in my life both artistically and personally, as so many of the people nearest and dearest to my heart I met and know because of Radiohead.
So when I say Reckoner is my favorite Radiohead song, I say it loaded with more meaning and significance than I can articulate here. That said, I’ll try.
The recurring themes in much of Radiohead’s music center around isolation, anxiety, fear, depression, paranoia, a need to escape. They’re a band with a tremendous amount of heart and soul and their music is life affirming. The subject matter, however, never shies away from the more painful, difficult, confusing and uncertain parts of life. It’s a way of understanding and coping by diving straight into that which you struggle with most. How To Disappear Completely is the most beautiful song ever written about dissociating to manage panic attacks.
So when In Rainbows, Radiohead’s 7th studio album came out, it was striking how warm and open it sounded and how intimate the songwriting was. Yet death and loss and mistrust and uncertainty and obsession loomed in every corner, keeping the subject firmly in Radiohead territory, albeit approached from a different angle. And then, track 7 on their 7th album hits and it’s unlike anything Radiohead has recorded before or since. It’s melancholy, the way so much of their music is, but it’s also so full of life and crucially, acceptance. Where so many of their songs exist in a place of tension and release - struggling against something or escaping something or wandering through uncertainty - the music of Reckoner immediately conveys something different: That whatever’s happening is okay.
And then Thom’s voice comes in and it’s as serene and beatific as its ever been. Through the next five minutes he sings about death, only this time, there’s no fear or regret or resistance or sadness, just acceptance.
As the band kicks into full gear after the first introductory verse, Thom sings “You are not to blame for / Bittersweet distractors” - you will get distracted from life’s meaning and joys and purpose and it’s okay, it’s not your fault, for the good or the bad that pulls you away.
During the bridge, as the music falls away and we’re left with just Thom’s voice and guitar, he intones, “Because we separate / Like ripples on a blank shore” as a haunting voice in the back sings the words “In Rainbows”. We can’t help but separate in time as our bonds break and death claims us all. But in Thom’s version, it’s okay that we separate because there’s beauty in the separation and the inevitability.
As the band returns for the final verse, Thom leaves us with the lines:
“Reckoner
Take me with you
Dedicated to all hu-
All human beings”
The reckoner - death - isn’t something to be feared, it’s something to be accepted and welcomed when it arrives and it is one of the things that binds us all together, all human beings. It’s a song that does what all Radiohead songs do - immerse the listener in something difficult and hard to put words to. Only this time, it’s to tell you that everything is going to be okay, that all the things that have haunted Thom, all the darkness and uncertainty and fear and doubts that have loomed in their music, all the pain and struggle and loss and anger, all that we’ve heard and shared in with them as listeners over the years, all of it is ultimately okay. We’re not to blame, it’s just life, it happens and while we may all leave separately, we are together in our separateness.