Ghosts and Empty Sockets

Little revelations are wonderful. I feel as if lately I have had several striking insights into my tastes and preferences. There's a post in the works about my preference for documentaries over realistic fictional films (the reason for this came to me like a flash while I was showering one morning), but I thought I'd take a detour tonight to write about another startlingly abrupt realization.

Those of you who know me well are aware of my deep passion for the songs of Paul Simon. He is a giant of American pop music, at once capturing the hopes and fears of the moment (decade after decade) and also pushing his listeners forward into unexplored territories. Well, another favorite artist of mine, one more of my own generation, is Sufjan Stevens. I think some people find Stevens a bit off-putting, potentially for several reasons. His music is bizarre: minimalist but with lush orchestration, with lots of jangles and oddities and a shifting meter. His lyrics are strange and often obtuse.

Thinking about this brought about the aforementioned insight. Their is a lyrical connection between Paul Simon and Sufjan Stevens, a talent they share that few others possess, and something which draws me back to them both time and again. I realized that Simon and Stevens have a unique knack for narrative songs (with a little twist to be discussed later). Most songs you think of deal with a theme, an idea such as love or loneliness. They dwell on this subject for all of their three minutes. There is a good reason for this: how would you give the plot of a novel in song form and still get radio play? The format of pop music forbids drawn out narrative. The magic of Simon and Stevens, then, is that they both excel at providing what I will call "snapshot narrative". That is, they manage to tell a story in their songs -- often giving a life's worth of backstory -- but they do it in ultra-condensed word pictures.

For the purposes of comparison, I will pick a favorite song of mine from each of the artists. Simon's title track from his seminal album Graceland comes very close to perfection. The singer talks about a trip he is taking to Graceland in Memphis with his son. Packed into this is his sadness over the failure of his marriage. But Simon does not give us a run down of everything that went wrong, or the reasons his wife left, or even a detailed description of all the pain he felt. Instead, he gives us an infinite nothing: "She comes back to tell me she's gone; as if I'd never noticed, as if I didn't know my own bed. As if I'd never noticed, the way she brushed her hair from her forehead." Years of arguments and heartbreak are jammed into that little line, one of the most powerful I know.

There is so much going on in Steven's "Casimir Pulaski Day" that it can be hard to keep it straight. Stevens sings as a boy who loses his dear friend (and potential love interest) to cancer. Like Simon, Stevens can succinctly capture the complexity of relationships in a few words. "Goldenrod and the 4-H stone: the things I brought you when I found out you had cancer of the bone." The key to this writing is mystery: we do not know exactly what significance those gifts had, but the image opens up a window on the tenderness between the two.

Part of the job of the poet is to take experiences and translate them into imagery. It is not enough to describe; the creative genius of the poet lies in reimagining events in a new light, with new language. By this measure, Simon and Stevens are masters of the form; they are the rare singer/songwriters who are accomplished poets. They are not content to catalogue events; they translate happenings and emotions into beautiful pictures.