Once we really take hold of a song, we never let it go. Years later, we’ll hear it and think there it is, the sound that steadied my chaos.
Like the smell of a particular house, the music becomes a narrative signifier of the story we tell ourselves in order to go on living. To go on making more story.
I have a handful of such songs, though I don’t mention them in casual conversation. They’re too powerful. Speaking of them, I could become affected, ripped out to sea.
The Rip Tide is the title track of Beirut’s 2011, eight-track album. Frontman Zach Condan wrote the songs in seclusion in upstate New York where he awoke every morning “to chop wood and swing golf balls at trees.” His eyes drift up and to the left as he gushes about his influences: the Belgian belter Jaques Brel, Balkan folk, Motown, and his complicated affair with the French horn.
Brass is a complicated affair. Blow too bright, and the sound comes across as an unearned proclamation, the empty enthusiasm of a military march. But if you blow just right, at exactly the right time, you’ll hit a note of hope⏤and all songs, even dirges, need hope, or else they fall flat. Perfect despair, it turns out, is just as unrealistic as perfect happiness.
The first brass instrument was a conch shell. Early brass players controlled pitch by carving holes in the shell, a mouthpiece at the narrow base of the curled funnel. In this way, brass has always belonged to those who live with the water, those who understand what it gives, what it takes away, too.
Lately, I only want to shoot in black and white. Habit made holy is ritual. Sometimes I document the little routines keeping me sane: lighting incense, reading in the morning, observing the light as it changes.
Or, I externalize my insanity, photography the big, bad, beautiful world. The abandoned churches. The music in bars and backyards. The street signs and the people turning right angles as they follow them⏤or ignore them completely.
Last night, I went to a house show in a garden. Tiki torches staked the wet earth. Bright on wooden tables, citronella candles burned off the mosquitos. The music was atmospheric, a soft petrichor. The words were full of vowel sounds.
I didn’t photograph this experience. Sometimes I let go of time, let it pass me by without pinning it to an artifact.
Last night, I had the pleasure of photographing a band that is new to me, Harriet Tubman from NYC.NPR featured their last album here, but one doesn’t have to read about their sound to recognize its origins: American freedom songs, Hendrix, Funkadelic, and Sun Ra. The trio harmonizes history with personal despair, and hope: a heavy blues buoyed by a playground of effect pedals.
Near the end of the set, Melvin Gibbs, mastering an impressive 5-string bass, offered up some of his heart: a frank observation on the topic of race in America and Europe. He was comedic in that wry, wrung way that is in fact deadly serious. “But I don’t want my opinions to reflect those of my cohorts,” he said, glancing over at his band mates.
“Don’t worry about that,” quipped guitarist Brandon Ross. He tapped a pedal with a bright green sneaker, and the language of the room changed from English to music.
In Cloud Atlas, his cyclical novel about reincarnation, David Mitchel writes, “I understand now that boundaries between noise and sound are conventions.” One song flowing into another, the fluid set of Harriet Tubman brings attention to the illusion of division. “All boundaries are conventions, waiting to be transcended. One may transcend any convention if only one can first conceive of doing so,” writes Mitchel.
Hearing music that is truly free inspires introspection: Where am I allowing myself to be corralled by arbitrary boundaries? How am I stagnant? Some tunes are like strong gusts of wind. They blow the wig off the ego. It’s cold without those threadbare layers, but also fresh, bright as early morning.
