Katie Harkin's invented a new genre about longing for people the singer hasn't met yet. Read her thoughts below, followed by reflections from Shamir Bailey, Wye Oak's Jenn Wasner, Tom Fleming of Wild Beasts, and Corin Tucker, and check back throughout this week for responses from other Talkhouse contributors. —Amy Rose Spiegel, Editor-in-Chief, Talkhouse Music
I have been writing songs to you. I have been writing songs to others. I have been writing songs to myself.
Writing my first solo record has naturally made me consider the kinds of songs I want to add to the pile. It's been a stop-start process, which has meant I've had plenty of time to reflect. It's been in these moments of downtime that I've come to realize that one of my favorite things about music is its capacity to combine the infinite with the instant.
One day—as with scores of others—I had a personal “Eureka!” moment whilst listening to Carly Rae Jepsen's “Call Me Maybe.”
It was in a moment of reflection that—among the vocal charm and superhuman strings that make “Call Me Maybe” a beloved, timeless, massive choon—I got stuck on one lyric: “Before you came into my life, I missed you so bad.”
It's a lyric that transcends time itself. It should be filed under Science Fiction in the dusty library of pop lyrics.
Side note: A dusty library of pop lyrics should exist IRL. If I get to be a dusty old woman, I will gladly docent.
Sure, there are plenty of love songs directly inspired by science fiction. But where Al Stewart's “Sirens of Titan” is an echo of the Vonnegut novel by the same name, songs such as “Call Me Maybe” are science fiction in and of themselves, warping reality and disrupting the timeline. Jepsen had alerted me to a specific category of pop songs that I hadn't previously noted. Let's call them “Songs About People the Protagonist Hasn't Met Yet.”
A six-week U.S. van tour leaves you enough staring-out-of-the-window time to either spin yourself some theories or unspool completely.
One of the side effects of playing music as much as I have recently been able to is that, sometimes, in order to perform it for people, you travel in states of almost enforced contemplation. Only on a plane does someone strap you into a seat and demand that you turn your phone off. A six-week U.S. van tour leaves you enough staring-out-of-the-window time to either spin yourself some theories or unspool completely.
When it comes to my feelings about music, I can relate to sports fans. I love the game. I have favorite teams. I'm into noting the stats. Even if I do not consciously approach my own songwriting in this way, I'm buying the trading cards.
I began to make a list. I polled friends and kept my ears open for more instances of my new pet theory. The results are in.
The most obvious SAPTPHMY are the ones that leave me cold. Michael Bublé just hasn't met me yet. Savage Garden knew they loved me before they met me. Maybe it's too thinly veiled. Maybe I'm too far from the intended demographic. Maybe it's, y'know, the music. These songs just don't make my head fizzy like CRJ.
Queer longing, meanwhile, fits in neatly with SAPTPHMY. “I felt you in my legs before I ever met you,” from Tegan and Sara's “Nineteen,” perfectly reflects how it is possible to know an emotional truth even before direct experience lets you empirically prove it. It's a kind of songwriter's VR for feelings. The same goes for songs written for a younger audience. One of my friends suggested “Somewhere Out There” from the 1986 Disney kids film An American Tail, with the note, “Gets me every time.” Hope endures eternal.
When Avril Lavigne's “I'm With You” was on heavy rotation, I was sixteen, young enough (and closeted enough) that “I don't know who you are but I / I'm with you” moved me. But old enough not to admit it. I didn't think I believed in guilty pleasures, yet it still makes me cringe to confess: even though I wouldn't have said I liked the song at the time, something about it made my gut drop. At their best, though, SAPTPHMY bestow on the listener a unique kind of hope. At their worst, their internal-hope generation seems predatory, almost exploitative—using the listener's loneliness as fuel for the song to function.
As an eight-year-old watching Top of the Pops, I was told “there's no beginning, there'll be no end” for fifteen weeks in a row when Wet Wet Wet's cover of “Love Is all Around” sat at Number One for what seemed like eternity. In spite of myself, an atemporal love of its lyrics, like Avril’s, is indelibly marked into my cultural memory. Perhaps this is why I found myself so drawn to SAPTPHMY.
I am not a woman of faith, but put a beer in me and I'll tell you that devoting what I can to music is the way I express my relationship with the eternal. I see the track laid behind for us, and work in the hope that what I'm doing could perhaps be some small lasting rail, sleeper, or spike.
