Strange Overtones
Confusion and Byrne and Eno — and a Linklater guest spot
This piece was written as part of a series of song-based essays and letters that I’ve been exchanging with my friend Maddie, whose writing you can find on here at Field Notes on Feeling.
Maddie, do you ever think you might not understand anything at all? I think I am so far from whatever the point is these days that I wouldn’t know how to go about finding it, and sometimes that upsets me, that confusion, and sometimes I am okay with it. I remember — I think she must have said this to everybody, so she probably said it to your class a couple of years before she said it to mine — our English lecturer telling us that modernists saw the world as a peach and postmodernists saw it as an onion. The peach has a hard pit at its centre. The onion, well. You peel and peel, and when you’re done peeling, it’s gone. Nothing at the centre at all.
When I was younger, I took this quite literally, imagining Woolf and Joyce and DeLillo had pointed to the fruit or the vegetable and committed for life. Faced with the two options, I thought I also had to pick which one was correct. And for me it was the peach. The real thing can be hard to find, but you’ll get there. I was hopeful! But more and more, Maddie, I don’t see a peach or even an onion. I’m not biting or peeling. I can’t describe anything, can’t decide on anything, can’t say anything honest, wouldn’t know what that would even be. I can’t hold anything in my mind long enough to make words of it. And oh, I’m lonely: lonely, lonely.
A year ago I felt like I was starting everything anew. I had for a little while been all squashed down, vacuum sealed into sadness, and I thought at last I could, maybe, burst out of it and become my own shape again. Lots of people tried to buoy me. They said, ‘This year is your year!’ It wasn’t, in the end, not really. But slowly I remembered what it was like to walk around a new neighbourhood listening to music and thinking not about my grief but about other possibilities — hope, joy, dancing. Sometimes I thought about other kinds of sadness and that felt like a break too.
One of the songs I listened to lots around then was David Byrne and Brian Eno’s ‘Strange Overtones’. A gentle groove. A kooky lyric. It made me feel okay, like I wasn’t being swallowed.
Your song still needs a chorus
I know you’ll figure it out
The rising of the verses
A change of key will let you out
I think when there is hardly anything that makes sense there is at least one truth: that people make things, have always made things, will keep making things. We will keep trying to say what we mean. To get to the chorus.
You and I talked recently about why we write: how it is mostly to point at things we think are good, to show them to other people. ‘Would you look at that!’ I think this in itself is a very good thing: the pointing. Sometimes songs try really hard to be comforting, and often I feel allergic to this, but perhaps just as often I find myself appreciating the offer of sympathy. Especially when it issues from the strained voice of a middle-aged man who I know can’t really dance.
The singer in this song is addressing their neighbour, someone whose feet they hear on the stairs every morning, someone they hear singing and even sing along with but, it seems, never meet or speak to. I think the song is trying to say, ‘There’s a lot of distance between you and I, but I’m glad you exist.’
Strange overtones in the music you are playing
I’ll harmonise
It is strong and you are tough
But a heart is not enough
I’ve been watching so many movies lately, they’re taking over. I watched Before Sunrise for the first time a few weeks ago. It’s one big conversation and at some point, in a cobbled alley, once it’s dark, Céline says, ‘If there’s any kind of magic in this world, it must be in the attempt of understanding someone sharing something. I know, it’s almost impossible to succeed, but who cares really? The answer must be in the attempt.’
Perhaps I imagine it all, all this, this life, not as a peach or an onion but some kind of path: we move along it and keep going. It is made by our movement. It disappears behind us as we go. And somehow, though we are each alone, we can call out to each other — actually, we have to — and listen for the voices that float back.
As for the shape of this path I’m dreaming up: I’m a bit lost, I guess, Maddie. But I think I can bear the feeling now that I’ve tried to tell you about it.