will anything ever sound as sweet?
It's just amazing how things slip by you, and it seems like the best moments where you might have enjoyed them at their peak are lost without you ever realizing they existed, and then they catch up to you years later when it's just the right timing for it all to come together in the way it was meant for you personally, however late or irrelevant it feels as part of their crowd. 2008 has been that sort of year for me. I owe this particular epiphany to a reality show that I don't even watch, whose winner with a penchant for rock-styled covers led me to a name which led me to a group named after an ugly but very cool piece of acoustic artwork in Seattle.
Be warned: this is quite a long train-of-thought type of post, because I had all of this brewing for a few months now, and I'm finally putting it all down in complete form. Brief ramblings on a fan board just can't cover it all, although it was nice to realize I wasn't the only one batshit crazy about Soundgarden and that old fans had remarkable patience when dealing with starry-eyed newbies going "OMG!" at every single note.
Am I the only one stumbling across Soundgarden eleven years late? (Or is that 23 years late? The fact that I was only 7 when they founded the band seems a pitiful excuse somehow. Add to that, I was listening excitedly to my siblings' Bon Jovi, Madonna and Amy Grant albums, and the whole thing just feels downright criminal.) It's not that I haven't heard Soundgarden before. I recognize now that I've heard a song or two of theirs in years past, but I never connected the song to a name or a face or to any entity at all, really. It wasn't "Black Hole Sun" or "Outshined" or "Burden In My Hand" I recognized, but "Hands All Over" and, of all things, "Uncovered." (Plus "Seasons," but that's another story, and of all the musicians in Singles, I could only recall knowing Pearl Jam-thought Jeff in his hat was cute-and Alice In Chains. Watching it again now is like realizing I went through middle school stark naked, i.e. "Why did no one tell me?" Not to mention the fact that Stone is to Jeff what Han is to Luke. Those first crushes vanished with nary an apologetic backwards glance when I hit puberty. Kids these days!) This whole belated discovery of Soundgarden has been like that. I couldn't begin to tell you where I'd heard those old Soundgarden songs before. I suppose someone in the once-rural town of Hachihonmatsu or perhaps the high school dormitory in Higashi Kurume owned a copy of Louder Than Love, because I sure didn't hear those songs on the radio coming in from Iwakuni base, mixed in with Paul Harvey and the Sunday morning hymns.
Anyway, I wanted to share this with you guys, for what little it's worth, as a "where I've been and what I've been feeling." Something more substantial than the nth "I'm back (for a brief interlude)!" Maybe someone else out there has felt the same about a piece of music, when it hits you so powerfully that you end up sounding a little batty trying to describe it. I haven't felt this way about music since I first watched Amadeus, which aside from however accurate or inaccurate the portrayal of his life might be, is an absolutely stunning soundtrack which awakened me to musical complexities, balance and resonance like never before. That (fictional) scene as they piece together Confutatis, layer upon layer, where each piece individually sounds simple but creates a breathtaking whole? Is what it's been like to listen to Soundgarden with ears wide open.
The whole experience can be captured (not completely but at least metaphorically) in a single song of theirs, although every song that came before it paved the way. It's my favorite song of theirs, which shot through many old favorites to become one of my very favorite pieces of music ever written. The song is "Like Suicide."
Of all their amazing songs, this is their magnum opus, IMHO, an unparalleled work of complete resonance. I can't begin to speak of it from a technical standpoint; I wish I could understand it on that level. It highlights everything about Soundgarden that I love so deeply. Never have the lows so complemented the highs, or the highs so fed on the lows. Brilliant is almost too tidy a word for it. Kim's guitar solo is magnificent in and of itself but even more flawlessly suited for the piece that frames it. Chris's vocals course over the music in this amazingly elastic ride, subtle to soaring and down again. Matt's drums are clear and strong as rain on a steel roof, and Ben's bass throbs as steady as a heart; their rhythm section pulls me through like an undertow. It's as if the song can't go any higher, can't get any finer, and then I hear what he's singing, and it's like listening to the purest inspiration pouring out of their collective souls, you know?
