Here is the song.

We all live under the force of the earth’s gravity. It pulls us down towards earth. This force affects all peoples in equal measure across the earth. It is a universal phenomenon. Yet some days the reality of this force is experienced more deeply than other days. When the proverbial sun is shining, we feel light on our feet. And when the skies turn grey, our shoulders slump inward, our lips slope downward, and we inherit a disposition akin to the latent storm cloud in this song. Why is this so?

Live long enough and you will have days like this. Days where you struggle to take another step. Days that diminish your vitality and that push your soul inward, posing desperate questions of yourself

‘The weight, how do you stand under it all?’

The arrangement manages to pull us under its mysterious sense of gravity; Dark lyrics delivered by Amma Whatt’s angelic voice, the drama of the strings is heard amidst raspy drums, and the introduction of the saxophone in the song’s final chorus, the perfect medium to communicate the disorienting nature of disenchantment. For what can be more tragic than being enchanted, and then being disenchanted? Living under the weight of your former enchantment?

And such is Nate Smith’s musical authenticity. I found my emotional response to this record is appreciation that such a difficult emotional journey has been expressed with such verisimilitude. Consider the bravery expressed in the conclusion, the tension is not resolved. Rather like life, the weight sometimes must be endured. Sometimes we must go to sleep with the weight with the hope that we feel better in the morning.

Here is the song (and live).

The standard has been eternally set for fusion music. It doesn’t really get any better than this, honestly. The irresistible consistency of this blend of soul, R’n’B and syncopatious latin ‘cha-cha-cha’ is nonchalantly named ‘Spanish Joint’.

For such an instinctively musical song, the lyrics alone are worth some serious contemplation. Yet they are so overwhelmed by the instrumentation that its easy to miss what D’Angelo is actually saying. D’Angelo’s music is all underside, all understatement, suave subtlety. This makes his vocals the perfect conduit for communicating man’s deep longings, complex or ‘otherwise’.

It has been said that the hallmarks of quality of writing (and apparently, also of good salespeople) is to ‘always be closing’. This state of closing creates a longing within the reader for more of what they have just witnessed. This song is an example of the same principle applied to music; There are several distinct moments when it feels like the fun is about to end, then as if by magic, the musicians elevate the atmosphere to a new level of euphoria (sometimes assisted by a key change).

Technically, the arrangement is brilliant, bordering on perfect, as all the instruments add substantial impact to the song’s texture.

• You can clearly tell the groovy bass is the type of instrument that wears sunglasses indoors
• The jazzy trumpets scatters excellence throughout the entire song
• The afro-latino percussion is making its pervasive influence felt
• The soulful vocal utterances convince the listener that they too can sing

“Somethin’ stirrin’ inside of me’s gotta be
Soul controller in control of me”

I feel the same every time I hear this song. Its almost like the freedom in musicians awakens movements and rhythms inside you that you didn’t think were possible. This of course only lasts whilst you are wrapped in its fabric of sound, and then once it’s all over, you’re left feeling much more cooler than you did six minutes ago.

Here is the song.

Have you ever dreamt of a song where the melody was so inspired, so genius, that you know it couldn’t have come from you, it was a serendipitous gift, like a massive rose growing in you garden that you didn’t plant. It’s happened to me once or twice. Sometimes I have been sharp enough to grab my phone in a half-awake haze and record what I thought at the time was a stellar attempt to recreate the harmony and bass and lyrics (all at the same time), which then reveals itself to be a incohate rendition when I fully awaken and playback the recording.

I write all of that to say, that this song is like a dream. This song is not from the conscious imagination. It is from somewhere else, its from the ‘night’, which has always served as a universal metaphor for the subconscious. The guitar inflexions aren’t normal. Even the irregular rhythm of the vocals. Its almost as if the ghostly whooo-wah-ah-ah’s is King’s subconcious reminder to us to say that ‘this is a dream’. The whole arrangement is a gift that presents to us its subject; the spectacle of an artist enraptured in his craft, and in that dream-like way, suspended in time. Because the very experience of being involved in the meaningful creation of art, and the flow that is required to achieve this, requires full engagement with the subconscious.

Then you realise that the mysterious guitar is supposed to represent the guitarist in the song…

Which raises a compelling idea; perhaps it’s not just that reality has an effect on dreams, perhaps dreams have an effect on reality. Therefore your confusing, preposterous, impossible yet strangely beautiful dream can change the course of human history. Or in other words, you have a profound responsibility to dream. And this song is living audial proof.

Stand-out line: ‘When he closes his eyes he’s in love, what a wonderful thing to dream of’

Here is the song.

Despite the tragic nature of the situation described in the song, there is something admirable about the revelation of an emotional truth that has been suppressed for so long. The truth is not just ‘nice to have’. Saying the truth about how we are feeling is cathartic, like screaming into a pillow. It’s something our bodies compel us to do, sometimes under much duress.

Perhaps the body has a truth reflex, an inner chiropractor that realigns us after the mangling we do to ourselves whilst trying to accommodate lies. Listen to frustration being cracked out of the singers back, and how the release of the chorus brings the clarity to the surface.

