Matt Berninger. Wikimedia Commons, Licensed underneath CCO 2.0.
This week, the Assessment is publishing a collection of brief reflections on love songs, broadly outlined.
In her 1993 memoir Exteriors, drawn from seven years of journal entries, Annie Ernaux describes overhearing a well-recognized pop music on the grocery store. She is struck by the pleasure she experiences—and by a “feeling of panic that the music will finish.” This prompts her to contemplate the relative emotional results of books and music. Whereas sure novels have left a “violent impression” on her being, the affect hardly compares to the “intense, nearly painful” feeling produced by the music. “A e-book gives extra deliverance, extra escape, extra success of want,” she writes. “In songs one stays locked in want.” The construction of pop music is inherently erotic; the repetitions of rhythm and melody regularly summon and fulfill aching anticipation. Love songs carry this in any other case sublimated longing to the floor: some by way of grand, theatrical gestures, others by drawing out the dialectic of want embedded in on a regular basis life—say, the sensation of being alone at a celebration, unhappy and self-conscious, desperately lacking somebody.
That is the premise of “Gradual Present,” a somber however rousing midtempo monitor from The Nationwide’s 2007 album Boxer. The narrator spends the verses separated from his lover, surrounded by folks however unable to succeed in them, confined to the claustrophobic quarters of his personal thoughts. Guitars flutter frenetically over foreboding squalls of suggestions, whereas Matt Berninger’s mumbling baritone evokes the narrator’s recursive, dead-end ideas: “Standing on the punch desk, swallowing punch”; “I leaned on the wall, the wall leaned away”; “I higher get my shit collectively, higher collect my shit in.” Within the choruses, an atmospheric sweetness swells as he briefly spans the space, if solely in his creativeness: “I need to hurry house to you,” Berninger croons, “placed on a sluggish, dumb present for you and crack you up / so you possibly can put a blue ribbon on my mind.” His halting syntax smooths out into the straightforward, fluid choreography of a fantasized intimacy, which disrupts his anxious solitude.
However even the utopic house of the refrain is marred by doubt in its remaining strains: “God, I’m very, very frightened / I’ll overdo it.” The identical concern that strands the narrator alone within the midst of a celebration gnaws on the edges of his reverie, manifesting now as a terror of spoiling the second. (Within the roiling “Dialog 16,” launched a number of years after, Berninger intensifies this identical dread: “I used to be afraid I’d eat your brains / ‘trigger I’m evil.”) Inside every gesture of mutual understanding between lovers there lurks the likelihood that the bond would possibly break; the separation that shapes want shadows each tender encounter.
The music’s prolonged coda collapses this play of distance and return right into a single, paradoxical picture of lacking what one doesn’t but know. Over a melancholy piano line, Berninger sings a quatrain tailored from the refrain of a music on the band’s practically forgotten debut album. “You understand I dreamed about you / for twenty-nine years earlier than I noticed you / you understand I dreamed about you / I missed you for, for twenty-nine years.” It’s a virtually mythic origin story for the mundane set of relations sketched in the remainder of the music: at first, there was a longing.
Nathan Goldman is the managing editor of Jewish Currents.
