Meredith Graves is a musician and writer. She also runs a small record label called Honor Press. You can follow her on Twitter here and on Instagram here.
Every summer, there’s that song — the song that defines those sunny days and balmy nights, the one you’ll forever associate with a specific time and place. This week, Talkhouse writers talk their song of the summer of 2014.
— the editors of the Talkhouse
The song that you sing alone in your blue gown, flowers in spring bloom when they hear the sound. The beautiful thing still seems to let you down. If I don’t feel the same I have myself to blame. I’m yours but not by name. The doom is so real, are we making a mistake? The song that you feel alone in your heartache. I just can’t deal, I just can’t stay awake. I want it bad enough; show me what you’re made of. I’m yours but not by name.
It’s just before sunrise. Hours in, I feel I have given all I can, the battle is slipping through my fingers. I reach for my phone, I call in reinforcements.
“When you get a free moment, I have a brain teaser for you: Sam C-P who sings in Radiator Hospital. Who does he sound like?”
Variations on a theme sent via text to Wisconsin, Brooklyn, the southernmost part of Texas, up north to my dad. They can’t see the list I’m keeping on a scratch pad next to my computer: Marked Men, New Pornographers, Weakerthans, Neutral Milk Hotel, Pavement. Nice guesses, but wrong. All wrong.
Sam’s voice, sweet and lilting and poignant, is the stunt double of another voice so distinctly familiar that not being able to pinpoint it is making me want to take a hammer to my face. I’ve been trying to work it out for the better part of a day while listening to “Blue Gown” on repeat. It is the second track off Torch Song, Radiator Hospital’s incredible new record. As if the song wasn’t amazing enough, it also features the perfect Katie Crutchfield as second vocalist. It’s the only record I’ve been able to listen to for a week. Despite the fact that I can’t figure it out to save my life, I’m still too bummed to feel stupid.
Sam’s lyrics are very good for those of us having a bummer of a time. He writes about love and heartache in extremely open-ended terms. Because of his noble insistence on making his music available for free and attaching his lyrics to the online version of the record, it feels almost as if he’s supplying his listener with all the tools necessary to make his songs about them. “Blue Gown” could be about a lover with a fear of commitment or it could be about an absent parent. These are familiar narratives, they’ve become tropes repeated in novels and films because they’re relatable. If we don’t have one, we’ll inevitably have the other at some point. Sam lets his listeners know they’re not alone. Familiarity breeds content.
“The beautiful thing still seems to let you down.” That word, “still,” carries in it the weight of that familiarity, of history; still, as in, it’s been this way for a while and it remains this way and for some reason I’m still here. Sometimes in love, despite our best efforts, circumstances just don’t change. Wanting something to work does not insure that it will, and show me what you’re made of might result in your finding out that they’re made of something other than what you expected. That’s the let-down that Sam, in his joyful voice, still recognizes as being beautiful. We let each other down over and over, but like flowers that bloom every spring, again and again we come back.
Case in point: I hung out with an ex last time I was in New York. It was the most time we’d spent together since we broke up around this time last year. Despite my best intentions, my heart lapsed repeatedly, leaving me totally perplexed and more than a little sad. We were supposed to be in love — it’s the only way we’d ever related to each other, not having known each other long before we started dating — and now here we are, walking arm-in-arm, but this time as friends. He came with me to a very fancy photo shoot where I had my picture taken by a famous fashion designer-cum-photographer, and there I was, very literally, in a blue gown.
If you’ve only ever seen a person in one light, it feels weird to acclimate when their role in your life changes, though it’s necessary — a part of you might still cling to old feelings out of habit, though they might not be relevant any more now that the nature of your relationship has shifted. I guess I’m trying to say that love is complicated.
“If I don’t feel the same, I have myself to blame. I’m yours, but not by name.”
It was all so familiar in a way that frustrated the shit out of me, that which I knew so well but could not make into words, something just out of reach, like Sam’s untraceable voice, so different but similar enough to something I’d known before that I became consumed by my inability to conjure up the past from the recesses of my mind. I’m still trying to figure out who he sounds like, and shit, part of me might still be in love. “The beautiful thing still seems to let you down.”
My friends aren’t texting me back, probably because it’s six in the morning here and most of them live in time zones where it’s even earlier. The closest I can get after 12 hours of thinking about this is Kevin Barnes from Of Montreal circa Gay Parade, or any record before he went full-on Velvet Goldmine, and even that’s just an approximation. I cross him off the list, I put the record on again, and again, I stop at the second song. I can’t stop listening to it. The pictures taken that day will run in a lovely fashion magazine this September, the same month that Torch Song will come out on vinyl.
