TheHellmouths
Slow Dancin' With My Sister in Acton
This is a song about the timeless and rapturous love a man can only have for his sister, and the glorious reciprocity thereof when he swallows his pride and pitches woo from the womb. It is the love that dare not speak it’s name but rather sings! sings! sings! to the happy hills of home, declaring itself in joyous resonance, sonorous with hearts of all who behold, and harmonious with the mathematical reverberations of a universe glowing with invisible light which casts itself only on those who know the truth of love and carry it into places where high and mighty intellectual types don’t go poking around if they know what’s good for them. For a whisper is but the hiss of shame… Moreover, I wanted to capture a time and place, rather, a timelessness and — e r —placenessness, in which siblings are as free to show their love as they are to vilify those in their midst who suffer from mental illnesses, have different skin colour, speak with thick accents or read books, for such people will never know the strength of heart and fortitude that comes of an unpolluted lineage reaching all the way back to first cow-flayers that came to this veritable Eden. I can only hope my feeble words can do justice to “my old stomping grounds”, that Angels may cross it without bending a blade of grass, sit by the lake and admire the swirling colours in it’s surface, partake of the bouquet, and let their spirits grace curtained subterrains in which I knew the pleasures of the Orient. Lo that I could walk again through it’s cavernous streets and look upon the faces of the girls untouched by course lines and glowing with youth and pregnancy; walk into the taverns where spirited folk boiled from the doors at closing time for mano ‘a’ mano ‘a’ mano ‘a’ mano etc. demonstrations of healthy discourse; while up above, affirmed ascetics very nearly achieve flight in collusion with a higher state of consciousness as spoken of by the most misunderstood prophets of history, that my the period of my age, as was my youth, not be wasted on ambition. Let this song be a gift, perhaps, if I may be so bold, an anthem, that future poets may come for solace from a world that puts too much stock in words, thoughts, feelings, ideas, ideals, sensations, people, and working where you live; finding their inspiration in the plastic molded chairs of coffee franchises, and in the strength and delicacy with which nature’s humble weed pushes itself through asphalt, and swans walk across the street rather than fly.
This is one of those rare songs in which Garrry and I worked on the lyrics together, which was necessary, we felt, in light of the sensitivity and importance of the material, written as it was, in exile from the place of it’s inspiration. It was an intense experience giving rise to raw naked emotion, bitter words, agonizing silences and brutal honesty. There were times over this arduous journey of creation when I thought this song would break up the band, when we could hardly look at each other, either out of intense animosity, or out of fear. Maybe we had aimed to high, flown too close to the sun in our arrogance that we could attain perfection, one the eagle to other’s Prometheus, impugning the other when we doubted ourselves, without the option of surrender to futility after having already sacrificed so much to a terrible and insatiable muse. Yes, we were our own harshest judges in our search for artistic purity, constantly tempted to relent to the obvious commercial potential of this work, knowing we could never live with ourselves if we copped to such base considerations. But at the same time, we wanted to reach people, and it was with that simple and easily overlooked reasoning that we knew we could be true to ourselves as well as the audience for whom we were giving so much of ourselves in the form of this song. Looking back on it, the entire experience, however traumatic and visceral, actually served to bring us closer together, as songwriters, as a band, as human beings. Only when you’ve had everything taken away, do you learn to give so much.
Yours,
K