What kind of music makes you feel? Which songs or tunes hit you so hard that you want to laugh or cry or dance for joy, even when you’ve heard them a hundred times?
A song popped up while I was on a train this weekend that prompted me to celebrate Grandaddy, a band whose work often hits me in the feels.
And it was quite beautiful
The first time that I heard Everything Beautiful Is Far Away, I wanted to cry at the sadness of this lonely astronaut, stuck far away on a dead world and hallucinating life just out of reach. The lyrics are matched to an unworldy, sparse tune that arrives in a staccato burst as though it’s a desperate broadcast across the aether from a barren, alien landscape.
But it’s the last verse that really kills me every time:
He knew he was as good as gone
Grandaddy, Everything Beautiful Is Far Away (Under The Western Freeway, 1998)
But gone was somewhere he really didn’t mind going to
Since the shuttle had crashed, many years had passed
And the pictures of his loved ones
That he drew on the walls of the cave
Had finally faded
He put out his smoke and proceeded toward the lake
Repeating to himself
“Everything beautiful is far away.”
The song reminds me of the end to Stephen Baxter’s Titan, a fairly bleak novel about a bunch of soon-to-be-jobless astronauts who take NASA’s unwanted hardware on a one-way mission to Saturn’s largest moon after a scientifically illiterate Christian fundamentalist hijacks American politics. Of course, that could never happen. It’s only fiction.
One day, not long after my wife died, YouTube ambushed me with Everything Is Beautiful Is Far Away and the song finally reduced me to tears. I had to put it on a banned list for a while of things I wasn’t ready for, along with the opening to Pixar’s Up.
And the sprinklers that come on at 3 AM
The Group Who Couldn’t Say is the opposite, a song about a successful sales team who win a day out to the countryside and can’t fathom the beauty they find there. As with many of Grandaddy’s lyrics, it captures the hollow heart of modern life where even the machines seem to pity humans enslaved to productivity.
I can never heart the start of this song without pausing whatever I’m up to, just so that I can enjoy the lyrics. One line in particular always makes me want to laugh out loud:
Becky wondered why she never noticed dragonflies. Her drag and click had never yielded anything as perfect as a dragonfly.
Grandaddy, The Group Who Couldn’t Say (Sumday, 2003)
And it’s really this that inspired me to write about two songs that capture, in their four minutes, emotions that I would aspire to evoke in an entire novel.
And to celebrate a band of lo-fi indie heroes that I somehow never managed to see live during my gig-going days. Fingers crossed I might have another chance now they’ve started to tour again.
Music in books: good or bad?
I don’t generally agree with the practice of embedding lyrics and song titles in literature. Copyright issues aside, I find that music is such an intensely personal experience that one person’s perfect tune might well be like nails on a blackboard for another listener.
Or worse still, it triggers no reaction at all.
I can almost guarantee that your favourite song leaves me nonplussed, but please don’t be offended. It doesn’t mean you lack taste. It just means that your tastes and mine are different. Vive le difference, etc.
It’s also why I don’t trust people who say they like all sorts of music (or literature or other art). It’s a noble aspiration to find merit in every art form, but it makes me suspicious that what’s really taking place is a calculated intellectual appreciation without the emotional reaction that art demands.
So I hope that you loved these songs. Or hated them. But if you think they’re just nice, you can get in the sea. I don’t much care for nice.
And while I have your attention, I’m still looking for beta and ARC readers for my new book, Blood Point. You can sign up here.