The Year in Music - Belle and Sebastian

Belle and Sebastian are the reason that there's a chapter of my dissertation (and, er, book) devoted to Glasgow. There are sound historiographical reasons for that chapter - which compares Belfast's tradition of violence with the relative tranquility of Glasgow - but the real reason is my longstanding infatuation with this Glaswegian pop band, and my conviction that any place that could spawn the likes of them must be a pretty fabulous place. So I spent a few days there back in 2004 doing research for that chapter, and, while I don't know that the word fabulous is the most accurate adjective to apply to Glasgow, I do remember being perfectly charmed by the place and wishing I had more time to dig through its (frequently grimy) layers.

Belle and Sebastian's songs are anything but grimy, but they are multi-layered - there are all sorts of complicated things going on underneath their shimmery (and, okay, sometimes a bit sugary) surfaces. Their best songs have a morsel of pain, regret, guilt, or simple sadness hiding just below the bouncy melodies and wispy, fragile vocals, and they grab me inside, just above the stomach, in a way that no other music ever has. They are my desert-island songs, my life-preserver songs, the songs among all other songs that I'd choose to save from destruction should some future Republican administration decree that all but a handful of the world's songs must be destroyed in a bonfire. Years ago, a beautiful barista in a Boston coffee shop told me - after I complained when she cut short the Belle and Sebastian album she'd been playing - that Belle and Sebastian were like chocolate cake to her, that she couldn't consume too much at one time without getting sick. That's when I knew that it would never work out between the two of us.

Joey liked Belle and Sebastian, though probably not as much as I did. I suspect that I was the one who introduced him to them, for I have been known to proselytize a little on this topic (see above), but I can't be sure about that. He did have a soft spot for that peculiarly British strand of cleverness and tweeness (look it up) that they represent: one of his favorite movies, for example, was Love, Actually, which is essentially the cinematic equivalent of a Belle and Sebastian album. So I'm pretty sure he would have liked their latest release, Write About Love, which came out in October. On the first listen I found it a little too syrupy, and there are a few songs that, after repeated listens, still get me thinking about that barista with her chocolate cake, but it gradually won me over. Many of the songs are about romantic relationships, many of them relationships that have soured or are in the process of souring, and so they don't evoke anything specific about Joey for me, but there's a general tone of wistfulness and longing that plucks at the usual heartstrings.

The opener, "I Didn't See It Coming," is about a failed relationship. It didn't really grab me at first, but I've come to love it - the lines "Make me dance, I want to surrender," repeated with varying degrees of urgency throughout the song, remind me of our wedding in September, when the joy of the celebration managed to overwhelm the pain of Joey's absence. And it did so largely on the dance floor, where I saw Tina dancing to the Snoopy Song and to Okkervil River, and where I saw my father dance for the first time in my life. The song also has these words:

Everybody's talking about you.
Every word's a whisper without you.


Here it is (sorry, the video is a little lame):

The song that really fills me to overflowing shows up late in the album. It's called "Ghost of Rockschool," and it's about God. Or, more accurately, it conjures that attitude that William James (I think) once described as the essential characteristic of a religious sensibility: to stare in open-mouthed wonder at the things of this world. It starts like this:

I've seen God in the sun, I've seen God in the street
God before bed and the promise of sleep
God in my dreams and the free ride of grace
But it all disappears and then I wake up.


Towards the end, when the song begins to lift off, those last two lines change to:

God in the puddles and the lane beside her
Yes, I've seen God shining up from her reflection.

And this also makes me think of our wedding, and of my wife, and of how both things, together, have been my salvation. And it recalls how Joey approached life with a similar wide-eyed (if smirking) wonder, and of his quirky enthusiasms, and of how he loved and was loved, and all of this becomes a sort of levee that keeps the despair from overflowing its banks. There are days when the whole world seems gray and one-dimensional, when all the mystery seems to have drained away and left nothing but randomly colliding molecules, but this song offers another way of seeing things. It reminds me to be awestruck - by the world's wonderfulness, by the places I've gone and the things I've done, by Joey, by Kate - and it makes me feel like being awestruck is quite an okay way to be.

Sorry, there's no actual video for this one, but here's the song:

Okay, one last song: it's an older one, from the album Dear Catastrophe Waitress (2003), and I came across it while searching for these other videos. I hadn't seen the video in some time, but I now believe that if Joey had ever made a music video, it would have looked a lot like this. The song is called "Wrapped Up in Books."