I Remember

this is secretly one of our favourites

I'm not sure whether Alan's liner notes to the b-side version of "I Remember" found on A Lifetime of Temporary Relief are just indicating that alternate version of the opening song from Secret Name or to "I Remember" in general. I kind of hope it's the latter.

No disrespect to the version they recorded with Mimi singing lead for the UK "Immune" single. The drum machine and odd organ tones make for a striking arrangement, and of course Mimi herself sounds great. But for a record that at the time I'd been told was Low's loveliest, to come to Secret Name through a haze of muted optigan organ distortion (not, Alan takes pains to say, samples of record hiss), faraway kick drum and snare tap and Alan's exceedingly carefully placed guitar notes... "I Remember" in its primary form is a thing of total desolation, right down to Alan's high pitched but muted delivery of the song's few lines.

None of the notes in the box set or on Low's old web page reveal much about what's going on here, and even for Low at the time "I Remember"'s lyrics reach new heights of opaqueness and brevity:

I remember every number

I remember graduation

I remember painted faces

No they couldn't believe it was you
I knew

To have that be all that was said, to leave the last two minutes of a four minute song with nothing more than the odd guitar note (played on Gavin Rossdale's guitar, for whatever reason, and taken by Alan as more "evidence that i'm a pitiful guitar player," despite sounding fine to me) and the tender thump of the kick drum in Mimi's mini-kit... it's both somewhat frightening and oddly comforting. This, then, was a band not interested in coddling the listener, one that full realized how lush even something like "I Remember" could be in the right context. It also for the first time highlighted for me the menace lurking implicit in many of the songs on Things We Lost in the Fire - that couplet of "No they couldn't believe it was you / I knew" is redolent of crimes gone unpunished, or small town whispers, or just pasts you try to forget. In some ways it's almost paradigmatic in terms of the oblique violence lurking under much of Low's material at the time.

The b-side version injects too much warmth and colour into the arrangement to have quite the same effect, although without the example of the album version I would probably think it just another good, possibly even great Low song. But as it is this version just isn't cold enough, or stark enough, or harsh enough, to hit me as hard as the original. I can't think of any way to convey that effect to you except to note that, at one point, I stumbled upon this image under a long-forgotten context and all I could think was that it looks the way the Alan-sung "I Remember" feels:

Will the Night

The original recorded version of "Will the Night," as much as I love it, seems painfully perverse to anyone (and this is going to include almost everybody who wasn't a Low fan back in 1997) who has heard the much more available and popular version on Secret Name. The original was, in Alan's words, "recorded on a mini-cassette recorder with us hovering over, then played back through a lot of reverb." The effect, more than any other song in Low's discography, is to make "Will the Night" sound like something you'd find on an old cassette tape in an abandoned, possibly haunted house. Only instead of creepy, it's kind of wholesome and comforting - if there are ghosts, you could picture them using their poltergeist powers to pull out a chair for you to sit in when you're having a hard day, not tossing shit across the room.

The video they made for it seems to acknowledge that feeling, and if you're only familiar with the later take on "Will the Night" (or even if you've never heard either) you really should watch it; this song, more than any other, represents the terminal point of Low's ambition to play as softly and slowly as possible (although I would argue that such an ambition is a smaller part of their music than conventional accounts suggest), and it's kind of bracing to experience it.

I am an acknowledged latecomer to Low's music, so by the first time I heard the Songs For a Dead Pilot version (where, and I want to emphasize this, it leads off the EP, which is pretty bold) I already had the later one memorized. But I don't know how easy it would be to tell what they're singing if you didn't already know it. The lyrics are the same as the later version (as far as I can tell), which makes "Will the Night" one of the few unambiguous Low songs:

Will the night
Last forever?
Stay
By my side
Cause tonight, together
Would be divine
But once it's gone
Your face to hide
Against the sun
The moon
Am I
On the other side
So blind
So long
Goodbye
Goodnight

The EP version has Alan and Mimi singing this (sounding particularly gorgeous on the momentary, soaring pause during "On the other side"), with maybe a bit of guitar being played. They're been mixed very, very low, so between the reverb and room sound and everything else it sounds like they're maybe down the hall from you. It's one of the few clear love songs in Low's repertoire, and it's fitting that they sound like they're singing it to one another, far away from everything that doesn't matter. If that was all we had of "Will the Night," it'd be a particularly poignant oddity in Low's work, a lovely song given a remarkable treatment. But I think it'd also be a little frustrating - the EP version is beautiful, and I'm glad they tried it that way (Alan's contention that "sometimes i think we should do a whole record this way" is actually one I kind of wished they had followed up on), but even in such a muted form you can tell the melody of the song is one for the ages. It's so good, and it's one of their favourite songs (as Alan has said more than once), that it would be baffling and frustrating if such an obscure, completists-only fate was all the band had in store for "Will the Night."

