But you know what, I've had a couple of thoughts pertaining to some of my favourite songs that I think might be worth sharing - things that feel, occasionally, like a little insight into the brilliance of the people who made them. Or who knows, maybe I'm just looking too hard. In any case, here's the first of these.)
| Song: | Hazey Jane II |
| By: | Nick Drake |
| Album: | Bryter Layter |
| Year: | 1970 |
Nick Drake is an incredible artist. His fine-spun, tightly-wound genius reminds me of J. S. Bach or Gerard Manley Hopkins - each beautiful piece is a perfect, multilayered gem, not a note or word too many or out of place, so strongly put together it feels like architecture as much as art. His life story is sadly familiar, but his work (the three albums Five Leaves Left, Bryter Layter and Pink Moon plus a few further recordings) survives. I don't think you need to be a guitarist to be able to appreciate just how right his extraordinary, subtle guitar lines are; if you do try to play them (Chris Healey's brilliant site is a good place to start) you'll see just how horrifyingly good the guy was at his instrument.
I don't mean he was a saint, or anything. His sense of humour sneaks into most of the stuff he does (Five Leaves Left is apparently what it said in Rizla packets when you were about to run out - and if you think he was only smoking tobacco, then you're probably missing something in The Thoughts of Mary Jane...), and as a person he seems to have had far from a Christ-like character, even before depression consumed his life. There's also the matter of whether he was into sex or not. To which I say, how is that any of our bloody business? But I seem to be in a minority in that opinion. But these details, for me, make him seem all the realer - this is a fallible, human person we're listening to, not a robot, which makes his achievements all the more impressive.
Start Over Again [link]
Bryter Layter is his second album - it's his most upbeat, even pop-y effort. Where Five Leaves Left had strings and congas, Bryter Layter adds in a beefy rock backing, complete with bluesy electric guitar (courtesy of Fairport's Richard Thompson, who guested previously but really lets rip now) and full drum kit (Dave Mattacks, also Fairport). Also, John Cale appears, because he was bloody everywhere back then. The overall theme that I get off this track (the closest we get to a radio-friendly single) and this album is that we're repeating something, harder this time, in the hope that it'll work better.
Take the album itself - it begins with the acoustic-guitar-and-strings-backed miniature Introduction (so far, so Five Leaves Left) before slamming on the gas for our focus here, Hazey Jane II. A sprightly brass-and-electric-guitar fanfare and crucially (if you'll pardon the drummer's angle) a straight-ahead rock drum beat launch us into a gear we haven't heard from Our Man In Tanworth-in-Arden anywhere before. (I've embedded the whole album so you start with it for the full effect, if you're making use of the video.)
This doubling theme hits you right between the eyes when we get to the unrhymed, off-kilter lyric with that fantastic murky Hammond organ. The distended opener doubles back on itself awkwardly ("And what will happen in the morning / When the world it gets so crowded / That you can't look out the window in the morning?"), and then tries again later (in the day!) ("And what will happen in the evening / With the weasel with the teeth / That bite so sharp when you're not looking in the evening?") This figure reaches its apex in the bathetic pre-chorus: "What will happen / In the morning / When the world it gets so crowded / That you can't look out the window in the morning?"
The scansion and the narrator relax into short, regular (mostly) rhymed pairs (and the brass comes back) as we get to the chorus, the dénouement (which after all means "untying"): "And now that the family / Is part of a chain / Take off your eye-shades / Start over again". We've heard about letting our brother and sister's hair down (in this case in a double sense), and this strength through the joining of similar elements (family members or links in a chain) is the positive spin on doubling - if you stick with family members as doubles the fact that the world is filling up is the negative view.
And, as a little nod, just as we hear "Start over again" the instruments jump back to play the chorus again (but with different words), and then all the way back to the fanfare I was gushing about earlier. Instead of the clumsy overflowing lines we get more of the punchy matched couplets (to the punchy drum beat). The clincher comes in the coda (which, of course, supplements the song as a whole) - Hazey Jane is in the narrator's mind "again". And indeed, this is Hazey Jane II - the rather more sedately orchestral Hazey Jane I (even the chorus says "Hey, slow Jane") finishes off Side One. We're left with the cryptic "If songs were lines / In a conversation / The situation / Would be fine" and a brief major acoustic guitar chord - even when surrounded by a crowd of session players our hero still manages to get the last word!
