Days Of...

I sometimes have problems with writer's block. I didn't used to, and I'm not wholly sure what the issue is now, although certainly my adult life has gotten more stressful as it's gone on (with some breaks). I don't get it, and I know I need to at some point. And it's what results in me sitting here at 3:00 am on a Monday morning, feeling like shit because yet again I have only finished the bare minimum of my writing for the weekend and once again I have started mentally shuffling my plans for the rest of the week to compensate. I hate this feeling, and so partly to give myself more time later today after sleeping and mostly to assuage some of that guilt I'm getting today's entry in now.

"Days Of..." was picked because I wanted a Low song that conjured for me a sensation of absolute stasis that fits the way I tend to feel when I've spent all day not getting done what I had plenty of time to do. I've noted this song's effectiveness in that category before, but it feels more pessimistic than ever this morning. As I note in my mix for Stylus last year, it's just occasional booms of drum and extremely hesitant bass notes (there might be a guitar note or two from Alan in there too, it's hard to focus on the music to be honest). The song is perfectly paced for its six minutes; there is roughly 75 seconds of instrumental at the beginning and the end, and the middle three and a half minutes contains one of Mimi's most precise vocal readings. She's singing, not speaking (there's no doubt about that), but the relative vocal or sonic fireworks of something like "Laser Beam" or "Coattails" are nowhere to be found. She is exceptionally calm and patient, even if the lyrics she sings suggest both disappointment and how we deal with that disappointment:

It was one of those days
Of salvation and loss

Just one of those days
When you wait for the worst
First they hold you for a ransom
Then they buy you for a song

Just one of those days
When you laugh at what you've done
How they ripped you from the pages
Oh you waited for the best

It was one of those days
Of salvation and loss

The opening and closing couplet is suggestive but not terribly informative; is any day, for Low, not one of salvation and loss? Or for us? Should it be? But the middle is interesting, as ever since actually looking at the lyrics I believe I have for the first time in this blog an actual theory about a Low song I feel good about. It's pretty obvious, what with "ripped you from the pages" and holding the "you" in question for ransom, but I can't help feeling like Mimi's talking about Jesus Christ here. If Low have often written songs that express some level of bemused sympathy for unbelievers, they certainly have more common ground there than with people who claim to follow roughly the same belief system as Alan and Mimi but make a mockery of it. And neither of Low's songwriters strike me as Bible "literalists" (put in scare quotation marks because people who call themselves literalists in this field almost never are), which suggests that they, like most people since the monks of the Middle Ages, possess enough brains to interpret Scripture in a fairly coherent way. Which means the distortions it tends to get put through even when Secret Name came out are more than just infuriating as they are to me; that kind of thing must hurt.

But that, ultimately, is not really why I picked "Days Of..." and it's perfectly chosen ellipsis. Mimi fills in what it's a day of in the lyric but really it's evocative, in title and performance, of any of those days that just slides right by, where nothing happens in such great quantities that you barely get to the something you had planned. Days when you feel like a person in a book, waiting for someone to read you, and wondering why you can't just do that yourself. Like every bout of writer's block, I'm telling myself tomorrow will be better. If it isn't, I know what I'll be listening to.