Learning what inspired the lyrics adds that extra level of unexpected warmth and sympathy, and there are times I can't listen without actually crying, like on the drive home yesterday, not necessarily because of the bird herself but because of the whole damn thing and watching Mikki fall to pieces last year to renal failure and being alone with my great aunt when she took her last breath in that shitty nursing room and the kitten I found yesterday concussed and drooling in the middle of the road and how it never ends with all of these beings of essence and matter who keep battering themselves up against your door, and you keep noticing too damn late, only at the sound of that last-ditch thump when they're already in pieces and all that's left is release and some days you want it for them and other days for you-and in the moments it doesn't feel inhumane to let go, it feels inhumane to linger, and you lose track of which voice comes from conscience and which from feeling-and that sense of peace never matches up, it's just what we tell ourselves after they've gone. And all the times you're ready to pull the plug come to a cold stop when the moment's come, and the fact that you can reach out your hand then to bring them cold, too, for long months afterward outlives every other memory of them and every other worth of you, and you realize the very same anger you felt at the "no trespassing" sign at the church down the street is at the root of the guilt you feel now, because maybe if you'd left the window open, they might have landed safely, and the fact that you've watched a brick taken to a living soul bloodied against the shrine of your world, you think, is that the only answer? If we can break, can't we heal?
It's a simple story and the lyrics are straightforward, but with his voice and all the guys, with the way they answer each other musically throughout it and drive each other through the pulse; they capture all the rage and grief and despair of the moments that I never wanted to face and can't forget once they've passed. I want them all gone and washed clear of me, but Matt keeps on, unrelenting, rain patter on my steel roof in the gathering storm, and Ben's pull is so dense and choking, it feels more immediate than the beat of my heart, and the futility of this grief builds too deep, takes me too low, as Chris goes into his "I feel for you" refrain, and I've never felt at once so claustrophobic and yet so secure within that box, and all I want in that moment is for Chris to just shut the hell up, for god's sake, because his bleeding heart is drowning me and my house hasn't room for the rain. But then he does, as Kim glides in beneath his echo, and that moment is the summit of my wall; my defense is towards the sky, but the tide cuts from the deep, piercing up from the ground where I've left my house unguarded. And it at last hits me as he wails into Kim's solo and takes hold as Kim shreds his guitar through my closely-walled heart like a pissed off friend knowing me too well saying "don't blind yourself to this," that I want it branded into me, too, because it meant something, damn it, and life needs shit to continue on, because life feeds off shit as well as off the daisies of the field, and just because we're all standing on someone else's bones doesn't mean we should shut ourselves off to the smell. It breaches me, but I no longer feel I'm drowning. I'm of the current. The mammoth tide crests to its peak riding on Ben's dark pulse, then they catch the reins and ease back down, trailing off as deftly they entered in until the very winding end, where their last supple breath leaves me on my knees, with images of the past and anger for the future burning me cold.
