the fucking loving and sentimental tone of “Memory Burns” fucking kills me every time. she wasn’t done loving her life as it was before it was crumpled up and thrown away in front of her. she’s still not done loving it. it feels like a cruel hook in my heart.
even if you survive the fire, it matters what was lost. it matters. it’s not just stuff. it’s not just trees and furniture. it’s habitat, shelter. it’s connection, ecosystem. it’s what everything means to everything else. a climate-related wildfire is a murder that hides the body, and survivors alone carry the memory while their whole world has left from them. we are still creating the early ghosts of something that will one day be done forever. and people dare to act like it’s materialism to miss your physical shelter. it’s love.
it’s a genuine relief when the subtext is made text in the final song of the album, “All That Is Solid”
“to prepare for the trial of the century, greed versus life.”
gabriel kahane’s heart bleeds so readily and while it hurts to be brought along through the sore spots, ultimately i feel less alone when he nods back. it does feel as bad to him. it hurts a lot less than hurting alone, even if the cycle of grief never ends.
i feel like the more direct songs are a key to the more surreal or humorous songs. it is a liminal album, somewhere in the spot between tragedy and death, there is time to take a breath. “st. vincent’s hospital” — grief in a hospital as a loved one dies of aids. “not even the dead” — traumatic impressions revisited as a soldier struggles to sleep. “memory burns” — mother of an evacuated family in a hotel.
i am always tempted to tie things up, to answer questions with other parts of a work. i want the irate veteran in “The Hot Tub” to be the sympathetic figure in “Not Even the Dead.” i want the father in “Rack of Time” to be of the same family as “Memory Burns”’s mother. i want “Newborn Plague” and “Put it in My Valise” to be two perspectives on traveling the same post-apocalyptic world. but, really, these pains are broad. there is no need to imagine it as one story to imagine it as one story, if that makes sense.
also, as i get more attached to the tragedies contained within the album, the bookends, which at first i considered to be a bit too direct and also detached from the guests. the first, “Speaking in Tongues” is like, this is about a transitory, temporary home and the people staying there. then at the end, “All That is Solid” is like oh by the way the hotel is the world. like. ok.
thinking of these moments between tragedy and death, these overnight stays at hospitals, these hotels with hostility within and without, homes that don’t feel like home anymore… i feel the genuineness of the bookends. kahane is obsessed with location, but he himself rambles to observe those locations. the elevator is a metaphorical train, like that in book of travelers, because there has to be something to connect a body of work that contextualizes humanity in place, in many places, in a world which humanity constantly threatens to carelessly destroy.
andrew bird once told kahane that it seemed like his albums were commissioned by the WPA, or otherwise by the federal government, which refers to real actual projects the nation has set out to do, to preserve the unseen and temporary state of the everyday citizen. kahane strikes out to do this work on his own, to find connection and reality, out of sheer grief at the violence and dissolution. it kind of breaks my heart to come to like these very personal bookends to such a surreal and far-reaching album as Elevator Songs, especially since i’m such a fan of book of travelers (even though i thought his mission there was entirely futile), and i wanted to believe in his hope even if i can’t hope on my own.
trying to record, archive, preserve humanity is a futile thing. it is his task. what a painful mission, especially in a world where meaningful information is also washed away by a flood of meaningless or discompassionate information.
…which i think is probably the purpose of the comedic songs, right? in the hearkening back to craigslistlieder, there the character sees but does not understand the aftermath of war. in the faux podcast-from-the-future, the materialistic host in militarized future-texas sees but does not understand the effects of climate change, and the feelings of travelers in the past who understood themselves to be part of the problem. does kahane fear being one of these cruelly indifferent observers?
then to look at the travelers in “Newborn Plague” and “Sophomore Record”, the stakes of their situations are so disparate, but the overt tone feels opposite. somehow the young couple fleeing some kind of biological disaster (a pandemic? a chemical disaster? something nuclear?) are listening to music, seeing the scenery, getting to know each other. somehow the musicians are just concerned with getting to shelter in one piece, and then to escape even from that with media. “nothing to write to mom about” feels the opposite of “i guess this is how i’ve always prayed.” i guess neurotic anxiety has no purpose when tragedy has already come to pass. connection is needed either way. and still, they are travelers driving cars. in “put it in my valise” we see the ignorant traveler as a jackass, and the worried traveler as sympathetic. the young couple and the musicians… are these people to blame for anything? does it make a difference if they’re seeking survival? does it make a difference if they’re chasing their dreams?
but we see this put up against war. traumatized veterans, soldiers just following orders, militarized future-texas presumably in the wake of further climate trouble.
kahane lives in the elevator, like the musicians in sophomore record may be learning to do. even if he rides it up and down until it breaks, is he somehow to blame for that? is travel greed? is worrying about personal items during moments of escape materialistic? is a CD that you typically pray alone to closer to a capsule wardrobe holding a short and prescribed list of laundry, or to a china cabinet holding a glass from the night that we first met?
what is the difference between “The Rack of Time”’s flicking through the day’s tragedy in the dark and “Sophomore Album”’s watching law and order? how personal or real does the media have to be to deserve to be a distraction from love? well, let’s put the father on trial. what else do we know? the father holding his child and scrolling his feed loves his child, grieves for the impermanence of their lives. the end of the song, the father reveals that he doesn’t know when he and his child will go home. he could be dying and grieving specifically that his child will be without him soon, or he could be healthy and grieving that his child will ever be without him. so going into the elevator and walking into the sun could be “going home” as in dying, and the father doesn’t answer because he can’t know. or he might only be able to offer to the child that one day they will leave where they are, because he doesn’t know what their home will be in the future because the old one is gone. this could be the husband to the mother in “Memory Burns”. home may no longer exist. flicking through the day’s tragedy on the phone might be so personal as to be familial. could be! or it could just be a man holding his child in any uncertain moment, phone in hand. maybe they’re just stuck at rhe hotel because of bad weather, as “Speaking in Tongues” suggests. Is a wildfire bad weather?
how can you bear to leave, to walk out into the sun, in the wake of tragedy. the sky, the sky the sky, the sky (“Newborn Plague”) just blue, blue for miles and miles and miles to the sea (“Not Even the Dead.”)
