To tell the truth, I am working on a political post, but posting a favorite song may yet head me off at the pass. So here it is: a song that features a lot of chorus/tremolo synced with the beat.
This may seem a superficial detail, but I think it’s part of the magic of the track. Magic, in general, entails the echoing of meaning across context. The shimmering beat expresses the state of mind the song speaks to, and from. And to get all the way from state of mind to guitar sound, where the physical sound serves the deep experience… that, I think, is a pretty high art.
You might have noticed that this definition of “magic” is very much like the definition of music itself. “The echoing of meaning across context” is, in another word, resonance, and resonance in another word is harmony.
So if you consider the process of songwriting from the bottom up, from music to master, you might see it as, ideally, an expanding resonance, binding note to note, music to word, song to arrangement, arrangement to production. So that ultimately, what is produced rings all together, and rings true.
Once you think of it, it can come to seem mechanical, as with all arts. When we experience these things in a state of innocence, the illusion of coherence, of resonance across context, the magic of it, can be completely convincing. But as we learn how something is made, we learn how to simulate its creation. “Resonance across context” can seem like an esoteric idea, and it’s probably my own phraseology, but the idea is well known within arts of all sort.
There is, then, some deeper quality, at least for romantics. For us, there is an unstruck note, a tone of pure sincerity that by the very force of its being is able to spread out into the world, propagating across contexts, so as to bind these together into a single self-expression.
This song is, to my mind, one such expression, with hooks that continue to fascinate me after many listens.
“…strike up the band
and make the fireflies dance,
silver moon sparkling”
It is such a rhythmically, phonetically and ideationally beautiful line – perfectly sung and harmonized – that it can bring me to actual tears. In fact, if I weren’t sitting in a Starbucks as I write this, I’d be crying right now.
I’d never seen this band before. The lead singer looks much like a woman I was covertly in love with way back then, when this song was new.