Distancing #1: Automatic for the People

Olivier in the apartment upstairs plays the piano some afternoons. Haltingly, but with emotion. I assume it’s him playing and not Inés because I can usually hear a male voice too, and I have trouble picturing the two of them in a Rockwellian family singalong scenario, but what do I know. Whoever it is, their repertoire is limited. “Life on Mars?” is a popular selection; so is “Sleep the Clock Around,” surely the best possible Belle and Sebastian song to have to hear tapped out at surprise intervals as the months come and go. Yesterday he—let’s just go with he—was playing a song I couldn’t quite place but whose little pre-chorus riff haunted me for a while until I lost track of it, as I eventually do most things these days. He started playing it again just now, as though he heard me down here typing this. Still can’t identify it.

A couple of weeks ago he added “Nightswimming” to the rotation, and I couldn’t get over how good it sounded drifting imprecisely through the ceiling, how refreshing and soulful and rich. I’ve been listening to R.E.M., consistently if never religiously, since I discovered popular music; I heard “What’s the Frequency, Kenneth?” last month at a bar in Key West and it too sounded marvelous, unsullied by its obvious age, though Kristina didn’t agree when I played it for her later. And I know that at some point I spent serious time with Automatic for the People, from which “Nightswimming” was the fifth of six singles, but I can’t remember exactly when and where that point was. So I’ve been returning to it, while washing dishes or staring sleepless at daybreak or watching the sky float from blue to gray against the rooftops across the street. Following it to see where it leads.

Music transports us. That’s what they say, right? That’s the premise for this column, to talk about the places and times we’ve been escaping to through this or that album, slipping the bonds of our confinement by getting lost in familiar melodies, etc. etc. I’m not trying to talk about how delicious a nighttime swim sounds right now, or about how eerie it feels to listen to a song called “Try Not To Breathe,” much less the awful topicality of its lyrics: “I have lived a full life, and these are the eyes that I want you to remember.” I’m not trying to talk about how it’s been the end of the world as we know it for years and years now. I’m trying to see through the music, I guess, to find a way out of the present rather than deeper in.

But so...