"I think that one's a bit sad for the hospital, dear," said the cleaner as she pushed her mop towards me, her eyebrows meeting like clasped hands in the centre of her kind face.
I paused, about to start forming the chords for the second verse of ‘Silent Night’, and looked more closely at her expression; there was something unnameable there.
“Oh… do you think so?” I didn’t tell her that staff on the last ward I’d played had demanded an encore of the same song again because they wanted to sing along, or the joy I’d felt as my voice climbed the melody up into a four-storey atrium. Later, patients on other wards would ask for this song first, over and over again. The first time that happened, later that day, I paused again, remembering the interaction with the cleaner.
Is it a sad song? Sadness is an odd force - intensely personal, occasionally collective, often suppressed, always necessary. In the hospital, sometimes it can be jarring to sing songs of jolly, festive yuletide, or frivolous songs that feature side characters from the fictional Christmas multiverse. Their irony can be blazingly, inescapably cruel, a searchlight that beams straight into the absence left by a relative or friend or child that seems to say: this song is not yours, these feelings are not for you. To be an unwitting conduit of that alienation makes me feel unspeakably sad, in a sort of obscured and obscuring way.
Some people want the old church carols, and the joy of my childhood choral training lifts and battles through the storm winds of memory. I started my life singing in church, but I left as I grew into myself and it no longer felt like something I could belong to. I haven’t prepared many of these songs, but every time someone asks for one, I find that the words are still there beneath my tongue, waiting to be sung. I’ve learned enough guitar now to busk the chords as I go, feeling grateful for their common simplicity, and find an odd comfort in realising how deeply those harmonic structures are written in my being, scored on my bones like slogans on a stick of rock.
It hit me, in the middle of a ward, that this is the closest thing I have to a tradition. After years in the folk scene, you come to learn that it’s something you either have or you don’t have: access to a canon of well-known material, instinct for how to deliver it, opinions on its various meanings and presentations. It’s not a tradition that I particularly want, and until recently the songs had the power to shatter me without warning - carol singers in the park, the silence following a solo treble voice on Radio 3 - as I began to examine the grief that follows loss of faith. I’ve reconciled a huge part of that loss, now, after years of therapy and the gradual dissolution of binary thought patterns that had held me in an uncomfortable state of limbo. My awe of being alive as part of the universe has returned. I have learned to hold multiple truths at once: that those songs tell a story that I no longer consider to be revelatory, and also that they offer a sacred moment of bliss and celebration for those that do. Somehow, with a guitar in my hands, standing on a hospital ward surrounded by beeps and lights and the eternal kindness of nursing staff, I can be a vessel for those songs in a way that feels true and uncompromising and, crucially, not about my personal story.
As I sang ‘Silent Night’ for the last time that day, I listened to the words again. A siren wailed past the window in an odd echo of my favourite version: Simon & Garfunkel’s heartbreaking 1966 version, which starkly juxtaposes verses of the carol with clips from real news bulletins reporting on appalling crises of those turbulent days. In that moment, I realised I agreed with the cleaner; it is a sad song, whether or not we think so for the same reasons. How many years have we told the story of a child born in Bethlehem, with a whole mythology woven around it of silence and serenity and destiny, the peaceful birth and the potent magic of redemption? How far could that possibly be from the actual reality of Bethlehem today? How can it be that an apocalypse of missiles rains over occupied Palestine, where angels were once supposed to have sung?
I have my own private, complicated thoughts on what it has done to humanity to pin so much of our collective salvation on Jesus & the prophet class of myths, but I can see why people still return to this story over and over again: nostalgia for the past, and hope for the future, and a brief respite from the present. That respite is a privilege that few on the planet get to enjoy, yet I also recognise that when I bring carols onto wards, I am providing that respite for people who desperately need it.
Music is a portal to parts of ourselves that can be hard to access, and a portal to community that transcends the gulfs between hospital beds. In its immense power, a song can help us celebrate and grieve and escape and disassociate, sometimes each response happening to different people in the same moment in the same room, all of us privately living out our timelines of memory and unknowable futures. It can also make us put up enormous walls if it touches a raw nerve in the wrong moment. The beauty and danger both lie in the multitudes of meaning. I want to believe that if we harness them well, an individual song can change the world - but I know that’s another myth I’m only just starting to unpack.