Now, Take a Little Time to Make Your Story Clear [link]
So what are we to make of it? First of all, let us draw near and affirm our faith that our host is a good enough writer that the awkward verses are intentionally awkward. I mean, if you try singing this by yourself (or even with a guitar) it's almost impossible to get right - other people have picked apart the wizardry involved more lucidly than I can, but let's say you have to be pretty good to act that bad. Looking at the lay of the chords, we see the interplay between the awkward section and the other (hair-down?) section is reflected by the former being in D minor and the latter in F major - the relative major. This gives a dark vs light contrast, evoked by the images of crowding, anxiety and being bitten by night animals set against the narrator lightening up (ahem) and expressing themselves the second time around. The chord that we finish on, and that pops up repeatedly in both sections, is C major. It's a chord common to both the major and the minor, almost like hesitating at the crossroads. As a side note, Chris Healey's decoding of the guitar parts (which sound pretty on the money to me) has the Introduction and both Hazey Janes in the same slack tuning to further add to the parallels. (CGCFCE, a beautiful discovery that is also used (amongst other things) for the song Pink Moon - trying to recapture the magic?)
That enigmatic last quatrain I cited (with its enigmatic C major) coincides with a final brief foray back into the relative minor before the rhythm section winds up - the narrator's problem appears to be expressing himself to Hazey Jane properly. The last lines give us a deftly minimal indication of how wrong the situation is: if songs could substitute for saying what was really on your mind, then there wouldn't be a problem. The figure is so much more effective than simply saying it outright (which I suppose is part of the problem).
I think this uncertainty in the lyric gives us ground to read the whole theme of doubling in two ways, appropriately enough, positive and negative just as the song oscillates between major and minor. We're doing a second album (it's tomorrow i.e. in the morning), and a second song called Hazey Jane - the major says that this time we will say it right (Start over again), or build on what was already there (the family is part of a chain), and we hope this will be true, just as we start the song with this upbeat, major fanfare (taking off our eye-shades to try seeing things major). And yet we can't help but resolve back towards the minor - if we have to say it again, does that mean that it won't work this time as well? (This is where I think the abandoned safety in the books comes in - we're out on a limb in this artistic project, does doing more of the same mean that we'll just go further into No-Man's Land?) Or, worse, will repeating ourselves make the previous effort look weaker? (The awkward verse). In a conversation, as the narrator wants, you at least have the opportunity of hearing the other person talk and reacting to what they're saying. But here, there's the gnawing suspicion that we're just saying the same few things over and over, without any reassurance that anyone's listening or that we're being understood.
The Situation [link]
I don't really like rooting around creators' biographies (I'm definitely on Team Death of the Author, as detailed on my old blog), but if you have a look at the guy's circumstances when he was writing and producing the album, this would seem to be a dichotomy that rings true. I think it's somehow appropriate that even at his most marketable (let's put the fast one to the front of the LP!), Nick Drake is still holding back, still conflicted with desperation for people to like and get his work (maybe this time will work), but worried that it's all for nothing, that what he's saying isn't important enough or people aren't interested. It's that minor reflex that closes the song (the situation is decidedly not fine), and that's the spectre that hangs over Pink Moon, casting its warm, heart-breaking, silvery songs into inescapable pale shadow.
This drama (and dramatising his personal and artistic conflict is as much the soul of Nick Drake's work as it was of Sylvia Plath's or Anna Akhmatova's) will be far from new for those who are familiar with people or with Freud, who like all really great writers says what we would have said ourselves if only we could find the words. The specific dilemma of whether adding is increasing or diluting is also picked out by Derrida's discussion of the term "supplement" - an example he gives of a hymen (a sort of verbal Schrödinger's cat, as Hymen is the Classical god of marriage as well as a symbol of virginity). I don't think any of these reference points are particularly essential to our reading of Hazey Jane II - I merely point them out in case you haven't met and like the sound of them.
Regardless of how tangled up we get with all the records of his lifetime, what I hope I've got across is just how much incredibly layered thought seems to have gone just into one song. Each record practically has a heartbeat - and it's Nick's heartbeat. And as I suspect is true for a lot of his listeners, it's an inspiration in everything I do.
(I hope that was a nice interlude. Sorry if you don't know/like Nick Drake - next week we'll be back to our regular word-weighing with a post on metre, and how it isn't just for poems.)
No comments:
Post a Comment