Tag Archives: Leonard Cohen

Like an extra arm, you are a part of us…

Leave a reply

16. Goodbye England (Covered In Snow) – Laura Marling                                                2010/11

Since my daughter was born, just over six years ago, there’s pretty consistently been snow each winter in England. Growing up I remember snow as a rare event – I don’t know factually whether it was, it may just be the vagaries of memory – whereas now it seems to arrive every year.

It’s divisive, snow. With adult eyes I view it as a wearying inconvenience: scraping the car, clearing the drive, being cold and wet, dangerous on the roads. Through a child’s eyes, of course, it’s a massive adventure: building a snowman, throwing snowballs, slipping and sliding, and the delicious prospect of the cancellation of school.

“Goodbye England” was the lead single from Marling’s second album “I Speak Because I Can” and was the song that, to me, heralded the arrival of a very special talent. Her first record “Alas I Cannot Swim” is extremely good but what has struck me as miraculous about Marling is her progression from record to record in such scant time. There’s a discernible growth in confidence in her four albums, appearing in relative quick succession over the last five years, with each building musically on the last. It’s the closest thing I think I’ve heard in my lifetime to the sort of artistic evolution that, say, Dylan or Mitchell went through in the 60s. Ryan Adams also came pretty close for me in the run from Whiskeytown through “Heartbreaker” and up to “Love Is Hell” but there aren’t many others. I appreciate that puts her in some fairly exalted company but I think it’s a valid comparison; I genuinely think she’s that good. I guess there’s an argument that she wears her Bob and Joni influences too freely but, frankly, who doesn’t if you ply your trade as a singer songwriter with an acoustic guitar, and at 23 it’s not like she hasn’t still got time to transcend those influences.

I could have included a number of Marling’s songs in this list and, in fact, originally I’d intended to go with “Sophia” from her third album “A Creature I Don’t Know” – partly because I adore it and partly because I distinctly remember hearing it for the first time and just laughing at how absurdly good it was. So here’s a link to the video for “Sophia” as a little bonus: it is a marvelous thing.

For a while last year – if I’d been writing this last year – then I’d almost certainly have gone with “Night After Night”. Does it borrow a bit from Leonard Cohen’s “Famous Blue Raincoat” ? Yes (which she happily acknowledges). Does it matter ? Not really when it sounds as assured, as poised, as stunning as this. So there’s a link to that too: it is also a marvelous thing.

Or “Flicker & Fail” (very, very Joni Mitchell), or “I Was Just A Card”, or the brutal “Master Hunter”, or the also pretty brutal “Saved These Words”. There are worse ways to spend a Sunday (or any day but I’m posting this on a Sunday) than watching and listening to these.

“Goodbye England” though is the one that I return to with affectionate regularity and, in the spirit of the overall list, has the most personal associations. The song seems to be concerned with the breakdown of a relationship and a desire to escape but those aren’t the reasons that it really chimes for me (although the escape thing is something of a recurrent theme in stuff I like). Marling recounts a story about visiting a hilltop as a child with her father and looking at the snow covered landscape. So struck with the beauty of the scene, and no doubt contemplating the passage of time as his daughter grew up, her father asked her to one day bring him back to the same place, to remember how beautiful the world could be; just once before he died. It’s a feeling that you get a lot as a parent, those peculiar moments when you briefly see the world afresh through your child’s eyes and simultaneously understand how fleeting those moments are – in a way that your child doesn’t. It’s incredibly bittersweet, somehow wrapping up a sudden, strong sense of your own mortality and a desire to preserve the innocence of childhood. It’s not unhappy – those moments can be almost perfect – but there is an abiding melancholy to it. This song does that to me every time.

Sometimes serendipity lends a hand. The song begins with the lines:

You were so smart then

In your jacket and coat

My softest red scarf was warming your throat

A couple of winters ago I was building a snowman with my daughter and she was traipsing through the white stuff dressed in a red coat and scarf. I think in the context of the song that it’s presumably Marling remembering that her father was the “smart” one with her scarf warming his throat but it doesn’t really matter to me – it instantly triggers the memory of a little girl cheerfully conversing with the snowman rising up out of the ground.

IMG_3853

As the song develops it explores the tension between leaving and staying that Marling feels as (presumably) a relationship ends, reflecting ruefully on the nature of love:

And a friend of mine says it’s good to hear

That you believe in love, even if set in fear

Well I’ll hold you there brother and set you straight

I only believe true love is frail and willing to break

She moves from disbelieving regret (I wrote my name in your book… only god knows why) to frantically pouring out some kind of explanation in a letter (I wrote an epic letter to you… it’s 22 pages front and back) before asserting that it’s too good to be used. A moment of candid self awareness – I tried to be a girl that likes to be used – before, finally, the confident assertion that I’m too good for that: there’s a mind under this hat and the decision to go (And I called them all and told them I’ve got to move).

