Resonance

Youth, age: what is that happens with age? For myself, the awareness of a melancholy which affirms itself in its constancy the less I find reason to complain. It surprises me: perhaps it is what is called a temperament, a kind of fate.

Presence of a mood like the low noise in David Lynch films. Darkness against which the bright things of the world stand out and which stands more darkly behind the things of the night. It matters only because it surprises me, because it seems like fate and because of that response to artworks, to events which attune me to what I must take to reveal the truth of the world. Smog’s The Doctor Came at Dawn is one such artwork. Does it offer consolation? No: it seems to speak truth, to speak from truth, to present the simplicity of things.

Simplicity: at these times, at the eye of melancholy, pure calmness. Carried on the great movement of the world, at its pace. With a knowledge that is as it were steered by this movement. I listen and think: this is how things are. By this I don’t refer to the lyrics of this song or that, but to a kind of drone I hear in these songs. A resonance which resounds with what is deep and true in the world.

What do I hear? The voice that is sung against this resonance. That will occasionally resonate with it. That sings with a tone that arises from the same depth, but slightly offset from it, so that it can be heard in its distinctiveness above the instruments. That baritone. And behind it, the pulsing that one hears so often in Songs by Smog (think of ‘The Morning Paper’ or a new song, ‘A Southern Bird’) …

A melancholic’s truth? No: a truth which speaks itself from the heart of a mood. Which would resound in a different way in a song of joy, or would speak itself in another way in a song of lament. But Bill Callahan does not sing to mourn. The music of Smog is affirmative, his voice, the music let speak what Kafka calls a merciful surplus of strength. Strength which is given through melancholy and struggles from it into a kind of joy.