Castles in the air

I can't decide whether popular music is merely the enduring and consoling soundtrack to my emotional life—or better, the sounding board, amplifying and accentuating the most trivial thoughts (think Nick Hornby's High Fidelity)—or whether perhaps it has a deeper significance suggesting, presaging, even determining changes in my desires and sensibilities far into the future.* Either way, it's damned important, sometimes it can cut deep.

So it was today, as I struggled to explain to Ayumi why I want to stay up this hill for as long as possible, that the following song, by Don McLean, a masterpiece that I had not listened to for 25 years or more, entered without knocking...

Click here to play [youtube]
 
And if she asks you why, you can tell her that I told you
That I’m tired of castles in the air.
I’ve got a dream I want the world to share
And castle walls just lead me to despair.

Hills of forest green where the mountains touch the sky,
A dream come true, I’ll live there till I die.
I’m asking you to say my last goodbye.
The love we knew ain’t worth another try.

Save me from all the trouble and the pain.
I know I’m weak, but I can’t face that girl again.
Tell her the reasons why I can’t remain,
Perhaps she’ll understand if you tell it to her plain.

But how can words express the feel of sunlight in the morning,
In the hills, away from city strife.
I need a country woman for my wife;
I’m city born, but I love the country life.

For I cannot be part of the cocktail generation:
Partners waltz, devoid of all romance.
The music plays and everyone must dance.
I’m bowing out. I need a second chance.


...To anyone born too early or too late, or in the wrong country, or just unlucky enough not to have heard of him, Don McLean is the songwriter best known for American Pie and Vincent (Starry, Starry Night): he is also the subject of the equally beautiful Killing me softly with his song, by Norman Gimbel and Charles Fox,  recorded by Lori Lieberman, after seeing an as yet unknown McLean perform Empty Chairs. All of these—including Gimbel-Fox-Lieberman's (the attribution is complicated!)—are almost beyond criticism, though some of the cover versions leave everything to be desired: I've just seen that even Susan Boyle has a cover of Killing me softly on Youtube. So perhaps it's for the best that Castles has not been pawed over.

Had I a decent singing voice, or had at least taken some voice training, I could have saved myself much grief and spared Ayumi my inchoate rage and frustration at our mutual incomprehension, just by singing this simple song.  It might not have changed her mind, for it's fair to say that she remains unconvinced of the value of living away from the city, of the cold and the inconvenience of the mountain, and in this she would appear to be in good company: in four months of living here, I have met only one Japanese woman who considers this country life desirable. But even if it doesn't change hearts, or overcome cultural differences, at least it speaks to me, and of me, more eloquently than any words I will ever write myself.

Click to play Roberta Flack cover [youtube]

He sang as if he knew me
In all my dark despair
And then he looked right through me as if I was not there
And he just kept on singing,
Singing clear and strong...

Strumming my pain with his fingers
Singing my life with his words
Killing me softly with his song
Killing me softly with his song
Telling my whole life with his words
Killing me softly
With his song...

Having got this out of my system, in the next post, I'll come back to the most important subjects of this blog, the children. There's plenty of good news to report, including an optimistic follow-up to What's love got to do with it?—we've been sent some inspiring youtube videos about talented and happy young DS adults which counteract the poison of the last set of posts I wrote about, also, some reflections on what Sean and Julian's incredible first days on skis might tell us about the critical period hypothesis. And many more pictures.

*Curiously, classical music cannot achieve this, since as George Steiner observed—see the extract The Retreat from the Word in the other piece I've been working on this week, it represents 'a mode of intellectual reality...founded on a different communicative energy.' Without remembered lyrics to hook into and snag on our everyday reality, to weave or (sometimes) cobble together associations of word, place, sound, touch, fragrance...musical notes alone, however powerful, beautiful or abstractly evocative, no matter how compassionately sophisticated (Beethoven's late quartets, perhaps) or sublimely ordered (Bach's partitas), classical music doesn't come close to Jacques Brel, or Leo Ferre, Leonard Cohen, Van Morrison—Phil Coulter, even!—in linking past and present, melding physical and emotional time and merging and remapping memories. Classical work is surely greater art, but it does not speak as clearly, it doesn't really speak at all.