Today’s post has very little to do with plants, or what we might call ‘nature’, other than the human members of it and how some of them like to play music and talk about their relationship with time.
There are also quite a few links to music videos, if anyone is feeling like a nostalgia kick!
Maybe I’m just the right age; not just now, but to have grown up in an era of angsty, eloquent, often angry, woman-fronted indie rock groups, and occasional solo singers (Alanis Morissette, I’m looking at you). As a pre- and early teen, these voices and their music left an indelible mark, and whilst the musical variety was enormous (I doubt many people would put Shirley Manson, Nina Persson, Cerys Matthews and even pre-‘Hollaback’ Gwen Stefani in the same bracket), there was something about the attitude to the world: young and angry, lyrical, observational and world-worn, that stuck in my mind. So, I was open, over the last decade, to a new generation of more lo-fi, shoe-gazey singer-songwriters like Sharon Van Etten, of more-or-less my age, that seem to be the heirs of the music I had loved a couple of decades before.
Another point that I suppose I should make at this juncture is that I have always had a difficult relationship with time. I’m not talking about my previously-perpetual tardiness (though this has improved in recent years, sorry old friends), but I do think that it is related. Whilst I do not deny its usefulness, or perhaps necessity, I have always found this very human way of measuring and dividing up the experience of going through seasons, life cycles, days even, as limiting or stressful; despite my efforts to the contrary, I cannot help but be aware of it, abide by it to some extent.
All this brings us to my hypothesis, which I do not especially put out to be tested: that my age and musical trends of my late childhood, as well as a hypersensitivity to time and a penchant for lyrical songwriting and emotive vocals ideally positioned me to be receptive to Sharon Van Etten’s glorious 2019 song, ‘Seventeen’, recalling with a mixture of perspicacity, hindsight and tenderness, half a lifetime later, a seventeen-year-old version of herself, or a projection of herself onto a seventeen year-old; its simple yet emotionally-complex lyrics complemented by a stirring indie ballad production and Van Etten’s rich, plaintive voice. Recently, the song came on the radio and I felt what I can only describe as nostalgia at a double remove, not for 2019, but for my own adolescence. I don’t think being a teenager is ever easy for anyone, but I found myself dwelling not on the ennui of school subjects that I couldn’t wait to jettison forever (some of which I probably would now find far more interesting) nor the self-doubt and hormonal tidal waves of emotion, but on the softness, the safety of growing up in relative privilege, with a loving family in what felt like an easier time in history (though the darkness was not of course absent, only encroaching and elsewhere), in a comfortable area of a wealthy nation, with popular culture reflecting this softness back at me, entertainment rather than overtly angry, polarised debate and satire.
Looking forward into the abyss of climate crisis does not always get me or anyone very far, so I wonder how much can be gained from looking back, not with naïveté, but with awareness that the lives we once led are the lives we are still living and will live, and that these lives, their intricacies and histories, will one day join back into all the matter of all of the other lives, human and nonhuman, contributing to the ongoingness that we all share. As such, here is my own reflection on a version of my teenage self and the life he and the unknowingly-lucky ones like him led, which I conceived as a continuity from Van Etten’s song, though not sung to its melody. I’d love to hear some of your own reflections about past periods of your life and how music, poetry or other art perhaps give you new ways in, new perspectives with which to think them through.
The cover of Van Etten’s album, Remind Me Tomorrow
Constantly Being Led Astray, after Sharon Van Etten
And, oh my –
So many errors mine
Small crimes committed
With hormonal ampleur
Crushed feathering hearts with careless words
Leaps of embarrassment, amateur Icarus
Less fearless escape, more corner shop courage
I did not yet know how to stand upon my legs
But, what swift calves
My shoulders not broad, hair already fine in front
So I flattened my abdomen and vaunted a beard
Aped romantic heroes and gothic fantasies
Wrong rules, wrong game
Harsh opinions I spat as just truths
Righteousness my cloak and spear
Studiously finding and losing God
I have no advisory words for that beautiful boy
Who frayed his own meandering path to becoming
Someone of whom I am not ashamed
I do not envy him
But I cherish the treasures he held
Vast seas and skies all open before him
Tearing down a rainy street under lamplight
Beaming joy in a sweaty basement club night
Night sky decorating his sacred space
All novels and angst and poetry and sublimated themes in TV series
Afternoons that were eras in soft mauve and cream rooms
With cheap candles and lava lamps
Friendship that felt like eternity
And before him, before me
He saw only and always, possibility