Someone Else's Déjà Vu Part 1

Currently listening to:
Song: “Someone Else’s Déjà Vu”
Artist: Son, Ambulance
Album: Someone Else’s Déjà Vu

This is going to be a LONG blog entry. You’ve been warned.

I have a strange relationship with this album. I had never really found many songs that I liked by Son, Ambulance, but when this album came out, I bought it after listening to the song “Juliet’s Son” and began to love it to pieces. I bought it the summer before I began my third year of college. At the time, I was getting ready to perform my first The Candle Simon show at Knickerbockers, I had been dumped and was just getting back into the dating scene and was moving from a Centennial single to a Madison apartment. Oddly, though, when I listen to this album, I don’t feel hurt. I imagine myself in the drivers seat of my Ford Escape, the windows rolled down, driving through the Lincoln streets at night with the cool breeze blowing through my hair. It was simple. It was easy. It was free. I felt free, and it was beautiful feeling. I was jumping into so many new adventures with a heart hoping to heal. There’s just something about the tenderness of Joe Knapp’s voice, the gentleness of the piano, and the palm muted guitar that keeps a constant flow. I mostly listened to this album in my vehicle at night and something wonderful was usually going on while listening. The summer ended and life took off once again. I hadn’t listened to the album much since and I don’t understand why. I’m amazed at the thoughts and feelings I can pull from my memory by the trigger of a song. This is one I miss.

This finally leads me to The World in Six Songs. The final chapter was of love. The minutes after I had finished, I was a little disappointed. Giving a day to let it all sink in, I began to appreciate it more. I suppose it just wasn’t quite what I was expecting right off the bat. I was expecting answers to my questions. Instead, I received answers to questions I never thought about that I should have been asking. It was rather depressing really, but life as a musician who wears her heart on her sleeve makes more sense as to why I do what I do and why the rest of the world reacts they way it does to music and musicians. I have a long passage I want to share with you from the book that’s actually from the religion section:

“Some of our deepest feelings come through the spirit,” Joni (Mitchell) continued. “To the extent that religion is a manifestation of spirit, it really ought to reflect the full range of feelings, especially joy. The ballet I wrote (Shine) is Gnostic, because Gnosticism rides the cusp, in a way, of all spiritual thought. It absorbed just about every religion, and put the goddess back in, it was earth-friendly, woman-friendly, and all the things that religion isn’t at this time. It saddens me so deeply what we, the Woodstock generation, have done to our planet. And nobody listens! We keep trashing it, ruining it, there won’t be anyone left fifty years from now and its purely our Tower of Babel arrogance that has brought us to this. Only humans have the stupidity to destroy their own planet. You talk a lot about ‘evolution’ in The World in Six Songs, but maybe it would be more accurate to talk about humans as the products of devolution, of a relentless pursuit of perfection in stupidity and arrogance. Even religion today has lost its ability to pull us out - now it’s all warrior gods. My song ‘Strong in the Wrong’ is a direct attack on these subversions of religion. On the other hand, the Gnostic God is a thing within you whereby you lose your self-consciousness and transcend. It’s more like Buddhism, in that way. So the Buddhists in the dance troupe kind of lip up because, it’s not like the Buddhists are afraid to do a Catholic dance, but man! the Catholics are sure afraid to do a Buddhist dance.”

As for parts from the love chapter:
“Romantic love songs are a sham that perpetuate a lie on unsuspecting young kids,” said Frank Zappa. “I think one of the causes of bad mental health in the United States is that people have been raised on ‘love lyrics.’”
Joni Mitchell says, “There’s no such thing as romantic love. It was a myth invented in ancient Sumeria, repopularized in the Middle Ages, and one that is clearly not true. Romantic love is all about ‘I’ this and ‘I’ that. But true love is about ‘other.’”

I strangely agree with some of this.

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Other parts:
What is this thing called love that it is so slippery, so ephemeral, so capricious? Could some of the greatest literature and music of all time have been written about an illusion? For those legions of modern thinkers and scientists who are atheists, there is certainly precedent in all the great writing and painting that was directed at a nonexistent God.
Because romantic love is what gets written about, talked about, filmed and sung about so much, we can temporarily forget that love comes in many different forms - the love between parents and children, between friends, love of God, love of one’s way of life, and love of country. What all these forms of love have in common is intense caring (the opposite of love is not hate, but indifference), caring more about someone or something else than you care about yourself.

