Wednesday 14th February, 2024
Firstly… Happy Valentines day!
Let’s use today as a chance to talk romance & love!
You may be well aware, but I am the most hopeless of hopeless romantics… or possibly a tragic romantic. Whatever I am, it involves romance. Generally the word ‘romance’ has taken on the meaning of non-platonic connections, but it’s other meaning is extremely important to keep in mind. Romance is another word for adventure. The metaphor of love as an adventure is most definitely at the core of my love-philosophy. I’m usually ‘looking for her’ or ‘waiting for her’. There’s usually a character of a love in my future. Someone just around the bend. Someone to focus my romantic attention & intention towards. When it comes to self-improvement, I’ve always found the hypothetical ‘her’ as a fantastic motivating factor.
Of course, the risk with all of this hypothetical romance is building up an ‘ideal’ of love. As a teenager (& an unfortunate length of my 20’s) I would inflict this ‘ideal’ on the girls I was dating. Took me a long time to learn how to drop the ‘perfect’ person in my mind, & fully see & appreciate the person in front of me. Anyways…
How does all this relate to music?!
Well… it’s kind of my go-to theme to talk about. Romantic love, longing for love, mourning lost love… most of my songs circle around ideas of love. Albeit I like to challenge the 2 dimensional concepts of love that most songwriters harp on about. (unless it’s ‘Living A Lovesong’, in which case it was about an actual love story that I was living at the time… no apologies for that!) One thing in particular that I’ve been interested in is the idea of a ‘second love’. First loves, & love at first sight are pretty established concepts. They’ve had their time in media & in our collective imaginations for long enough. These ideals are, of course, stylized versions of reality… but I wanna stylize & romanticize the reality of your second love… or your third love… or at its most basic: the other side of heartbreak. Which I’m now realising is a MUCH BETTER title for my first album. (Dear God… why did nobody tell me?) Anywho’s…
The value of experience is one that is overlooked in traditional love stories. Purity, & innocence (its own form of purity) were exalted as the most important quality… usually in women. For men? I guess experience was valued… turning them into some kind of weird teacher/father type person. & we wanna avoid that kind of weirdness, don’t we? Doesn’t sound awfully romantic by today’s standards. My hunch, my hot-take, my inflammable idea is that our definition of romantic love today is more accurately described as a ‘sustainable love’. Our romantic ideas now are interested in open communication & compromise with your lover. We love a well-adjusted love story… right?
Traditional romantics valued love over practicality. “Why marry for money, when you could marry for love!?” Today, I’d guess that the majority of humanity has accepted that we now marry for love… at the very least, in my culture, that’s what’s expected & assumed. But where do we go from here? Our heroines & heroes would give anything… even their lives for love… & as a result, romantics have a dramatically lower life expectancy. Today, we know that love isn’t a once off… to have a single ‘love of your life’ is quickly becoming an outdated idea. Now we know that we will love again. When Cher asked if you believe in life after love… she was being rhetorical you fool!
I love the bittersweet idea of second love. The idea that you can keep a kind of love for someone in your past, for who you both were at that time, & continue to find & build love with other people. Heck, if you want my full opinions on love (seeing that you’re asking), I think you can love multiple people at the same time, & that you can, in fact, love anyone… but we’ve already strayed from the topic at hand. The aftermath of a love, I find a more fascinating place to write from. ‘Carolina’ is about coming back after a loss of love… & it’s actually about the affection of strangers & how healing that can be. ‘Broken & Beautiful’ is probably my biggest statement on love. The idea that we have value in our broken pieces, that our experience of heartbreak can make us more loveable & able to love. (I was trying to write that song for years… ever since I learned about the concept of Kintsugi in 2017 or so.)
But all of this was album number one! What about today?
These days I’m writing a lot of tragic love stories, & some more explicitly sexual ones. My song ‘La Petite Mort’ is about the joy in relinquishing yourself to another person. ‘Moonlight Fantasy’ is about my romantic relationship with the literal moon. But I’ve also written a song about two eternal lovers, both forgetting one another constantly through their battle with Alzheimers. I’m also writing a love song about someone who’s looking back on the earth from space, & pondering the life of their distant love. Then there’s one about someone lamenting the fact that they could have loved someone more when they were still alive.
Okay I’m gonna stop listing these song meanings, cause they’re surprisingly depressing when you explain them like this. When you hear them… you’ll see. They’re actually quite fun & bittersweet. It’s not a ‘love is sad’ album. I swear. Basically, this next album doesn’t seem to have a coherent philosophy on love because my ideals of love haven’t really changed. My experience of love has in some interesting ways… but that’s a very personal journey that I’m on these days. To summize, a ‘distant’ love is definitely a theme that’s emerging.
I’ll leave you with one of my favourite short love stories… or love ‘moments’ might be a better term. It was told by Werner Herzog, about his Grandfather.
In his old age, this man suffered terribly from Alzheimer’s. He would wake every night & pack up all his things, still afraid of the long since defeated, Nazis… only for his wife to wake up each morning & set the house right again. One evening, as she set the table for dinner, her husband arrives to the room dressed in his finest fit. His hair was gelled to the side, his cuffs were crisp, & his manner was… formal. He greeted her politely & pulled her chair out for her to sit. He was particularly well mannered this evening & listened deeply to everything his wife was saying. You can of course, see what’s happened, right?
When the dinner was finished, her husband stood up & bowed to her. He said:
“Miss, if I was not already married, I would have asked you for your hand.”
I keep that story deep in my heart. I tell it whenever I can. It speaks to a deep part of my romantic soul. It validates something unknown within me. Love is more than a series of chemicals that drive us to continue our species. Anyone who reduces one of the most wonderful things in life to a simple function is either misguided or bitter. These people need your love most of all!
So go out there… love anyone & hopefully everyone… in any way that you can, or that they want you to!
Nathan
