Home

Home
Everybody wants to go home
Even when they're old
Even when they're small
Home
Everybody wants to go home
Even when they're old
Even when they're small
Home
Home
Home
Home

The sound that starts "Home," a kind of cycling buzzing hum, always makes me think of plugging and unplugging a guitar into an amp. It takes the place of drums and bass, with only Alan's barely-there guitar and tremulous voice hovering over it. I always picture him making this one alone in the studio, barely picking the strings of a capoed guitar with one hand, and inserting and removing the plug for another instrument with the other.

I get the impression Low have always recorded in fairly friendly places, whether an old church or Steve Albini's studio or their own basement, but "Home" feels like a missive from the guts of some massive major label complex late at night, Mimi and Zak both dozing on couches, Alan missing his kids and his friends and his home and wanting to be anywhere less sterile. Of all the brief snippets of songs that Low scattered around their earlier albums - "Streetlight," "Stay," "Dark," even "Sea" - "Home" feels the most complete. Maybe because, like "Dark," it comes in at the end of the album, providing a brief postscript. But instead of providing a coda to the hypnotic "Do You Know How to Waltz?" "Home" slowly rears its head after the brief and ravishingly romantic "Will the Night," undercutting that song's swooning with a bit of desolation. It feels more self-contained, and after all the reviews that told me that Secret Name was nothing but pretty melodies and sweet voices "Home" was maybe the single biggest indication that there was something darker and deeper and more significant in this music.

Alan's slightly quavering voice ("perhaps a little homage to the swans," he says) and his choice of lyrics make this track an anti-lullabye. It always feels to me like it's being sung to someone 'small,' and that makes "Home" reassuring in a perverse way. Everyone wants to go home, even when you're old. Something about those word choices make me feel like "Home" could be a song from an old, dark fairy tale, and that plug noise (or whatever it is) turns into something more ominous: the rumble of storm clouds, or animals out in the woods, or just the sounds of the dark city. But in here it's okay. Although it sounds like it's being sung from far away, "Home" also makes me feel I'm the one actually at home, like I'm blessed in that way the narrator isn't. I love traveling, but I'm also one of those people who enjoys the return most of all and more often than not it's that rumble and quaver I'm humming to myself as I haul my luggage in the door.

I see looking this entry over that I've used some variant of "this songs makes me feel like" or "I aways imagine that" more often than most of Low's songs. Something about the late night stasis, Grimm Brothers feel and that plug noise just makes "Home" very evocative for me, and I can't help conjuring up associations every time I hear it. On another day you'd probably get a distinct but thematically related set. Up until "Walk Into the Sea" it's probably my favourite closer from a Low album.