Thankfully, a few years later Low decided that "a coherent version" of the song was warranted, and it became the anchor of Secret Name. Located between "Days Of..." and "Home" (both of which have been previously written up under this tag), it takes on a disproportionate weight of the album despite being a slim 2:23. Alan takes lead this time, although Mimi does back him up, with vocals and with a brief kettle drum surge to give the latter part of the song some heft. Other than that, the track is all strings; Alan starts singing "Will the night..." and instead of the expected guitar a string quartet (I think) starts up. I love strings, so I may be biased, but this is a perfect setting for the song. Despite its lack of a chorus or really any real structure the sentiment and melody of the song feel kind of like throwbacks to a more refined and romantic age of popular music (I couldn't really picture Sinatra doing it, but Alan sells the song short when he jokes "maybe barbara streisand will cover it some day").

It would have been good with guitar, or even just vocals, but those perfectly calibrated strings wrapping around Alan's voice (as Mimi's voice does) and that one, brief surge of bass drums - the first time I heard it, "Will the Night" in its 'coherent' form felt like a classic, and I haven't wavered from that belief since. Its lyrics speak movingly towards both the feeling we have when we're in love and the bittersweet certainty that something - time, space, responsibilities, life, etc - will prevent us from just ignoring the world in favour of our Other. But it's not a disappointed song; that lament of how we're "so blind" on the other side isn't despairing, and the closing shift from "goodbye" to "goodnight" acknowledges that they'll see each other soon. And implicit I think in "Will the Night" is that the fact that you can't just wall the two of you away from the world all the time is probably for the best, and makes the time you have together that much sweeter. It's a very, very romantic song, which makes the discussion about in the documentary included in A Lifetime of Temporary Relief all the funnier (I won't spoil it for those who haven't seen it). On the short list of songs I would want to have for a first dance at my wedding should I ever get married, there are not one but two Low songs. The other, and the one that's both more appropriate and slightly (I think) more likely to be approved by someone else is "Closer," but some small part of me thinks of the occasion whenever "Will the Night" - either version - plays.

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.

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.

Don't Understand

Woof. I managed to not quite get around to this today, as I spent much of the afternoon on the phone fixing my phone and internet connections. Which doesn't mean you don't get an entry; but I dug up my old piece on "Don't Understand," so both to put something here while being able to go to sleep and to embarrass myself into not slipping up again, here's what I thought of this song back in April 2004. Comments from the present time in []s and italics.

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Low are pretty much the only band I love that make me want to listen to nothing but themselves. I put on other acts I love (Plumtree, say, or the Wrens) and after finishing listening to them I want to listen to another record, sure, but necessarily another of their records. [Sheesh, put that more awkwardly, Mathers.] After finishing The Curtain Hits The Cast or Trust or Long Division or Things We Lost In The Fire or especially Secret Name, I just want to listen to more Low. Luckily, as you can see, I have plenty of options.

There are many reasons why I love Low, [STOP REPEATING THEIR NAME] but their lyrics, as oblique and fragmentary as they are, certainly form a large part. Yes, the songwriting two-thirds of Low are Mormons - what of it? It gives extra meaning to some of their lines if you know about Mormonism or Christianity in general. They honestly seem to be out to convert anyone so much as Mimi Parker and especially Alan Sparhawk are grappling with their own beliefs and the world. [Err... yes, this was posted with a "don't" missing from this line.] Note that almost all of their songs are sung in the first person ("Whore" being the only counterexample I can think of) [There are a number of songs sung as direct addresses, actually - but it's been a while since I've thought about the prevelance of "I" in their catalog, aside from the brief remarks in my entry on "Alone"]; Low's songs are compelling partly because they contain an astounding catalog of human folly, and they don't ever pretend that they are above it just because of their faith.

But then there are songs like "Don't Understand." It, arguably, belongs to the group of songs I've just mentioned; but like most of Low's songs, I dare you to tell me why other than just the fact that you know it does. It starts, and continues, with a weird sampled sound repeated over and over again, without ever gaining any variation; feedback from Alan's guitar coasts over the top. At around two minutes in, cymbals and then the repeated beats [WTF is up with that phrasing?] of bass and guitar join in. They sound like a death knell. After another minute, Sparhawk starts singing. As with much of Low's music, and similarly to the Radar Brothers, there is a sense that something horrible has happened/is happening/will happen. The lines "Drag you to town / treat you just like a son / alone in my house / did they teach you to run?" have a particularly awful resonance if you remember what Son has a central place in Alan's worldview. And then the moments that lock this song inexorably in my memory; Alan sings (with Mimi offering harmony)

I

don't

un

der

stand

And with each syllable the three instruments crash down like an axe. The idiot, gibbering sample in the back continues unabated. the song crashes along, nearly seven minutes and total. And then it, quite literally, recedes. That the next song on the album begins "Soon it will be over / I laughed under my breath over your shoulder" always creeps me out.

Low's music is, for whatever reason, one of the most intensely visual forms of music I can think of. The images the songs call to mind don't tend to be narrative so much as impressionistic, but they are powerful nonetheless. Slow motion and harsh lighting are often involved. You could quite easily score an experimental film to, say, Secret Name (where "Don't Understand" is found). The images for "Don't Understand" don't make much sense, and in any case they change. But for me this song is the sound of every repressed memory struggling back to the surface, of a small child crying in a closet.

