Songs for life

and the miracle of live music

(Tip: the footnotes are for aficionados. Or save them for the second pass.)

A few years ago I was at a church service. It was not a funeral or a wedding, just a regular Sunday service. When I was younger I would have occupied the time with an atheistic internal rant. Now I was older, meaning not just intellectually and emotionally, but also I had sat through a hell of a lot of rubbish — terrible seminars, tortuous presentations of strategies and visions and reflections, administrative-figurehead conference welcome speeches — so now I was less bothered by thirty minutes of metaphysically dubious platitudes.

The thing that struck me was the genius of a regular sermon. You give people a bunch of advice and counselling, but no matter how good it is, even if it has apparently arrived directly from God, people are weak and easily distracted; they need a refresher course. They don't mind that they're hearing the same thing over and over again. They want to hear the same thing. They want to be reminded of all the good advice. They want their resolve revitalised. They want a pep talk.

I have become so boring that my takeaway was: can I book myself a weekly time-management sermon? 

I thought of this again on Thursday night, when I went to a Crowded House concert. Crowded House is a band that has been around since my youth in New Zealand. I heard them on the radio while I was a teenager, just as I'd heard their predecessors, Split Enz, when I was a little kid¹. They broke up around when I finished my undergrad degree, but I clung to both bands’ Greatest Hits, and later their individual albums when I left for the wider world to be a grad student. On CD players and mix tapes and then playlists, they were a reliable connection to home and to childhood, and also an endless source of emotional sustenance. Is it possible that I have listened to “Distant Sun” more than 1000 times?² They were an aural distillation of all that is good and hopeful and worthwhile. Their biggest hit in the US was “Don't Dream It's Over”, and for the UK it was, inevitably, a song about the weather³.

After they broke up, the lead singer, Neil Finn (if this was an article in the New Zealand Herald, it would be “national treasure Neil Finn”), released some solo albums and two albums with his brother Tim. Neil and bass-player Nick Seymour reformed the band in the aftermath of the drummer Paul Hester's suicide in 2005, and now the band is tightly bound to its history and lineage: besides Neil Finn and Nick Seymour, the other members are Neil's two sons, and the band's original producer Mitchell Froom.

I have been to several Finn-infused concerts over the years. I hear the same songs, but it's like a church service: I want to hear the same songs. My soul needs the sermon.

Life is busy. Life is stressful. Life is, quite often, a drag. I felt like I wasn't in the right mood to enjoy a concert. There was stuff I was worried about, and mountains of work I was behind with, and my inbox was stacked with so many little problems that they added up to one very big problem. (Including: what I was I going write about this week?) It was multiplied by the frustration that all of this frustration was going to ruin a concert I should have been looking forward to for months.

The concert was in the grounds of Cardiff Castle, which is a beautiful setting for a show. On how many live tracks have I heard Neil Finn cry out, “What a beautiful setting this is!”? This was not the steps of the Sydney Opera House, but he would surely do it again tonight. (And he did! There was much classic Crowdie banter about the castle and the keep; the summer, the sunshine, and then the moon.) There were hipster food trucks, and an efficient beer stand, and a one-way system for the toilets. Now, as they say, we're getting somewhere⁴.

Neil's son Liam opened. Liam is a loony. He may also be a genius. It's hard to be sure when he's jumping around the stage messing with looped drums and guitars, and talking to himself.

Then he played “Empty Head”, from his old band Betchadupa. That's when strange feelings arrived. The band were current while I was a PhD student. I enjoyed some of their songs, even though I suspected that I was too old for this youngsters’ music. That was 20 years ago! Now I'm not the only one who's too old for that stuff — so is the guy playing it, now in his 40s.

That was nothing to how I felt when he played “Better to Be”, from his 2007 solo album. Now I had tears in my eyes. What was going on? Was the song that good? The first time I heard it I thought it was just Ok; I thought the whole album was just Ok⁵. Then we saw him play at a club in Cork, a small upstairs room where you could see the river out of the window. He played like a demon who was sitting on a thumbtack. Now it sounded like one of the best albums I'd ever heard.

That was over 15 years ago. It was the vertigo that was getting to me. It was supercharged nostalgia coming in rapid-fire shots. And we hadn't even got to the really old stuff!

During the thirty-minute between-band stage preparation I tried to also prepare myself.

Of course it was unnecessary. I had been preparing for decades. This is the reward for having a band or a singer who is with you your whole life. You progress from excitement of hearing your favourite songs live, to the pleasure of hearing them again, to something much stronger⁶.

I had prepared in the best possible way, by being unprepared. I had mostly forgotten the concert was approaching; it was just another obstacle on my journey through my google calendar. I might not have listened to Crowded House for over a year. I hadn’t event checked the recent setlists to get my hopes up for any particular rare tracks.

I was perfectly set up for three decades of intense familiarity to bowl me over.

They kicked off with “World Where You Live”. As always, the entire crowd threw themselves into that soaring chorus. The service had begun. For the next 90 minutes I felt the way you do at the best concerts: life is so good, so very clearly, obviously good, that the only mystery is why it's not obvious all the time.

The only way to remember is to regularly attend the sermons.

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For those waiting for more fiction, it’s coming soon. I promise. For those hankering for more wise words on academia, fear not: I won’t be able to resist.

1. I distinctly remember being at the school playground climbing frame, ranging over the thing with none of the focus of my colleagues, because I was entirely distracted by pondering the meaning of “History Never Repeats”.

2. Another clear memory: listening to it on the car radio while driving to a lecture. If not the first time I heard it, certainly in the top five out of those thousand. I thought the guitar sounded weak and thin; I missed the sonic depth of the older songs. This is a chronic failing: I am eternally unable to appreciate a song the first time around. I certainly could not guess that I would grow to love it more than probably any other song I've ever heard.

3. For a while I strongly believed that “Better Be Home Soon” was better than both. I have to admit that it doesn't have quite the power of “Dream”, which always succeeds in being timely. (For example, right now our neighbours are building a wall between us. I am dreaming of when it’s over.) I have a live version of “Better Be Home Soon” where Neil says, “I've never done it since and I'm really pissed off about that. It just came all in one as well,” and then he playfully implies that “The Drugs Don't Work” was a rip-off. Tonight he played it on the piano.

4. They struggled with the shuffle on that song. I don't even know what a shuffle is, but maybe I know what they mean. It feels like it should blast off, but never quite makes it. I, of course, enjoyed taking a determinist's exception to the bit at the end, “We can choose what we choose to believe.” Such naivity.

5. You see what I mean?

6. "Something So Strong" is their most pure pop song. Probably about love, maybe about coffee. Paul Hester thought the music video looked like a margarine commercial; the director believed it would be the beginning of a communist revolution. I learned this in a book of the history of the band. Guess what it’s called?