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Love is about feeling that there is something bigger than just ourselves and our own worries and existence. Whether it is love of another person, of country, of God, of an idea, love is fundamentally an intense devotion to this notion that something is bigger than us. Love is ultimately larger than friendship, comfort, ceremony, knowledge, or joy. Indeed, as the Four Wise Ones once said, it may be all you need.
Romantic love is typically blind, as Maugham notes; we feel it for those we don’t really know. And it tends to be very me-oriented: I love her because of the way I feel when I’m with her; because I have fun when I’m with her; because I find her beautiful, sexy, smart, funny, and so on. A more mature love comes when we care more about that person’s happiness than we do our own - the selfless love that parents show toward children, a willingness to do without so that the child or our mate can do with. Romantic love drives us to be with the other person at all costs; mature love drives us to want to see the other person happy, even if that means not being with us. “If you love somebody, set them free,” as Sting famously sang.

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The connection between truth and love is obvious - when we love, we make ourselves vulnerable (and there are many songs that reflect this naked emotional state). Real love requires an almost irrational trust and faith in another person. We never really know if our partner has been faithful, has been stealing money from us, or has an ulterior motive. As Will Smith’s character says in the movie Hitch, love is like jumping off a cliff. These concerns take time, sometimes years, to assuage, and relationships would never make it that long if we didn’t suspend suspicion temporarily and take the risk of letting the other person into our lives and hearts. Different people resort to different mechanisms, some psychological, some practical, to bridge this gulf of trust. Some refuse to make themselves completely vulnerable to their partner, exchanging safety for lack of intimacy. Some - who are otherwise very well protected in all other dealings, in business and friendships - throw caution to the wind over and over in their love lives. Each new love is a new beginning; “the only love worth having is one that is complete and total,” we say to ourselves. Others insist on prenuptial agreements. “I’ve never seen a prenup I couldn’t break,” a lawyer once told me, “so why bother in the first place?”

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There are love songs to reflect four stages of love: I want you, I got you, I miss you, and it’s-over-and-I’m-heartbroken. Love songs reflect the different kinds of love as well: the Romeo-and-Juliet love (I’d kill myself for this person); the more mature love of being together for decades and looking back; and the love of ideals, such as of country. The dominant theme of popular music for the last fifty years seems to be love in all these forms.

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Many people report that music triggers memories long ago buried, and this seems especially true of popular love songs. This may be a modern phenomenon, and from what we know about the neurobiology of memory, it is a product of the way that human memory works. The prevailing view among memory theorists is that nearly every experience we’ve had is encoded in memory; the trick is getting it out. What you want in a retrieval cue - jargon for the thing that helps you pull a memory up from your brain - is something uniquely associated with a time or place or event.
Pop songs, because they are typically played over and over again on the radio for a short period of time, make ideal cues for this, as do smells. A song like the national anthem or “Happy Birthday” can certain trigger memories, but a song you haven’t heard since you were fourteen years old is more likely to trigger deep, buried memories.
“In that first moment when we’re sexually attracted or romantically attracted or both, whatever song is there in the background takes on an absolutely important meaning and that meaning will never ever vanish or fade,” Jonathan Berger says. “And I think what that is saying, is that there is always a long game. There’s always an ‘I didn’t get it’ that persists all the way through life. I have this strong memory associated with Freda Payne’s ‘Band of Gold.’

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I think this is pretty much amazing:
The honest signal hypothesis is particularly relevant for love, and may explain why love songs move us so. When someone tells us they love us, we may have our doubts. When they sing it, all our doubts seem to melt away. This may be an evolutionary and biological inheritance, something that is beyond our powers of rational control or conscious influence - singing matters. This could account for why people become furious when they find that singers are lip-syncing. It may also explain our fascination with the private lives of rock singers (much more so than other band members): If they are not living the life they profess in their songs, our truth detectors go wild.

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And of course, the final paragraph:
It is the love of our existence that is the highest love of all, the love of humanity with all our flaws, all our destructiveness, all our petty fears, gossip, and rivalries. A love of the goodness that we sometimes show under the most difficult stresses, of the heroism of doing the right thing even when no one can see us doing it, of being honest when there is nothing to gain by it, of loving those whom others might find unlovable. It is all this, and our capacity to write about it - to celebrate it in song - that makes us human.

Now, I could have tried to paraphrase everything, but…eh. I don’t think I could have explained it any better.

Peace out. For now.