There is surely music like this out there for everyone, and tedium by one person might be grace to another. Music that rips your soul back from apathy. This song does all that for me with a building fury that's compassionate and real. Soundgarden have written incredible song after incredible song but nothing as perfect as this. No one has outside the classical/opera/Broadway realm, not that I've heard, but of course that's subjective. Other groups in general and a few songs in particular ("Comfortably Numb," "Whale & Wasp," "The Sounds of Silence" live, "Laugh, I Nearly Died," "Perfect Day," "Drown," "Being Boring," "The Unforgiven," "Pushing the Needle Too Far" live, "RV," "With or Without You"... to name a few that do it for me in one way or another) are close in terms of how deftly the music hits its particular mark, with an atmosphere built up flawlessly from the music, which lingers long after the final note. Yet the way all the elements of "Like Suicide" come together completes its emotional impact for me in a way no other non-classical song has. "Drown" and "Tintinnabulum" are similarly epic, but (IMO) one is payoff without build-up and the other is execution without story. I am captivated for the duration but unchanged after the final fade. Other songs Soundgarden have done come damn close, as well, whether it's the lyrical weight or the musical weight of the song suffocating me, hitting its mark perfectly. "Mind Riot," Cornell's "Seasons," "4th of July" and "Tighter & Tighter," the latter which is like the answering echo of "Like Suicide" ...a cry from the broken bird. So close, that one. Then I'll listen to "Like Suicide" again--and perhaps because it's a day like today, after seeing the next in an unending chain of random frailties, that homeless kitten dead of heat stroke and hemorrhage despite all a vet can do, or perhaps it's because they feel less random as the chain lengthens and it all runs together, the unyielding current pulling you past the bleeding, white water when you try to turn--but everything else they've ever done will seem a million miles away, and every other song I've heard feels increasingly left behind on the flat plains while "Like Suicide" scales the mountain. The music, the lyrics, the emotional impact it has on me, the whole thing. A full circle, a true circle; grief that finds hope without denying the corpse.
How rare is that? Really? Most songs, they give us hope or rage, despair or heroism; they hold our hands or they shove us away, they drain us or they pump us up. The songs I mentioned above, Soundgarden's included, are perhaps great because they capture their given moods so tightly and never let up; they force you to confront their emotion. I had never expected anything else-anything more layered, truly layered and fully self-contained without abbreviation, in the emotional sense as well as the musical-from anything less than a full symphony, opera, Broadway score or concept album before hearing "Like Suicide." How is it that Soundgarden balanced it all in this one song? It breathes and has a pulse, and the sounds change as its story is told. It went somewhere. It didn't start there; it didn't end there. It was the full journey. It called me in its wake and made me walk the miles on bare feet, and it walked me back again, bleeding, and I was changed for it. They do that so well, Soundgarden, and amid the spectacular gigantic songs they've put forth, this one stands out as a true rock symphony, such as Mozart, Beethoven or Rachmaninoff might have composed. It's their Fidelio layered with a Requiem Mass, an entire complex dramatic score condensed without suffocation or compromise into a single 7-minute work of pure grace.
It wasn't my first track, and in retrospect, I'm very glad it wasn't. There's an intimacy here, perhaps derived mostly from Chris's lyrics and delivery but also in the slow build of the music itself and the final flutter of its last breath. It's not instant gratification, however trashy or sweet; it's not "Paradise City" or "Chasing Cars." It's a little more like people waiting for the payoff in "Unchained Melody," only it's not about the glory notes, the fancy solo; it's every step that builds up to it and how it builds, the balance and response, the drive and pull, and how it comes back to rest when it's made its point. It's too lazy, in a way, and too prolonged, like Smashing Pumpkins' "Drown." It takes its sweet time because every second is worth its place. I was a casual listener when I first stumbled across them, and casual listeners aren't going to be giving a casual listen their full attention. This type of song needs it from the start, or the mood is entirely lost by the end. That's why I take the scenic route coming home from work, hoping to catch the twilight just right on this song, because it breathes best there, like it was meant for the twilight right before true night, that last gasp that always slips away too soon. Soundgarden knew it when they arranged the album, placing it at the very end of Superunknown. "Like Suicide" isn't a "hello." It's not an opener. It doesn't bring you home into their superunknown. You're already there. You're folded over on the floor, unaware you're crying. It's a closer. It's shutting the door behind you. And how Kim's guitar echoes Chris's vocal wilt at the end is the quiet catch of the key locking you in.