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As clumsily as it's written, that entry still holds basically true for me. I want to write something about the use of terror in Low's songs, and inexorability, and the feeling of being pursued. But honestly, "The Lamb" is where I'll be locating at least some of that. The key with "Don't Understand," I think, is that contrast/relationship between the weird sample loop and the steady crash of the three main instruments on the 'chorus.' It's a great song, and as I mention here perfectly placed on Secret Name. I just wish I could have written more eloquantly on it.

Important Note: I've just discovered I do not, in fact, own the Songs For a Dead Pilot EP, which I thought I did. Could any helpful folk hook me up with those tracks until I can scratch up enough money to buy it myself? If anyone has the never-seen-by-me Low/Spring Heel Jack Bombscare EP that'd be fantastic too.

Starfire

I chose "Starfire" today for reasons other than historical progression, but after I started writing this entry I remembered with something approaching ruefulness that it also happens to continue the story of how I fell in love with Low, so I might as well start there. After getting and loving Things We Lost in the Fire it took me a while to investigate the rest of their discography. That happens to me a lot, and for two completely separate reasons. The more interesting one, which unfortunately does not hold with Low, is that there are albums I like, and even love, where I don't ever want to hear anything more by that band, where I feel like I have enough of that artist (A Hundred Miles Off by the Walkmen is a good example; I love that record more than I should, and I like a few other tracks I've heard, but I have an almost shocking aversion to getting any of their other albums). But often, it's just a case of time/money/laziness problems on my part.

The one thing I did do fairly quickly was download three free, legal Low MP3s from their label (I think, it was years ago). I got "Shame" from Long Division and "Two-Step" and "Starfire" from Secret Name, which I'd read about on NME.com (sadly, they started cleansing their online archives the same time they started reducing most of their album reviews to 200 words or so) and allmusic for a while at that point. And to be honest, if it'd just been "Starfire" I might have stopped right there.

I don't really think it's a bad song, there's a million things I'd take "Starfire" over, but that's now. I don't skip it when I'm listening to Secret Name, but it's not on my computer either (I don't keep whole albums I own on my computer, just 3-5 highlights from said albums). I don't think I've ever been moved to put it on a mix, which is a rarity for Low songs - hell, I've put "Home" on a mix. And at first, I actually experienced palpable dislike for "Starfire."

It's Alan's voice, especially at first; every line in the verse, which is seperated out line-by-line by Mimi's responding, wordless vocal and a stringed drone (violin? viola?) starts in a higher-pitched part of his range and then clumsily ascends to where he just sounds shrill and forced. In latter part of the track, once he and Mimi are exchanging "la la la"s the song actually becomes compelling to me, but that first section just turned me off. It's not as extreme as I may be making it sound; further experience with their discography suggests that "Starfire" is well within the limits of what Alan usually does. But he certainly doesn't do it on Things We Lost in the Fire; that is a record of uniformly smooth vocals, and I wasn't used to what he does on "Starfire" at all (you can compare it to the way I didn't like John Darnielle's voice the first time I heard The Sunset Tree, and now I love every song he sings). Of course, I'd soon find out that Low's music wasn't all like what that first album had prepared me for (and maybe on Monday I should do "Coattails" or something to talk about how surprised I was at how loud some of their songs are)

I don't dislike the structure, the Mimi-and-string response to each line is actually quite compelling, but the constant guitar burble is maybe actually, and it feels weird to say this about a Low song, a bit too busy. It works well on Secret Name coming right after the stark, terrified opener "I Remember" (one of my favourite Lows songs) to warm up the album a bit - I'm actually surprised that the above AMG review says "the music is so warm it's a literal caress from the speakers." Even "Starfire" feels a bit standoffish, to say nothing of "Don't Understand," "Lion/Lamb," "Immune," etc.

And as for what "Starfire" is about, this brings me to another of my frustrations with the band. I mostly love the new website (check out the video for "Breaker" while you're there!), but I kind of hate the information that's gone missing from the old site. Half of the albums have lyrics "coming soon" still, and the old page where Alan gave you brief tidbits of information on each song is gone completely. I miss that page. I loved that page! If it's a case of not having enough time to do it and someone from Low is somehow reading this page, I absolutely volunteer to do whatever transcribing, etc. can be done remotely, free of charge. As for "Starfire," my memories are a bit hazy, but Starfire is a friend of theirs (he's thanked in, I believe, a couple of the albums) who used(?) to work as a paramedic and who planned with Alan at one point to open a pirate radio station. Hence:

We'll call it Starfire, who will know?
I want a station of my own
I have the tools
I have my rules

I'll load the back end, you can drive
Broken bodies all the time
Let's take a ride
Starfire tonight
Ten thousand miles away
Away

(again, except for some "la la la"s, that's the whole song)

Now, I don't want the detailed stories of the genesis of each song, but that's not what the song notes were. And sometimes knowing just a bit of the background makes (for me at least) the song so much more resonant, even magical. Low tell so much of the story by leaving so much out, and that's whatI've come to like a little about "Starfire," even if there are problably ten songs I'd swap for it on Secret Name.