https://soundcloud.com/thetryingartist/sets/in-the-silver-light

 

A love song in disguise, In The Silver Light pays tribute to two years of cinema dates with my first girlfriend. Deliberately picking the worst films around so there would be fewer people in the audience. The beginnings of sex. Fighting, not knowing what to say, the tension surrounding almost anything involved with sexual relationships at that age. And a healthy dose of lyrics that don’t really mean anything.

But it’s also about something else more interesting: the feeling of losing yourself in something larger. Whether it’s watching a film, listening to music, experiencing art in any way. Sometimes you can feel your own life fade for a short while as you become enveloped, and at these moments you are completely relaxed, or excited, or inspired – they are moments of total sensation.

The one line that stands out for me is ‘when it goes black and normal life returns in a daze I stand up and walk to the door’. Something that has always stuck with me is a kind of unease with the moment the film, or gig, or anything else ends, and my life seeps back around me. I’ll be asked what I thought of the experience. I’ll be forced to express myself. Things that normally come naturally seem unnerving after the ego has been subdued temporarily by an exterior effect. I listened to this song today after having spent a couple of hours trying to write lyrics about exactly the same thing, and suddenly I was immersed in memories of the darkness, and the tension, and everything seeming very important.

In The Silver Light was meant to be a good song. It has the first ‘groove’ in any of my compositions, with a bass line so catchy I recycled it years later. It also has an early example of the ‘drone singing’ (staying on one note, fast paced lyrics) I now predominantly use when writing singing parts for myself. The lyrics, when they make sense, are probably a step up from any earlier songs.

Its fatal flaw, however, is that it’s just really quite annoying. Why am I singing too low for my own range? (I can answer that question: obviously because I wrote the bass riff first and couldn’t be bothered to change the key.) The effect of the strain on my voice is that forced attitude thing that makes me cringe so much when I listen back now. And it becomes increasingly messy as it goes on, ending in classic style with a collapse of instruments – drummer moving arms as fast as possible in uncoordinated style, while the rest of the band maybe falls down the stairs, I don’t know.

I can’t help but feel slightly sorrowful at my current reaction to a song once enshrined in my mind as a ‘golden oldie’. Proof of its enduring reputation is attached: a newer version, recorded a few years later (probably more than I’d like to admit), which manages to be perhaps more charmless in its new sleeker clothes. You sort of think: ‘shouldn’t you know better now?’

At least I tidied up the ending – at some point I must have learned the skill.