Then there's the acoustic version. So spare and subdued. His guitar work towards the end has the essence of someone crying out from a long distance away over wrongs dead and buried centuries ago that he is seeing played out again in his own lifetime, yet no one is listening, and he's angered by it as much as he's saddened by it but ultimately he's defeated by it. It's that type of song, emotionally. No glory notes or enormous solos. Just a voice lifting up in grief in the middle of a hollow sort of silence; no one else around to buffer the sound. I heard it initially after I'd heard the band version, and at first, it felt too lightweight. I went immediately back to the band. But as I listened to that version again, I felt how incredible the acoustic truly is. It's a powerful piece because of its sparseness, just as the band arrangement is powerful for how all of its elements come together to create that immensely rich atmosphere. Listening to the acoustic immediately before listening to the band version certainly brings out the chemistry and responsiveness of the complete band in their version even more than listening to it straight. It becomes even more of a rhapsody. Gorgeous. The build-up of added instruments, first drums then bass then guitar then at last the vocals, it all feels that much more alive… if that's even possible. Though the acoustic version remains ever in the shadow of its heavier brother, it takes on this sweeter edge with every listen. Like clear stars after that twilight gasp, or a sliver of blue filtering out from behind passing storm clouds, it's a quiet reminder of where the music began. The hollowness around his voice lingers, but I realize I've entered in, and there's miles of empty road around, but I'm not alone.
There's just no one like Soundgarden, to my ears. Stumbling across them early this year has been the best thing to happen to me in the best timing that I can remember in a long time. It kills me that I'll never be able to tell them, each of them individually, how much their music means to me. I want to write them each a letter but I don't know where to send it, and what would I even say? I wouldn't know where to begin or how to phrase it. How do you sum up this stuff up? This is just one song. I could go on about their songs. Not every song. Like everyone, they have some stinkers. But many songs. More songs per album than most bands accomplish for me. I wonder if they know, because they seemed-in interviews published back in the day-on the one hand fairly blasé about it and on the other a little weirded out by how fans react. It's not that they're the soundtrack of my life. They don't sound like me, not always, but when we do find the same notes, they're so present that I can't hear anyone else. It's like reading The Book Of Lights or The Charioteer for the first time and realizing others also notice the shape and texture of the stones that pave the road. You fall into attunement and everything else suddenly feels incredibly stale. I think that's where music lives, like a current, and some works that sweep others away we pass through unfeeling, until we find the one that catches us and draws us in. Music, poetry, art… Those who say such things are irrelevant to our existence are fucking idiots.
Anyway.
I love this song. That's all.
Had to share.
Be warned: this is quite a long train-of-thought type of post, because I had all of this brewing for a few months now, and I'm finally putting it all down in complete form. Brief ramblings on a fan board just can't cover it all, although it was nice to realize I wasn't the only one batshit crazy about Soundgarden and that old fans had remarkable patience when dealing with starry-eyed newbies going "OMG!" at every single note.
Am I the only one stumbling across Soundgarden eleven years late? (Or is that 23 years late? The fact that I was only 7 when they founded the band seems a pitiful excuse somehow. Add to that, I was listening excitedly to my siblings' Bon Jovi, Madonna and Amy Grant albums, and the whole thing just feels downright criminal.) It's not that I haven't heard Soundgarden before. I recognize now that I've heard a song or two of theirs in years past, but I never connected the song to a name or a face or to any entity at all, really. It wasn't "Black Hole Sun" or "Outshined" or "Burden In My Hand" I recognized, but "Hands All Over" and, of all things, "Uncovered." (Plus "Seasons," but that's another story, and of all the musicians in Singles, I could only recall knowing Pearl Jam-thought Jeff in his hat was cute-and Alice In Chains. Watching it again now is like realizing I went through middle school stark naked, i.e. "Why did no one tell me?" Not to mention the fact that Stone is to Jeff what Han is to Luke. Those first crushes vanished with nary an apologetic backwards glance when I hit puberty. Kids these days!) This whole belated discovery of Soundgarden has been like that. I couldn't begin to tell you where I'd heard those old Soundgarden songs before. I suppose someone in the once-rural town of Hachihonmatsu or perhaps the high school dormitory in Higashi Kurume owned a copy of Louder Than Love, because I sure didn't hear those songs on the radio coming in from Iwakuni base, mixed in with Paul Harvey and the Sunday morning hymns.