That middle section is brilliant; sketching out the whirlwind of emotions and uncertainty that accompanies the breakdown of something in eleven perfectly judged lines, capturing the random little asides that the mind throws in to the mix. The wry, self deprecating and I bet you that he cracked a smile following only god knows why is a great touch, as is picking up the thread of being used – from her own letter being too good to be used to recognising that she had played a part that wasn’t her, wasn’t good enough for her, and that she was also too good to be used.

The tension in staying or going then wraps us back into that moment on the hill with her father, now torn between running away (as an independent adult) or returning to her family:

Feel like running

Feel like running

Running off.

And we will keep you

We will keep you, little one

Safe from harm

Like an extra arm, you are a part of us.

“Little one” is what Marling was often called within her family and, serendipity again, is also something that I call my daughter – I doubt it’s uncommon. The “we will keep you” lines deliberately borrow from the mice’s “We Will Fix It” song from Bagpuss, a British kids show from the 70s, which perfectly distills the sense of comfort and nostalgia in returning to the safety of her parents. On another level the Bagpuss tune itself is adapted from a 13th century folk round (“Sumer Is Icumen In”), something that I imagine Marling would be well aware of and that she may well have picked up from her parents; her father was also a musician and ran a residential recording studio, her mother was a music teacher. If it is a nod back to her parents, grounding the song back in a folk tradition which they may have taught her, then it’s a lovely touch. Even if it isn’t then it’s still a delightful moment in the song, it doesn’t need the context to work.

The sense in the song is that her choice is to strike out on her own (it’s called “Goodbye England” after all) but with a promise to return:

I will come back here

Bring me back when I’m old

I want to lay here, forever in the cold.

I might be cold but I’m just skin and bones

And I never love England more than when covered in snow.

I guess as a parent that’s the best you can hope for, that your child grows up confident and assured enough to strike out on their own but always with that promise to return. Like an extra arm, they are a part of us. So next time it snows there will undoubtedly be part of me that sighs heavily and prepares to shovel lumps of it off the drive. There’ll also be part of me though that puts this record on and remembers the privileged time I spent in bringing up my daughter, the opportunities to see the world anew, and the many, many glorious, transient, bittersweet moments along the way.

And every breath we drew was hallelujah…

Leave a reply

12. Hallelujah – Jeff Buckley                                                                                        Bristol, 1995

“It”. The difference between good and great. The intangible quality that separates countless singers with guitars from a star. That rare combination of talent, application, attitude, look, feel, and passion. Jeff Buckley had it. Had it in spades.

Sony execs must have been rubbing their hands together with glee when they signed Buckley; he sang like an angel, was a guitar virtuoso, and looked like a film star. His voice could be Robert Plant one minute, Nina Simone the next, and finish up pitching sounds that would bear comparison with only, maybe, Liz Fraser amongst recent singers. His guitar playing ranged from delicate, intricate picking to ragged distorted chords; fusing rock, jazz, blues, hymns, East and West. Feted to be the new Dylan, the new Springsteen, the new Led Zeppelin, the new Van Morrison: take your pick, who knows which path he’d have trodden.

Personally I suspect he’d have taken an artistic route more akin to Joni Mitchell than, say, any of her male contemporaries – a restless evolution of his sound and a deeper exploration of ever more complex musical forms. I doubt it’d have been necessarily very commercial but it’s impossible to second guess now. Van Morrison came out of “Astral Weeks” with “Moondance” and Springsteen reigned in some of the eclecticism from “Wild, Innocent & The E-Street Shuffle” to produce “Born To Run” so perhaps Buckley might have found a way to simplify.

We’ll never know, of course and it remains frustrating that there’s so little material – a solitary finished album (“Grace”) and the patched together recordings that may or may not have gone on to be its follow up (“Sketches From My Sweetheart The Drunk”). What there is, outside of that, are reams and reams of live recordings – seemingly every time someone pressed record on a mixing desk Sony / Columbia would subsequently release it. Whilst in some respects there’s a faintly depressing aspect to this as the label look to milk their ear marked “legacy” artist – their cash flow projections somewhat inconvenienced by his premature death – it does also provide a fascinating glimpse into Buckley’s evolution as a musician and singer.

The best pre “Grace” document is the “Live At Sin-e” recording, originally put out as an EP in 1993 but then issued as a full double album ten years later. It’s just Buckley, a telecaster, and a couple of hundred people. It’s clearly an environment in which he feels comfortable; there’s a lot of joking around, whether it’s improvising a song to help people find their seats (and then imagining the equivalent punk version for CBGBs), mashing up Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan with Nirvana’s “Teen Spirit”, or calling for “Jim Morrison levels of reverb” via an impromptu tease of the opening bars of “The End”. There’s also, in the same spirit, a lot of improvisation, stretching his own songs out as if he’s still working out the kinks, and extending and shaping the covers like he’s trying to unravel each song to suss out how it works  before he puts it back together again. Inevitably some of it’s pretty raw and not everything works. The version of “Lover, You Should’ve Come Over” (which is a stand out on “Grace”) is a bit of a mess and beset with tuning problems and there are moments when some of the goofing around outstays its welcome.

