I have fallen in love a few times. It isn’t easy to describe the effect when it happens with other humans; even more slippery, then, to find words for the process of falling in love with a song, or the songs, of some musician new to me. It happened all through my childhood, but got particularly intense around the age of 12. I remember hearing Willy Mason’s ‘Oxygen’ for the first time on a late night radio show (Xfm 104.9, back in 2004-ish). His gruff delivery and laconic revolutionary spirit ignited something private and radical in my little suburban bedroom universe and I wanted to hear it over and over again, so I bought a CD and did just that. The same thing happened with Guillemots’ first album, Through the Windowpane. I still consider that album to be an absolute masterpiece. The string arrangements alone are impressive, but the overall effect, layered around and beneath their gut-punch lyrics - yearning, just the right side of sentimental, perfect for the melodrama of puberty - was, to me, transcendent. I listened again, and again, and again.
I remember the first time I properly listened to Joni Mitchell, at 21, just before I began writing my own songs. I was trying to understand more about jazz, and a vocal tutor introduced me to her version of ‘At Last’ with full orchestra. I immediately fell headlong into her wide, deep pool of flawless songcraft, drinking in Mingus and Blue all at once with incredulity that one musician could produce such wildly different - and entirely coherent - collections. It was like she put a magnifying glass onto my understanding of composition, of musicianship, and expanded every detail with a clarity and grace still unequalled by any artist I’ve encountered since. Then, about a year later, I heard This Is The Kit for the first time. Even now, I can’t put my finger on exactly what it is that Kate Stables’ music does to me. So much of it is about her lack of pretence, or pretentiousness, how she wraps some truth about her own character in a sound that’s all groove and no ego, tender and yet somehow unbending in its will.
Each of these artists planted two things in me. First, the revelatory thought: “wait - THAT’S possible? They’re allowed to make something that sounds like… that?” And over a long gestation period, I would find myself digesting their innovations and reshaping them into something like permission - a portal to my own creativity via a recognition and rejection of some rule that I’d been unknowingly imprisoned within. The other effect, more immediate and more subtle, was the way their music seemed to continue playing in my mind even when I pressed pause on the actual playback of a song. I’d turn away and start thinking about something else and then, as soon as a small crack in my concentration allowed, the song would sneak back in and spin me under its influence again. It wasn’t just the main melody but a whole pattern of sounds, even the timbre of the instruments as they outlined the chords that shifted and dovetailed in the texture of the song. (I have no idea if this how earworms work for other people - strangely, I’ve never asked anyone else about it. I hope that it’s a common experience because although it’s bizarre and extremely distracting, it’s delightful.)
It’s happening to me right now with the composer Caroline Shaw. It’s the first time it’s happened in a while, at least since I got hooked on Ye Vagabonds’ new record Nine Waves last year, but somehow this is a more extreme case. It reminds me of the obsessive listening I would engage in during my teens. As I write this, there are three different tracks of hers competing for attention in my mind. The winner is ‘Other Song’, but specifically, the version with Attaca Quartet from her 2022 album Evergreen, which I prefer to the initial version she released with Sō Percussion in 2021 on Let The Soil Play Its Simple Part. Both versions are astounding, but my feelings are in charge, and they’ve picked the strings.
I don’t just want to listen to it; I already am listening to it, all the time, inside my head. It’s constant. It’s also extremely intimate. It feels like some layer of my body is vibrating to the memory of the sound waves Shaw dreamed up, as though it was transmitted directly like this without ever passing through the air. I’ve tried to analyse what it is about the song that affects me so much, and I’ve got some answers: the harmonic progression is both satisfying and surprising; the melody is simple and yet evolves with such seamless sequential development that it really goes somewhere; the round, rich, pure tone of Shaw’s voice expresses an impeccable technique but remains free of vibrato and the constrains of any classical academy’s doctrine of singing; and the perfect, heart-tugging strings, of course. It hits all my buttons in 3’41” of sonic bliss, and I am ruined for anything else.
And yet. It isn’t just a catalogue of musical affect that happens to line up with a lot of my preferences, but a gathering of elements into some sacred intangibility that has made me feel, deeply. It’s a reminder that music can still transport me, even after all these years of learning and writing and playing, and that sometimes to be in the irritating, enchanting grip of a song is really to be alive. I have a few options at this point, and all of them offer me something I already want. I can keep listening to it, internally and externally, praying that the moment of inevitable staleness is still a way off. And - or - I can learn to sing it myself, to learn its secrets and so transmit some of its meaning and magic into my own voice and hands, but different, by nature, to the recording that has so bewitched me. Beyond that, I can let the other, slower, effect take root, and trust that I will start writing music that responds to the freedom embodied by this remarkable piece. It could allow me to find some way of embodying a new freedom in myself, and in my composing, that starts with listening to the quiet sounds dancing inside me and working out how to bring them out.
I saw Shaw and Sō Percussion perform together at the Barbican in London last month. In the centre of that enormous stage Shaw cut a fairly diminutive figure, but exuded a calm authority that seemed to say: “Of course I am here, but I am here in service of the music”. Surrounded by four top-tier percussionists, unabashed in their visible respect towards her as composer and collaborator, the ensemble was equal parts playful and focused as they each swapped instruments and roles in a deft choreography that relied on intense communication and trust.
Shaw introduced ‘Other Song’ as the final piece, and explained that it is, in fact, a song about songwriting, about pursuing that thread of truth that comes through us and tells us where to go next. (She didn’t quite say that, but something like it - I was too excited to remember her exact words, so that’s my own take.) I listened with new ears to this song that had already embedded itself in my being, hearing my own experience of the intimacy of songwriting in the song’s gracefully insistent architecture and cascading melodic lines. By the climax of the song, tears were rolling down my cheeks as Shaw, centre stage, sang “find the line / find the line”.
On the records, and in the cavities of my skull, she’s still there, singing those words with absolute conviction, compelling me to stop stalling and find the songs I haven’t written yet. I didn’t know how much I’d missed the feeling of being totally blown apart by another musician’s work and then stitching myself back together with new threads to follow, deeper into myself, deeper into the music. What I’ve come to understand is that every song has a life of its own, something almost like agency, insisting on its own creation and replication. While I respect and admire the songwriters who have shaped my own musicianship, my reverence is also for the song - and I stand in awe of the de-centring undertaken by musicians skilful and humble enough to let the song write itself.
As a singer, violinist and poet, Shaw’s multidimensional involvement in the creation and delivery of a song is an embodiment of the type of musicianship I find most inspiring. Her imagination is the vessel through which the music arrives, and now the song is part of me, and I can’t imagine what I did before the song was there. The most poetic answer to the song, surely, is to let it resound through me - both as itself, and as its echo transforms into new ideas that begin to replace itself in my inner sonic world. When I am gripped by a song, my own or anyone else’s, I’m not much good for anything else - and I wouldn’t change that for the world.