Here's a final SAPTPHMY to play us out from a woman who has given us at least a whole viaduct's worth of musical tracks, Björk: “I know by now that you'll arrive / by the time I stop waiting / I miss you.” Beer me.
Singer-songwriter and Talkhouse contributor Shamir added his response to Katie Harkin's Talk, and here's what he had to say on Songs About People the Artist Hasn't Met Yet—read more thoughts from Wye Oak's Jenn Wasner and Tom Fleming of Wild Beasts, and check back for more thoughts throughout this week.
It's no secret that music is completely timeless. As a songwriter myself, I often feel a lot of my ideas are handed down to me by musical ancestors who didn't get a chance to immortalize their creations.
On a spiritual level, the idea of the protagonist feeling the energy of someone before they met them is how I like to think most music is made. The whole concept of demos is to present a song before the song is actually done! Songwriting is just channeling anyway—so of course, a lot of the time, song lyrics reflect disregard for how time actually works!
Jenn Wasner (Wye Oak, Flock of Dimes) had this to say about Songs About People the Artist Hasn't Met Yet—start with Katie Harkin and Shamir's thoughts, and check back for more throughout this week.
This brings to mind a Neil Young SAPTPHMY: “Lookin' for a Love” from Zuma. I’ve always both loved and been a bit unsettled by this one. Upon first listen, it’s simple and, if you don’t think too hard about it, seems openhearted and sweet. But after repeat listens, the certainty and specificity our boy Neil has about his newfound paramour starts to feel a bit creepy. They’re going to meet on a beach, and she’ll be “nothing like [he] pictured her to be,” and things will be really great! Until probably he starts acting like an asshole, because he’s a moody artist, etc. I’m all for self-awareness and recognition of patterns, but let’s take some responsibility here: If this scenario is going to play out (and likely it will), it won’t be the result of some universal omnipotent narrator pulling the strings. It’ll be because of his own purposeful actions.
We build our lives for ourselves—they are founded upon a series of choices that, if we are successful enough at self-deception, we can avoid ever having to reckon with. And I get it—it’s very tempting to believe that the narrative we’re spinning doesn’t exist, that instead we owe our lives to the magical unspooling of fate.
A good SAPTPHMY speaks nothing of real love—the kind that is unburdened by the needs and desires we project onto flesh-and-blood human beings, with inner lives and purposes of their own to fulfill. But the romantic type—those particularly prone to having heartstrings pulled by this particular mix of loneliness and certainty—is especially vulnerable to this fallacy. Or at least that’s what I’ve heard. Definitely not speaking from personal experience!
Tom Fleming of Wild Beasts had this to say about Songs About People the Artist Hasn't Met Yet—start with Katie Harkin, Jenn Wasner, Shamir's thoughts, and check back for more throughout this week.
This makes me wonder about who the "I" and the "you" in love songs are. There's this push/pull of speaking to EVERYONE WHO HAS EVER BEEN IN LOVE and giving just enough particulars to be believable in putting over the song.
There's an old trope of the man-admiring-a-woman-from-afar-who-if-she-only-came-to-her-senses-silly-thing-they-could-be-so-happy-together, which is kind of an extension of the SAPTPHMY thing: a one-way imagining of what things might be like, or could be like. You think you know what you want, but, really, that person isn't real yet; they're only really an idea in the singer's head.
To reverse that, I always remember a very young Taylor Swift's "Love Story," with all the Romeo and Juliet/star-crossed lovers/fate stuff that we're all told we're supposed to experience once (and only once, thank you very much). That there's a Prince Charming who will pluck you from the dirt like a little daisy and your problems will simply melt and you will have completed your life's story. It's very pervasive, and of course very cynical, but it does tap into that idea that your life is a series of decisions, forks in the road that could have been different. Taylor's naiveté is charming, and we're supposed to identify with her optimism, but it's really an awfully pessimistic idea: that life will always be a grind until something magical one day happens out of the blue. What a rip-off.
Corin Tucker (Sleater-Kinney) has this contribution to the idea of Songs About People the Artist Hasn't Met Yet—start with Katie Harkin, Jenn Wasner, Shamir, and Tom Fleming's thoughts, and check back for more.
I love the concept of “Songs About People The Protagonist Hasn’t Met Yet,” but what about the mystery Protagonist? Specifically, our dear departed Leonard Cohen’s “Famous Blue Raincoat.” His lyrics, "And what can I tell you my brother, my killer / What can I possibly say? I guess that I miss you, I guess I forgive you, I'm glad you stood in my way,” are haunting, and is he addressing himself?
