The National to Derrida: Music In Context

The National

It didn’t feel like too big a deal at first, when things didn’t work out between me and the girl from California. Sure, it was a pity. She was beautiful, after all; smart and affectionate too. But best of all she was a fan of The National. When we discovered our shared love for the guys from Ohio on our first date, things could hardly have seemed any better. Sadly, however, it came to a premature end when she rather abruptly called time on things just a few weeks later. “Never mind, these things happen, plenty more fish in the sea,” my friends all told me. “Even fish who like The National.” They are a rare breed, but this was true enough – and at least in ending so early, for once it didn’t seem like something my mind was likely to linger on.

Perhaps I would have still felt this relaxed about it a few weeks later, were it not for the very same band we both adored personally intervening to kill off any chances of the latest disappointment in my love-life ebbing away quietly.

Ok, so I admit The National did not write the penultimate track on their new album, which I had been looking forward to for months, specifically to remind little old me of that girl from California. But given that just a few weeks after things finished between us I found myself listening to Matt Berninger pining over a Californian girl living in London, loving her life in the rain, I hope I could be forgiven for feeling like they really had. England is the best song on High Violet – possibly the best thing they’ve ever recorded – and after one listen to its soaring melodies and the blaring horns I was hooked. Yet with every listen repeatedly churning my personal associations with the lyrics, listening to it became an increasingly bittersweet experience. It felt like I was being taunted and teased by the very musicians who had helped inspire our brief tryst.

Thankfully that eventually wore off a little. But as a music lover, it left behind an interesting reminder of the emotional power involved in affixing our own meanings to a piece of music – and how this can often happen against our wishes.

Perhaps it will stem, as in my case, from little more than some vague links between pop lyrics and episodes from our own lives. But sometimes it doesn’t even take that much.

Micah P Hinson recently revealed to me in an interview that his wife does not allow him to listen to any Richard Hawley records when she is around, because it reminds her of an unhappy incident that happened to the couple while Hinson was supporting Hawley on tour a few years ago. The unpleasant event did not even involve Hawley himself, but in the mind of Hinson’s wife a mental bond was permanently forged between the British crooner’s music and memories of what happened that night.

But while it’s unfortunate that songs can be sometimes be soured forever by a personal association, it’s our ability to create our own interpretations of lyrics that helps make music so powerful. One only has to look at the continued debate down the years about the true subjects of Carly Simon’s ‘You’re So Vain’ and Alanis Morrisette’s ‘You Oughta Know’ – and the popularity of discussing lyrics on the Song Meanings website – to see how much we like music to have a sense of ambiguity about it.

Indeed, Pearl Jam’s Eddie Vedder has previously criticised music videos for robbing music fans of the ability to affix their own meanings to songs. During an interview in 1993 he said: “Before music videos first came out, you’d listen to a song with headphones on, sitting in a beanbag chair with your eyes closed, and you’d come up with your own visions, these things that came from within. Then all of a sudden, sometimes even the very first time you heard a song, it was with these visual images attached, and it robbed you of any form of self-expression.”

Interestingly, Vedder has since revealed that the upbeat interpretation of ‘Alive’ by the fans of his band has changed the way even he views the lyrics and the meaning behind his own song: “They lifted the curse. The audience changed the meaning for me.”

In contrast, Bono finds only confusion in some U2 fans’ more optimistic view of One, saying: “The song is a bit twisted, which is why I could never figure out why people want it at their weddings. I have certainly met a hundred people who’ve had it at their weddings. I tell them, ‘Are you mad? It’s about splitting up!’”

It’s hard to imagine French philosopher Jacques Derrida was a fan of either Pearl Jam or U2. But given his theory of the freeplay of the signifier and the signified, at least he would have approved of Eddie Vedder’s free-thinking approach to the meanings behind his lyrics.

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