I get stuck on a song from time to time. Lately, it's an operatic tear-jerker called 'Sometime Around Midnight' by an LA indy-like band named, after the second part of the Don DeLillo novel White Noise, The Airborne Toxic Event.
I first heard the song a few months back while making toast (the morning is when I'm most vulnerable to attack) on my favourite radio station, BBC 6Music. It burrowed its way into my psyche about three weeks ago and is just now coming out after roughly 1,000,000 plays on the iPod.
The songs that get stuck always have strong emotional pulling power, and they're usually fully plotted, from setting to exposition, through customary climax and denouement. 'Sometime Around Midnight' cloys all categories, ticks all boxes.
(Even so, I'm afraid it's really not, in the end, that great a song. These attachments occur no doubt through a combination of forces: whatever's going on in my life, where I am when I hear the songs and just the right or wrong mood, for starters. But I'll leave the analysis to a qualified therapist, should I someday reach the unlikely conclusion that loving pieces of music to distraction is actually doing me harm.)
The song is set in a bar with live music, consisting of at least piano and vocals, and at a time that I think the title pretty clearly gives away.
First off, there's the melancholy instrumental introduction, set to electronically enhanced strings and probably keyboards. It's an opening that draws blood and, just after clearing the floor of the spilled stuff of life, is followed by a vibrato-treated, but otherwise untainted and minimal guitar riff played on a standard issue Fender Stratocaster. I know this because I used to own one, and no other instrument quite clips and chimes simultaneously with such dramatic effect. A stoned monkey can make a raw Stratocaster vamp sound magical, and The Airborne Toxic Event's guitarist and producer realised straight away that all they needed to do was plug the thing directly into a second-hand Peavey turned up to, maybe, five to achieve the very simple, plaintive voice that sets the ghostly rocking stage upon which the song crashes into the heart.
Queue the singer, Mikel Jollett, a name I have no clue how to pronounce, although I'm drawn to "Michael" after living nine years in a land where every word, no matter how foreign or foreign-seeming, is more shamelessly Anglicised than anywhere else in the English-speaking world.
According to Wikipedia, Jollett suffers from, "a genetic autoimmune disease which led [him] to develop two cosmetic conditions: Alopecia areata and Vitiligo," which apparently render him simultaneously hairless and of uneven skin pigmentation. So he's a bit challenged, and that he sings so sweetly, almost boyishly, the opening lines of the song only heightens the vulnerability of the protagonist. It's probably wrong, but I feel a bit sorry for both singer and subject straight away.
And it starts sometime around midnight -
Or at least that's when you forget yourself for a minute or two.
Our protagonist is having a nice night out, it seems. He's relaxing and letting himself go, forgetting himself and who he is. The danger, of course, is that he could share fates with the protagonist of Douglas Coupland's Life After God, who forgets from time to time, early in the morning, who the adult 'he' is and what he is contractually obligated to get up and go do in the world. He ends up retreating into the British Columbian wilderness and submersing himself in an ice cold stream, an experience that forces his balls to retreat into his body, where he realises he is sick and needs God after all. Caveat, forgettor.
As you stand under the bar lights
And the band plays some song about forgetting yourself for awhile.
And the piano's this melancholy soundcheck to her smile.
And in that white dress she's wearing; you haven't seen her for awhile.
Enter our white-clad mystery woman, who has been out of sight recently. Who is this woman who's so suddenly insinuated herself into this man's revelry? And why has she turned up when he's feeling so emancipated, relaxed and vulnerable?
But you know that she's watching.
She's laughing, she's turning, she's holding her tonic like a cross.
Why is she watching? Perhaps she's keen to see our hero see her having a wonderful time - a comportment that indicates she may wish for him to suffer the best form of revenge: looking good. But she can't leave it at that. She flies in for the full sensory overload, including especially smell, the memory trigger of all memory triggers.
The room's suddenly spinning.
She walks up and asks how you are.
So you can smell her perfume,
You can see her lying naked in your arms.
There's clearly history here, and it seems whatever it was that went on between these two ended in a way that could not be described as 'rosy.'
And so there's a change in your emotions.
Well, duh, and why doesn't he just wear a sign saying "I am, like, SO heartbroken right now! Again, for fuck sake! Arrrrrrgh!" Sometimes, my fellow countrymen, I swear...
