Sometimes I imagine the performer to stand in the same relationship to the song as the listener, that they were joined in amazement that there is a song at all, that there can be singing. In one way, this is ridiculous: the singer was capable of singing; it lay in his powers; his prowess is witness to years of practice, his song to his patient songwriting: and isn’t this why we go to hear him play?
But there is also a way in which the performance sets itself back from that prowess, that to sing is also to enter a state of grace. The singer leans back into the song; the song bears him, this is the surprise. As though it were necessary to be weak to perform. As though one had to fall into the arms of the song, to receive what one cannot achieve by oneself.
Further still: who sings? Is it me – is it the ‘I’, or does the first person, singing, dissolve into the third, does ‘I sing’ become ‘he sings’, and the ‘he’ become the impersonal ‘it’, the dummy subject of phrases like ‘it is raining’. It is raining: but what rains? There is raining, there is singing: it is the infinitive that comes forward when the singer falls into the arms of the song. The infinitive that unlimits itself for there to be song. That gives itself so that there might be the singing of a song.
I also tell myself this can be heard only very early in a singer’s career, or very late. Early, like the first albums by the Palace Brothers, or late, as I thought I heard it listening to Nina Simone’s final albums and Sinatra’s Watertown with friends the other night. Late style: the song worn away. Late: Simone’s voice is gentle, it begins resignedly: to sing again? Must I sing again?
Frail strength – strength held out into frailty: how can we not compare this last of voices to her earlier stridency, to the strength of a voice that lifts itself from the records cut for RCA or for Colpix? But now, I think to myself – vaguely, impressionistically – the voice is as though frayed, not because it lacks any technical means (notes are held, sustained …), but because it has given up a kind of confidence.
Perhaps this is also because she covers songs from Sinatra’s A Man Alone, and even adopts something of his style. Sinatra’s is almost always a performance, and those performances are marvellous, but hearing his strained voice on Watertown – or is it that his straining lets itself be heard there – the persona he adopts there is frayed.
Who is he supposed to be? A man whose wife has left him to go to New York. A man alone in the sticks, in Watertown, with two sons to bring up: a song cycle written especially for Sinatra. But the voice is frayed; it is not what it was, even on Cycles, a couple of years earlier, or September of My Years. Sensing this, Sinatra was reluctant to promote the album.
But isn’t the miracle that he could sing at all? That he could sing, or that there was singing, and he could fall back into the arms of the song, that it carried him, as it had done many times before. But with the elasticity of his voice failing him, that support was needed now more than before. Sinatra knew what he needed.
Frailty: he was ‘not in good voice’. Or better: his voice, strained, was not his own. Didn’t he heard what he could not sing in his own singing? Isn’t that what he knew, that the name Sinatra was stretched across the void? The same, I think, for late Simone. Who was she now? Who sang? The first person sank back into the third: the song as though sang by no one. By the no one in her, occupying her, taking her place. Who sang? Who sings?
Perhaps, I think to myself, it is only in frailty that singing reveals its condition. Late style – or early. In late song, singing knows its frailty, mourns it or is resigned to it. There is much of which I am not capable; much that I cannot do. Simone’s strength was everpresent, even in the tenderest of songs in the 60s and early 70s. And now? Sinatra’s voice loses itself from the late 60s onward.
But in early style? The surprise of being able to sing at all. To find oneself singing: thus the earliest albums recorded under the name Palace Brothers, or Palace Music by Will Oldham and others. That I can sing: this is marvellous. That there is singing: this is the impersonal strength that bears the wavering of the voice.
Ungenerous comparison: Joanna Newsom is so much the product of a creative writing school and the Conservatory. She rests in her proficiency. Early Will Oldham comes from nowhere in particular; he sings with his brothers and his friends, with only informal training. But there is singing, and that’s the surprise. There is singing – no proficiency, but risk.
Each time as for the first time: the strained voice, a voice sincere not because its bearer can be trusted, or because he sings from his heart. The voice out over 70,000 fathoms; the ‘I cannot’ in the ‘can’, where it is the song that sings itself, where it it finds itself only in falling back and being sung from that falling. Impersonal sincerity, sincerity that is those 70,000 fathoms aquiver in the song.
My strength is failing me; I have not achieved my strength: in each case, strength is at stake, and weakness sings, weakness is the unlimiting of the song.
Lars Iyer's Blog 