Anyway, I wanted to share this with you guys, for what little it's worth, as a "where I've been and what I've been feeling." Something more substantial than the nth "I'm back (for a brief interlude)!" Maybe someone else out there has felt the same about a piece of music, when it hits you so powerfully that you end up sounding a little batty trying to describe it. I haven't felt this way about music since I first watched Amadeus, which aside from however accurate or inaccurate the portrayal of his life might be, is an absolutely stunning soundtrack which awakened me to musical complexities, balance and resonance like never before. That (fictional) scene as they piece together Confutatis, layer upon layer, where each piece individually sounds simple but creates a breathtaking whole? Is what it's been like to listen to Soundgarden with ears wide open.
The whole experience can be captured (not completely but at least metaphorically) in a single song of theirs, although every song that came before it paved the way. It's my favorite song of theirs, which shot through many old favorites to become one of my very favorite pieces of music ever written. The song is "Like Suicide."
Of all their amazing songs, this is their magnum opus, IMHO, an unparalleled work of complete resonance. I can't begin to speak of it from a technical standpoint; I wish I could understand it on that level. It highlights everything about Soundgarden that I love so deeply. Never have the lows so complemented the highs, or the highs so fed on the lows. Brilliant is almost too tidy a word for it. Kim's guitar solo is magnificent in and of itself but even more flawlessly suited for the piece that frames it. Chris's vocals course over the music in this amazingly elastic ride, subtle to soaring and down again. Matt's drums are clear and strong as rain on a steel roof, and Ben's bass throbs as steady as a heart; their rhythm section pulls me through like an undertow. It's as if the song can't go any higher, can't get any finer, and then I hear what he's singing, and it's like listening to the purest inspiration pouring out of their collective souls, you know?
Learning what inspired the lyrics adds that extra level of unexpected warmth and sympathy, and there are times I can't listen without actually crying, like on the drive home yesterday, not necessarily because of the bird herself but because of the whole damn thing and watching Mikki fall to pieces last year to renal failure and being alone with my great aunt when she took her last breath in that shitty nursing room and the kitten I found yesterday concussed and drooling in the middle of the road and how it never ends with all of these beings of essence and matter who keep battering themselves up against your door, and you keep noticing too damn late, only at the sound of that last-ditch thump when they're already in pieces and all that's left is release and some days you want it for them and other days for you-and in the moments it doesn't feel inhumane to let go, it feels inhumane to linger, and you lose track of which voice comes from conscience and which from feeling-and that sense of peace never matches up, it's just what we tell ourselves after they've gone. And all the times you're ready to pull the plug come to a cold stop when the moment's come, and the fact that you can reach out your hand then to bring them cold, too, for long months afterward outlives every other memory of them and every other worth of you, and you realize the very same anger you felt at the "no trespassing" sign at the church down the street is at the root of the guilt you feel now, because maybe if you'd left the window open, they might have landed safely, and the fact that you've watched a brick taken to a living soul bloodied against the shrine of your world, you think, is that the only answer? If we can break, can't we heal?
It's a simple story and the lyrics are straightforward, but with his voice and all the guys, with the way they answer each other musically throughout it and drive each other through the pulse; they capture all the rage and grief and despair of the moments that I never wanted to face and can't forget once they've passed. I want them all gone and washed clear of me, but Matt keeps on, unrelenting, rain patter on my steel roof in the gathering storm, and Ben's pull is so dense and choking, it feels more immediate than the beat of my heart, and the futility of this grief builds too deep, takes me too low, as Chris goes into his "I feel for you" refrain, and I've never felt at once so claustrophobic and yet so secure within that box, and all I want in that moment is for Chris to just shut the hell up, for god's sake, because his bleeding heart is drowning me and my house hasn't room for the rain. But then he does, as Kim glides in beneath his echo, and that moment is the summit of my wall; my defense is towards the sky, but the tide cuts from the deep, piercing up from the ground where I've left my house unguarded. And it at last hits me as he wails into Kim's solo and takes hold as Kim shreds his guitar through my closely-walled heart like a pissed off friend knowing me too well saying "don't blind yourself to this," that I want it branded into me, too, because it meant something, damn it, and life needs shit to continue on, because life feeds off shit as well as off the daisies of the field, and just because we're all standing on someone else's bones doesn't mean we should shut ourselves off to the smell. It breaches me, but I no longer feel I'm drowning. I'm of the current. The mammoth tide crests to its peak riding on Ben's dark pulse, then they catch the reins and ease back down, trailing off as deftly they entered in until the very winding end, where their last supple breath leaves me on my knees, with images of the past and anger for the future burning me cold.