And to drive the point into the ground, the guitar enhances the mood by slipping into a noisier mode, akin to the up-the-neck chiming pioneered by The Edge. Still, somehow, despite its sentimentalism, the gesture works.
And all these memories come rushing
Like feral waves to your mind.
Of the curl of your bodies like two perfect circles entwined.
And you feel hopeless and homeless and lost in the haze of the wine.
Ah, poetry. That last line does for the form what any good run of David Mamet dialogue did for iambic pentameter. And now he's filled up again, this time with memories. Did he do her wrong and still regrets it? Is she dangling the big, juicy worm of her irresistible feminine wiles in front of him because she knows what effect it will have on him, and wants to injure him?
Hold tight. It gets much worse.
Then she leaves with someone you don't know.
But she makes sure you saw her
She looks right at you and bolts
As she walks out the door,
Your blood boiling and your stomach in ropes
It's here that Jollett's voice jumps the octave from the land of "I'm so far immune" to "I can't resist the urge to drag you down with me." But she's hit our hero with a cheap shot, perhaps, and again it seems we're still dealing with either warranted retribution or just plain cruelty.
And when your friends say "What is it?
You look like you've seen a ghost."
All hell breaks loose in the orchestra. Guitar, strings, and keyboards conspire to whip us into a sympathetic frenzy of angst and pity heretofore not seen since Elsa walked on to the cathedral, despite the pagan witch Ortrud's vow to imminently destroy her happy world, if not happiness itself, In the Wagner opera Lohengrin. It's all about to go tits up, in short, and famously.
Onward our hero, broken, frustrated and screaming into the night. The rock orchestra goes with him, buoying up his horror and shock into what is either an irredeemable fray of sophomoric emotion or a genuine trauma.
Then you walk under the streetlights
And you're too drunk to notice
That everyone's staring at you
In my experience, this doesn't require a tremendous amount of booze. But adding a reasonable enough quantity of the elixir of amnesia to the forces that have gathered in the face of having a former, and, it seems, wronged - or wrong - love ramming their new-found happiness so viciously up one's nose makes it seem almost feasible.
Still, there's something wrong with all this emotion. Who did what to whom? Is she just a vindictive person? Is he just a sap? Both or neither? I can hardly wait to find out. (And, rest assured, Jollett won't tell us.)
You so care what you look like
The world is falling around you.
It's here I have to pause to hail the understated brilliance of the little-known phenomenon of California irony. To say "You so care what you look like" is the same as saying "You don't care at all how you look." The technique, if it is one, was probably first made popular by Frank Zappa's daughter Moon Unit in the almost-hit Valley Girl off the 1982 album "Ship Arriving Too Late to Save a Drowning Witch." Say what you will about the vacuousness of Los Angeles: there's a nugget of genius in this usage that has been shamefully underrated.
You just have to see her
You just have to see her
You just have to see her
You just have to see her
You just have to see her
You know that she'll break you in two.
Oh, come on now. Really? She doesn't want to see you, so why do you want to see her? What sort of self-disrespecting masochist is this lost boy of ours? How can he become so forlorn, so heartbroken at the one-off sighting of some bird who doesn't care if he lives, but only cares if he dies?
It was after two weeks of suffocating under the weight of the song's raw emotion that I started to consider what was probably happening. I don't like the idea of leaving a hero bleeding needlessly in the artificial light of a drunken stumble home, or worse place, after seeing a woman who seems to want to destroy him, so I did my best to rescue his reputation.
The only way I can seem to redeem this poor sucker is to assume that the woman is dead. He only sees her when he forgets who he is, where he is and, I assume, everything about himself, including everything he's trying desperately to forget. His guard is down sometime around midnight, the witching hour. She's wearing a white dress and carrying a cross. He can smell her perfume, and his intentionally repressed memories of lost love come streaking into him like wild animals out of a black and terrifying forest. And it all happens because he makes a failed attempt to allow himself to start getting his life back to normal. He takes a chance, but it's a gamble as risky as betting a year's wages on the first five cards of a draw poker hand. It's just way too soon, but he couldn't have known. He makes a schoolboy error, but it's a big one.
The opening string motif returns, echoed in the guitar and driven into the light by the persistent beat of the drums. The music gently trails off, and the lonely guitar reduces everything to an ambivalent calm through an unsteady plucking of two notes that futilely trip over themselves at the end, as if they were traumatised and stumbling homeward late in the evening.
Bring on the hangover of a lifetime.
