We Are Proud Of Our Choices

There’ll be sad songs, to make you cry (June 2010)

October 2007. Tracey Thorn is in my studio to demo some new songs. “What are we doing then exactly?” I ask. “I think I want to make my miserable middle-aged record” she replies. Today that record, ‘Love and Its Opposite’, is released and I am reading the thoughts of a blogger who thinks we did our job a little too well. “These songs are simply no fun” he writes. “Tracey, well, I guess she’s going through a lot. No doubt her pain is genuine… I just don’t want to hear about it.”

My first reaction is to chuckle, remembering all the laughs we had in the studio. Of course the listener isn’t privy to the jolliness behind the scenes and the record certainly is darker and starker than he might have expected. It is a common enough mistake – what literary critics call the biographical fallacy – to imagine a work can be mapped directly onto the experiences or the emotional state of the author. A few weeks after recording a song called ‘Oh, The Divorces!’ Tracey got married. Infer the life of the artist at your peril.

What is actually happening here is reportage, acute observation the likes of which you usually only get in fiction. And very good examples of it can be hard to take without a hankie close-by. A few days ago my girlfriend, reading Lorrie Moore’s brilliant short story collection ‘Birds of America’, complained that she could only read one at a time as “they’re just too sad”. Being able genuinely to upset is a sign of great writing as far as I’m concerned. The best stuff always draws a little blood. But though the likes of Thorn and Moore make us stare hard at disappointment and difficulty, they’re wise and laugh-out-loud funny as often as they’re heartbreaking.

The simple fact is that life is full of sadness. Sometimes art serves as a welcome distraction from that, but it’s duty-bound to bring us back around before long. There is a place for disco escapism – and maybe Tracey’s next record will return there – but sad songs and stories perform a vital service. The pang of recognition is one of compassion. We are reminded that other people have been and are there too; that, in the face of the dark, we’re not alone.

This entry was posted on Monday, July 12th, 2010 at 7:08 am. It is filed under groove columns. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.