State lines is a man realigning himself to truth of how he feels about his romantic partner. Gone is the glow of the romcom. Sweet nothings have turned into sour somethings. There is no self-deception here – “let me introduce you to all of the ways I can let you down”.

The analogy of the ‘state line’ is a perfect, it elevates the song to golden status. It’s so good. It evokes so many ideas, the long journey, boundaries, home and foreign lands, tiredness, distance and deviation. And all these meanings are relevant to context of a relationship that’s fallen short of expectations.

The instruments playing in the song have such character. They give the song a rugged feel, the type you can grasp with your hands. It has been said once that ‘you can’t grasp a seamless mountain’. Well, you can grasp into the ridges of this song, into the pockets of the drum rhythm, the piercing horns, the offbeat of the drums and the riffs of the electric guitar. The truth is said to be a double-edged sword, and when its done slicing you, maybe you too will have enough character to be grasped with both hands.

Here is the song.

Commitment lies at the heart of great things: When you commit money to a savings account, the magic of compound interest happens. When a person commits to a relationship, whether that person is a parent, a partner or a friend, real love can develop. When talent commits itself to a field or a discipline, then genius can flourish.

And so it is with music, exemplified by this arrangement; Listen to how the bass and percussion remain committed to the rhythm and in so doing, the saxophone and piano can fully express themselves over the course of the song.

Here’s the magical part – I think something similar happens inside of us – the listener – in the course of listening. Once we become comfortable with the rhythm, our spirit can drift off into open space, safe in the knowledge that we are supported, that there is a path that we can always return to, so that we won’t get lost. And so we can begin to give voice to emotions and expressions latent within us.

‘I’ll close my eyes’ is a beautiful name for a song. There are so many things it could mean. We don’t close our eyes unless we feel safe. And for many people the truth is their surroundings are not safe, and people in their lives cannot be trusted. In such a world, it can be easy to close one’s eyes as a form of escapism – like the monkey emoji 🙈 – but I think there is a grander form of ‘closing one’s eyes’ – the type that the song alludes to. The type that says I’ll close my eyes and create my own island of trust and safety as a subversive act of defiance against a cruel and unjust world. That’s how I make sense of the hope-tinged sadness in the saxophone.

I’m glad that many brilliant musicians have committed themselves to mastering this jazz standard over the years. There is no better way to drift off to sleep than to play this song on repeat…

This is the song (Spotify link).

All of life, at every level of abstraction can be expressed in terms of movement. Think of the great metaphors for life such as the circle of life or the archetypal storytelling arc, even how we describe relationships as ‘growing together or apart’; They all imply movement from one place to another. The absence of movement signals an absence of life. Take the english language as an example – we talk of ourselves as ‘going nowhere’ or being ‘dead still’. When there is movement from one place to another, there is life, there is journey. Journey by Kamasi Washington is a beautiful ode to the spiritual journey we have the opportunity to take ourselves on every day.

Like life, a song takes you from one impression to another. And the space they navigate is a mix of our audial senses, our memories and our imagination, weaving paths that are worth coming back to again and again. Journey crystallises the concept so well – the shape of the words, of the sound, of the composition produce beautiful fractals. There is a rising and a falling, a climbing of one hill after another (aren’t hills and mountains nature’s most overused metaphors for life? I guess life never runs out hills for us to climb – whey!). Then there’s the way Patricia Quinn (on vocals) sings ‘Halleluiah, joy springs’, she shapes her voice as if it is a stream of joy that has reached the top and is on its way down.

I think all the lyrics are worth writing out;

“Life and love and peace in my heart

Halleluiah, joy springs

And everyday a brand-new start

Halleluiah, joy springs.

With this Prayer I live

Let my life be the one you give

With this song of praise I sing

Halleluiah, love is everything”

I’m no expert on the human condition, but don’t we all want these things? Life, love, peace and joy? A brand-new start? Genuinely. Who really desires cynicism as their portion? And how do we get there? Prayer, praise and gratitude. This song probably came from that very place.

I don’t think the journey ever ends guys. In fact, some say that when we die, we’ve only just begun the ‘true’ journey. Whatever that means.

Here is the song.

The stoic will one day break down and acknowledge the underlying emotional undercurrent that drives their life. The thing is, strong emotions such as Love, Death and Jealousy cannot be bottled up for long. They will explode. And when they do, no amount of philosophising will be able to provide consolation in that moment.

Through the character of Aaron Burgh, Leslie Odom Junior produces a song that touches on what it means to be forever in waiting for a great equalising moment that will right all the wrongs of one’s life. We all feel wronged in life. We are not in control of the cards that life deals us, but to compensate, we can be in control of how long we ‘wait’ for the great equalising moment to happen, therefore we have a vested interest in waiting, we are actually happy to wait. There is an underlying sense of gleefulness in Odom Junior’s voice as he ‘waits for it’.

Listen to the rational mind in the opening verses, the lowered voice, and how reasonable he is. Now compare that to the exclamations and direct language in the chorus.