There is surely music like this out there for everyone, and tedium by one person might be grace to another. Music that rips your soul back from apathy. This song does all that for me with a building fury that's compassionate and real. Soundgarden have written incredible song after incredible song but nothing as perfect as this. No one has outside the classical/opera/Broadway realm, not that I've heard, but of course that's subjective. Other groups in general and a few songs in particular ("Comfortably Numb," "Whale & Wasp," "The Sounds of Silence" live, "Laugh, I Nearly Died," "Perfect Day," "Drown," "Being Boring," "The Unforgiven," "Pushing the Needle Too Far" live, "RV," "With or Without You"... to name a few that do it for me in one way or another) are close in terms of how deftly the music hits its particular mark, with an atmosphere built up flawlessly from the music, which lingers long after the final note. Yet the way all the elements of "Like Suicide" come together completes its emotional impact for me in a way no other non-classical song has. "Drown" and "Tintinnabulum" are similarly epic, but (IMO) one is payoff without build-up and the other is execution without story. I am captivated for the duration but unchanged after the final fade. Other songs Soundgarden have done come damn close, as well, whether it's the lyrical weight or the musical weight of the song suffocating me, hitting its mark perfectly. "Mind Riot," Cornell's "Seasons," "4th of July" and "Tighter & Tighter," the latter which is like the answering echo of "Like Suicide" ...a cry from the broken bird. So close, that one. Then I'll listen to "Like Suicide" again--and perhaps because it's a day like today, after seeing the next in an unending chain of random frailties, that homeless kitten dead of heat stroke and hemorrhage despite all a vet can do, or perhaps it's because they feel less random as the chain lengthens and it all runs together, the unyielding current pulling you past the bleeding, white water when you try to turn--but everything else they've ever done will seem a million miles away, and every other song I've heard feels increasingly left behind on the flat plains while "Like Suicide" scales the mountain. The music, the lyrics, the emotional impact it has on me, the whole thing. A full circle, a true circle; grief that finds hope without denying the corpse.
How rare is that? Really? Most songs, they give us hope or rage, despair or heroism; they hold our hands or they shove us away, they drain us or they pump us up. The songs I mentioned above, Soundgarden's included, are perhaps great because they capture their given moods so tightly and never let up; they force you to confront their emotion. I had never expected anything else-anything more layered, truly layered and fully self-contained without abbreviation, in the emotional sense as well as the musical-from anything less than a full symphony, opera, Broadway score or concept album before hearing "Like Suicide." How is it that Soundgarden balanced it all in this one song? It breathes and has a pulse, and the sounds change as its story is told. It went somewhere. It didn't start there; it didn't end there. It was the full journey. It called me in its wake and made me walk the miles on bare feet, and it walked me back again, bleeding, and I was changed for it. They do that so well, Soundgarden, and amid the spectacular gigantic songs they've put forth, this one stands out as a true rock symphony, such as Mozart, Beethoven or Rachmaninoff might have composed. It's their Fidelio layered with a Requiem Mass, an entire complex dramatic score condensed without suffocation or compromise into a single 7-minute work of pure grace.
