The Better Man

I stumbled into this old country song the other day, who’s melody really grabbed my ears. I have worked high and long to boil down the formula that accounts for what it is exactly that I like about any particular song, so as to use it, somehow, to find more songs that I would instantly enjoy…but it continues to elude me, in the murky connections a melody has with one’s emotions, and the simple fact that as an emotionally retarded individual, I have an adolescent knowledge of my own at best.

Of lyrical structure and pacing, I can identify the form that I prefer– the objective, or allegorical, accompanied by a soothing and repetitive style pace. Songs that resonate loneliness– not in the cheap, subjective fashion, but as entities all their own. Loneliness as can be taken for granted, rather than spelled out with great and deliberate effort. There are many aspects a song can have for me to appreciate it, despite my high and ridged standards for things, but of melodies that I find pleasing I can not seem to grow beyond a know it when I hear it awareness. The best I can do at identifying them is simple pattern analysis– I prefer melodies that seem to tease an eventual low note initially, and then end smoothly on it…repeating the process with alternating end notes, which further the teasing for the original low. I suppose low note may not be the best phrase to describe the note that the moment in the song finishes on, as it summons images of pitch and tone…but any note can be a low note, in the way I describe it here, as long as it is the opposite of what is teased about before it is dropped. The dropping of it, after the moment, usually resonates on some sort of painful melancholy feeling…a feeling desired, but somewhat bitter– unpleasantly stirring, but not regretted. I keep coming back to Leonard Cohen’s words, as the minor falls, and the major lifts…it’s the shifting of feeling, from high to low, that is recognized subconsciously, and appreciated. To surmise, the best I can do at identifying pleasing melodies, and the reason they are pleasing, is to assume that they somehow imitate my emotional nature….a series of neutral distractions, ending on a welcomed and bitter low note.

The somewhat generic break-up song, which hooked me initially on melody alone, grew into a lyrical curiosity after I caught the phrase rolling in the clover, finding it rather lovely. I soon came to the realization that the song itself was written from the perspective of a somewhat welcomed and bitter low note, not from within the process of losing, but rather looking back, from a well explored state of loss. Within the chorus, and in fact the title, there is a sort of optimistic forward-thinking attitude sprinkled amongst the painful nostalgia, which I find, through no coincidence, rather dull and boring…but the aspects of it that are reflective contain a surprising amount of vulnerable honesty, allowing me to be impressed not so much with the song itself, but with the genuine motives behind the person who created it.

I find myself in a strange place, in a strange frame of mind. The reconciliation between who I was, who I am, and who I will become is as impossible as it is eventual. I used to have all of these possessions…these people that, at the time, I couldn’t imagine life without. But now that the steadily grinding inertia of time has completely taken them from me– not just because it has moved them from my proximity, but because it has completely destroyed that which they were, that which we were…I find myself surprisingly content, by grace alone if not by choice. Anything can be forgotten, and eventually everything will be forgotten…or at worst, replaced with something a little better, and a little more recent. We may have made love under the stars that distant evening, so long ago, proclaiming that the intensity of our love for one another would have no choice but to endure…but decades pass, and other lovers are eventually taken under the stars, and the feeling behind the memory is forgotten. Replaced by another…and then forgotten again.