Much of it though, often when it’s more focused and slightly less experimental, is stunning: a gorgeous, fragile take on Edith Piaf’s “Je N’en Connais Pas La Fin”, a melodic run through Dylan’s “If You See Her, Say Hello”, a sensuous “Strange Fruit” (Billie Holiday, Nina Simone), and an utterly lovely read of Van Morrison’s “Sweet Thing”. It’s worth stopping for a second to look again at that set of covers. That’s Edith Piaf, Nina Simone, Billie Holiday, Bob Dylan, and Van Morrison that he’s taking on and making his own as a 26 year old without a record to his name.

And then there’s “Hallelujah”. Back in ’93 the song was far less known than it is now, thanks in no small part to Buckley’s version. Written by Leonard Cohen Buckley uses John Cale’s interpretation as his template and it closes “Live At Sin-e”; the recording is probably the closest point of comparison to my first encounter with the song. At the time, in the months following graduation, I was back living with my parents and working a temporary job dealing with customer queries about their invoices for a mobile phone provider. It was a set of circumstances distinctly lacking in romance or magic.

Buckley was playing at The Fleece And Firkin (now The Fleece) in Bristol to promote “Grace”, it’s basically a pub with a stage, capacity probably around three hundred. The sort of place you can get within feet of the performers and reach on to the stage to pinch a taped down set list at the end. In all honesty I had principally gone that night to see Bettie Serveert who were supporting as I was a big fan of their “Palomine” record. I’d heard some buzz around Buckley and was curious but hadn’t heard a note of his music.

The gig was a revelation. I was there with a friend from school who’d ended up working at the same place as me, in much the same circumstances, and that time at work was significantly enlivened by his conversation and camaraderie – one of the few bright spots in an otherwise gloomy time. I suspect I started watching Buckley’s set with a slight “come on then, let’s see how good you are, impress me” attitude and, early on, the signs weren’t good. He had constant sound issues during the opening songs and some technical glitches, neither of which seemed to help his mood; he seemed tetchy, unable to really get into his performance – the malfunctions interrupting his (and consequently our) reverie. Slowly but surely though he (and band) turned it around; the equipment started to work and they wove a captivating spell.

Buckley was impossible to take your eyes off. On stage he had charisma to burn; a very attractive, sensual man oscillating (wildly) between little-boy-lost vulnerability to lithe sexuality. Irrespective of gender or orientation the man just had “it”. He was also impossible not to listen to. He had the technical chops but his much heralded four octave range doesn’t really tell the story. The range of expression in his vocals was breathtaking, although that’s probably the least appropriate adjective to describe them given his sustain. He sent notes out like birds taking wing: soaring, swooping, climbing and diving. “Grace” as an album acts as a fine showcase for his voice from the pure falsetto of “Corpus Christi Carol” to the heady languor of “Lilac Wine”, the resignation of “Last Goodbye”, the pain in “Lover…”, through to the free style screams of catharsis he lets loose at the close of “Grace” itself. It was a glorious instrument and to hear it in the flesh in such intimate surroundings was a genuine privilege and one of the finest live performances I’ve seen.

He closed with “Hallelujah”, I think it was an encore. Just him and a guitar. You could have heard a pin drop. If you had you probably would have asked it to be quiet. It was just jaw droppingly good. Astonishing. Staggering. Go to town with your own superlatives but he held all of us rapt, perfectly still, in thrall to seven minutes of perfection. We left shaking our heads in mild disbelief. I think I bought “Grace” the next day.

The song suffers a little now for its relative ubiquity, everyone from Bono to X-Factor winner Alexandra Burke has had a go at it. You can argue the toss over whose version is definitive – it seems to usually boil down to a straight fight between John Cale, KD Lang, and Buckley; maybe Rufus Wainwright – but the version I heard first is always the one that sticks for me. Towards the end of his life even Buckley started to lose some of his sparkle in performing it, listen to the recording on “Live At L’Olympia” and he sounds a bit like he’s going through the motions amid the audience singalong (to be fair the cut on “Mystery White Boy” that splices in The Smith’s “I Know It’s Over” is much better). But in the beginning it was, and remains, sublime.

In 1997, at just 30 years old with the world at his feet, he was gone. Drowned whilst swimming Wolf River in Memphis. Speculation persists that he intended to take his own life – vehemently denied by his family – and I guess that the fact that toxicology reports indicated nothing in his system could be read either way. His death was ruled an accident.

It was also, in some respects, an accident that I saw him that night in Bristol. It’s ironic given the dedication and determination he applied to his undoubted gifts: his artistry and musicality was no accident.