Sickness: An Exposition Of A Song You Haven’t Heard.
How could you? I haven’t even recorded it yet. I still need to close the curtains and arrange the microphone stand around the bed. Someone needs to walk past the house and hear the faint sound of a heart being sung out - Leonard Cohen meets Johnny Cash - if customer reviews are believed. After all, you can’t record a song half-arsed. I will record my socks. I will record whilst naked. But not with half of my arse.
My intention was never to write a song from a book. Or at least, not that book. One, so heavily interpreted and analysed that it comes with it’s own introduction by James Woods (not that one). Any sane person would gather themselves and sprint to the nearest pub for a shot of something sugary and dark; their face will wince, the bar-staff will hand over the receipt with knowing eyes and watch whilst they head on the path towards that term which encapsulates the majority of British life: sloshed.
Fuck introductions. Fuck sloshed. There were no philosophical approaches in my mind when I borrowed the book from a colleague in a Centre for Calls (nothing to do with calls or phones incidentally: trees are kept in states of near-death underneath the terrible gaze of a golden eagle). even if in the end she didn’t like it. Or she gave the best, worst response, as I tried to express the gravity of a book forcing me to song: an “Okay.” as she took the book back, and got on with her life.
With a good book, the acid of the eyes corrodes the pages one by one and until the words invade you. And I was invaded. I knew this because the weekend after i had finished it, I sat on my bed and for many hours, and did nothing. I stood in the living room and watched my landlady’s hanging plates (the hung, like plates sometimes do) and could not remember moving or how I came to be there. I sat in the kitchen, and wondered how I got anywhere. And whether it mattered. And I thought how nothing really mattered, except for the enormous amount of matter that made up everything, how it clung to everything, sticky and invisible, like peeling PVA glue off your hands.
Some sixty years ago this man described a complete loss of self. The world and all the objects in it swallow him up. A proper body-shock. And I knew what he meant because I had felt it before and reading the book had brought it back, this bizarre, numbing sickness. And in the only way I knew, I picked up my guitar and wrote a song in the way every creative person wants to: the complete thing, spewing out of me fully formed - a lost weekend suspended in a melody. How quaint.
But it did the trick. I wasn’t sick anymore and I kept the song with me, even after many years of it being basically hidden away. And to be honest, I like it. I like the melody of the guitar, and how it works with the vocals, I like the subject matter. The only reason you’ve not heard it is i haven’t made it so that you can. Except now of course, I’m am, only it’s taking longer than I expected. So I decided to write an exposition to distract you.
And it’s worked…
