Such a stupid sentiment, but write it once again.

This week, there was an intense cold snap in Chicago. I woke up on Thursday morning to a layer of snow on the trees outside my window, the sun all blushing and translucent. It was highly unpleasant. The snow did melt by midday, but the fact that it had come so early and with such panache did frighten me. Classes have really started, which means my life consists of reading PDF files on computer screens and carrying around expensive paper with a horrifically enlarged version of my face on it. There are two songs which have stuck in this week. Predictably, both of them are old songs, and both of them are dramatic in a way my life currently (and thankfully) fails to be.

Arab Strap, “The Shy Retirer”.
I’ve never much been into Arab Strap. Though this choice is probably left over from my militantly-anti-Belle-and-Sebastian days (oh, how I hated them!), I think it still holds some legitimacy. Arab Strap are a little overly solipsistic, a little too intense for me. But the Scottish drawl in this song sucked me into it, and the charming couplet that pops in about halfway through: “You know I’m always moaning, but you jumpstart my serotonin”. This song is a short film, the Who/What/Where/Why all un-artfully obscured, but the moment captured beautifully, the narrator pushy and under the influence of something nasty but lovely. He’s angry, and hurt, and purposeful (“We promised ourselves before we came here/ we’d do something we regret/ these people are your friends/ this cunted circus never ends/ I won’t remember anything you say”). He’s so nasty and charming, so accurate. The song has a tense string section, and horns slipping in as well. This song is worthlessness to the fullest extent of its use. The world is all anger, standing around, pointless drugs. The world is in shambles, but it is very well-articulated and we can’t ask for much else these days, can we? At the end we’re left with a tight drum loop, standing there on its own. Am I supposed to be dancing? Was I supposed to be dancing all along?

Tom Waits- “Hold On”.
This song is 5 minutes and 33 seconds long. It (and I know this is a travesty, please forgive me) reminds me of Bruce Springsteen. A lot. And I know Tom Waits is better in some ways than Bruce, and I know he’s more original and completely different. But this is a ballad about a relationship and leaving town and physical desolation but emotional salvation. The line, “Go ahead and call the cops/ You don’t meet nice girls in coffee shops” is somehow completely moving and honest. And that honesty swings into the next line, “She said, ‘baby I still love you/ sometimes there’s nothing left to do’”. The sentiment of loving something that’s perfectly flawed is a cliché. But in all reconstruction, there’s the ghost of destruction, and it doesn’t have to be a menace. This song quickly becomes about accepting the problems in the past, the lame substitutes which become our essentials. As he growls, “You build it up, you wreck it down/ You tear your mansion to the ground,” we’re confronted with the fact of those ruins, and here we are, carrying them in our pockets and feeling the sharp edges as well as the smooth ones. For five minutes, there is a unison between the broken and that continual, awful process of repairing, between clutching something tightly and remembering how it once supported us. I’ve never been comforted (so much as amazed and terrified) by Tom Waits’ voice, but at the end of this song I want it to be record, so I can physically move the needle back to the beginning of the loop and start it again.