The song is as much a study of character as anything. It’s almost as if Aaron Burgh is in the eye of a hurricane with destruction all around him, and if he doesn’t keep up the façade of the stoic, everything will come crumbling down. In the chorus, the façade falls off and we do feel the full force of the hurricane. With every unacknowledged hurt and suppressed feeling and emotional undercurrents getting sucked up into the vortex. It is said that the more compact the eye of a hurricane is, the more destructive the overall hurricane will be. And if you’ve seen Hamilton, then you know how the story of Aaron Burgh unfolds.

Here is the song.

There is a social experiment that I once did where you have to stand a few inches apart from a stranger and stare intently at their face for 10 minutes. There was a group of us doing this exercise in pairs and some people broke down and cried because the intimacy was too much for them to handle (why is intimacy too much for us handle?). This is an intimate song, not in a romantic sense, rather in the sense that Abimaro’s voice gets close to our very soul. To me, it serves as a reminder that it is God’s prerogative to get as close to us as this. I often wonder if this is the reason why people reject the idea of a personal God. Perhaps people really don’t want a God in their business, someone who will remind us that we will one day have to fit through the eye of a needle.

“Perish spoil fade, everything I’ve owned or made, it will perish spoil fade , but I won’t go empty to my grave…”

Study these words closely. This is the kind of folly we all laugh at on paper except when we’re doing the exact same thing in our lives. It is an illogical conclusion that sums up the futility of human striving. The piano captures this sentiment perfectly in its desperate attempts to keep its head above water throughout the song.

And what of Abimaro’s voice? The pure texture that it is. The voice that haunts us with its uncanny proximity. In this video, Abimaro describes her songwriting process as coming up with the words, having the melody develop from the meaning of the lyrics, and then letting her band give the melody ‘wings’. Ain’t that something. And now listen to how the song begins to levitate in the second verse, particularly at 2:17. Ain’t that something indeed.

Here is the song (spotify)

Dreams are primarily visual experiences with sound playing a supporting role most of the time; Scenes that fade to black, supported by sounds that fade to silence. In this song, abstract electronic sounds and abstract language combine to describe an abstract dream. Its as if the whole thing is some form of virtual reality hosted in ‘the cloud’ of our subconscious being run by powerful algorithms we do not understand.

Dreams can feel at once so close to our psyche, yet so far away from our literal senses. BIGYUKI creates this juxtaposed distance within the production by making the synth feel close and contrasting this with the watery piano and velvet singer seeming distant. Dreams can also feel at once familiar yet unfamiliar. Unfamiliar like the ‘Stranger Things’ synth, yet familiar like the soothing vocals and rhyme structure in the lyrics.

Enter into dimensions unfold – Passing colours fading into cold – I awake to find – This is a dream – Taking shape with the sound – In a train of thought – To become to belong – This is a dream – After all I have found – Somewhere I belong

Perhaps we dream not for reasons of indulgent escapism. Perhaps our subconscious is striving to become and to belong. Perhaps we are subconsciously drawn to music for the same reasons. Think about it, have you ever heard terrible music in a dream? Don’t we sometimes feel that during the 4 minutes and 53 seconds of a song we love, we belong there, taking shape between the sounds? And like a dream, once the song is over, you emerge having gained an experience you didn’t have before.

Here is the song.

At Toastmasters International (the non-for-profit organisation dedicated to Public Speaking), the first speech every new member must take is called The Icebreaker Speech. In this speech, the topic is yourself, and you can go as superficial or as deep as you’d like, needless to say the best speeches don’t rattle off the list of subjects you studied at school. Rather, the best speeches reveal the telling facts of one’s life in a way that leave you with an understanding of who the speaker is. The best speeches have a sense of an emerging narrative, as opposed to an imposed narrative that is usually self-serving. It’s the difference between a textured novel and an obituary. This is very hard to accomplish in 5 mins. It takes Leon Bridges 4 minutes and 9 seconds in the song Georgia to Texas.

This emerging narrative is delivered to our ears via the blues – a genre that prides itself on its verisimilitude. More so than any other genre, the blues song states its case without pretence or duplicity. Indeed, a blues singer would give you the same performance whether he was singing to himself or to a crowd of thousands.

Listen to how the instruments ‘speak’ to us on Leon’s behalf. The double bass signals at the beginning of the song “Leon is about to tell you something deep, I’d listen to him if I were you”, the piano tells us with clarity that Leon is telling us the “God-honest truth, I swear”. The saxophone communicates Leon’s “irresistible world-weariness”. And finally the drums create a beautiful canvas for Leon’s story, for note that no 4-bars of drums are the same, just as in life the rhythm of life is never exactly the same when you pay attention.

It’s fascinating to hear this song, having heard and written about Lisa Sawyer. The record Good Thing is a darker album, exploring more complex human emotions than Coming Home. In this sense, the song is the conceptual counterpoint to Lisa Sawyer, following a similar structure, a similar road, but travelling in different directions, and yet still ending up in roughly in the same place – an appreciation of the scope and scale of Leon’s mother’s life.

At Toastmasters, you can give your icebreaker speech again when you are older and wiser. Consider this Leon Bridge’s second icebreaker speech.