The Waves

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.