It wasn't my first track, and in retrospect, I'm very glad it wasn't. There's an intimacy here, perhaps derived mostly from Chris's lyrics and delivery but also in the slow build of the music itself and the final flutter of its last breath. It's not instant gratification, however trashy or sweet; it's not "Paradise City" or "Chasing Cars." It's a little more like people waiting for the payoff in "Unchained Melody," only it's not about the glory notes, the fancy solo; it's every step that builds up to it and how it builds, the balance and response, the drive and pull, and how it comes back to rest when it's made its point. It's too lazy, in a way, and too prolonged, like Smashing Pumpkins' "Drown." It takes its sweet time because every second is worth its place. I was a casual listener when I first stumbled across them, and casual listeners aren't going to be giving a casual listen their full attention. This type of song needs it from the start, or the mood is entirely lost by the end. That's why I take the scenic route coming home from work, hoping to catch the twilight just right on this song, because it breathes best there, like it was meant for the twilight right before true night, that last gasp that always slips away too soon. Soundgarden knew it when they arranged the album, placing it at the very end of Superunknown. "Like Suicide" isn't a "hello." It's not an opener. It doesn't bring you home into their superunknown. You're already there. You're folded over on the floor, unaware you're crying. It's a closer. It's shutting the door behind you. And how Kim's guitar echoes Chris's vocal wilt at the end is the quiet catch of the key locking you in.
Then there's the acoustic version. So spare and subdued. His guitar work towards the end has the essence of someone crying out from a long distance away over wrongs dead and buried centuries ago that he is seeing played out again in his own lifetime, yet no one is listening, and he's angered by it as much as he's saddened by it but ultimately he's defeated by it. It's that type of song, emotionally. No glory notes or enormous solos. Just a voice lifting up in grief in the middle of a hollow sort of silence; no one else around to buffer the sound. I heard it initially after I'd heard the band version, and at first, it felt too lightweight. I went immediately back to the band. But as I listened to that version again, I felt how incredible the acoustic truly is. It's a powerful piece because of its sparseness, just as the band arrangement is powerful for how all of its elements come together to create that immensely rich atmosphere. Listening to the acoustic immediately before listening to the band version certainly brings out the chemistry and responsiveness of the complete band in their version even more than listening to it straight. It becomes even more of a rhapsody. Gorgeous. The build-up of added instruments, first drums then bass then guitar then at last the vocals, it all feels that much more alive… if that's even possible. Though the acoustic version remains ever in the shadow of its heavier brother, it takes on this sweeter edge with every listen. Like clear stars after that twilight gasp, or a sliver of blue filtering out from behind passing storm clouds, it's a quiet reminder of where the music began. The hollowness around his voice lingers, but I realize I've entered in, and there's miles of empty road around, but I'm not alone.
There's just no one like Soundgarden, to my ears. Stumbling across them early this year has been the best thing to happen to me in the best timing that I can remember in a long time. It kills me that I'll never be able to tell them, each of them individually, how much their music means to me. I want to write them each a letter but I don't know where to send it, and what would I even say? I wouldn't know where to begin or how to phrase it. How do you sum up this stuff up? This is just one song. I could go on about their songs. Not every song. Like everyone, they have some stinkers. But many songs. More songs per album than most bands accomplish for me. I wonder if they know, because they seemed-in interviews published back in the day-on the one hand fairly blasé about it and on the other a little weirded out by how fans react. It's not that they're the soundtrack of my life. They don't sound like me, not always, but when we do find the same notes, they're so present that I can't hear anyone else. It's like reading The Book Of Lights or The Charioteer for the first time and realizing others also notice the shape and texture of the stones that pave the road. You fall into attunement and everything else suddenly feels incredibly stale. I think that's where music lives, like a current, and some works that sweep others away we pass through unfeeling, until we find the one that catches us and draws us in. Music, poetry, art… Those who say such things are irrelevant to our existence are fucking idiots.
Anyway.
I love this song. That's all.
Had to share.