You can hear the songs while you read on this link: www.lamrimmusic.com
PREFACE: THE COMMENTARY
This commentary has come from hours of listening to this album, especially when I was sitting on public transport on the way to or from work and wondering about where my life was heading, whether I was happy with the the idea that routine was a normal part of adult life and whether or not I minded too much about how the years were passing and most of my ideals and ambitions were dissolving in the acid of common sense and having your feet firmly on the ground. The lyrics would filter into my thoughts and I would wonder about the person who was telling me all these stories about his life and experiences, his dilemmas and his conclusions.
Like most people, I listen to music for pleasure; background music sweetens the atmosphere while you’re working or makes a journey more interesting; the faces of other travellers, the billboards, the passing cars, the dog-walkers or the patterns in the lines of telegraph poles do the rounds as a private music video. Then you ask yourself about the experiences that have gone into the music and, when you get tired of looking at the other passengers, the scenes from the songs play out in your imagination. What follows in this commentary contains a lot of what came out of those journeys.
The album title identifies the eleven tracks as pieces rather than songs. This would be easily overlooked except for the fact that these tracks often incorporate changes in tempo, rhythm and tone in the same way that contemporary music does while fusing rock, pop, blues, jazz and electronica, especially prominent in God Gave Me A Chance and Nothing’s Gonna Make Me Fall. For this reason I refer to the tracks as pieces rather than songs. It’s easy to think of a song as something a voice does almost exclusively and the rest of the instruments have their secondary roles whereas, to my mind, calling something a piece gives the instrumentation and the musical options more prominence.
LAM RIM – Path Stages.
The name Lam Rim, meaning ‘path stages’, comes from Tibetan Buddhism and, according to the teachings, makes up the complete path to enlightenment. The idea of ‘enlightenment’ flogged to us by the popular media appears as impractical, aloof and fit for the maladjusted who hop from one escapist theory to another. Eleven Pieces of Something introduces us to a ‘persona’ in each piece, however, who is rooted in real life and who at times experiences extremes, confronting the crisis rather than hiding it under an ‘I’m FINE, alright!’ smile that you could slap someone with. This is not someone who aspires to a happiness resulting from the absence of problems and the easiest possible option. Instead, the person progressing through these life stages is at times painfully lonely or heartbroken and at others confident and ecstatically happy; on occasions he struggles to reconcile romantic love and the fear of losing the beloved. On others, he weighs up the temptation to throw in the towel against the importance of realising his dreams but he’s still progressing. The underlying message about enlightenment is an appealing one to me, at least, and very down to Earth. It’s easy to look at all the conflicts and chaos in your own life and think, ‘Forget enlightenment, I’ll be lucky if I’m even up for a pinprick of light at the end of the tunnel’. It’s not easy to look at the experiences in our lives, often appearing as disjointed ‘pieces of something’, and learn to be enlightened by them.
DEEP INSIDE and GOD GAVE ME A CHANCE
Something happens in my heart, I know it’s love and I can’t stop it now
As the opener and prologue, Deep Inside anticipates the whole album in musical colour and in the tone of the songs. As the starting point of the album, it’s a De Profundis, a cry from the depths:
‘I’m so tired of feeling bad,
I need something to believe I’m glad’
Like the Psalm, De Profundis, it’s desperate but dominated by hopefulness. At the beginning the music is black, the imagery is sullen but, as the song picks up in rhythm and energy, the tone is progressively more optimistic: the change deep inside that love is effecting is unstoppable, profound and total; the gradual melting away of loneliness.
In blazing contrast, God Gave Me A Chance is about getting what Deep Inside pleaded: ‘Love me!’ Frequently, the lyrics borrow religious imagery, ‘I was born again two weeks ago… I’ve found what I was looking for… I need you to hold my life… God gave me a chance to find my way’, all of which elevates the experience of falling in love to the sublime, not so different from the Psalm-like Deep Inside. On the surface it sounds buoyant and confident but under that surface is an unresolved fear of the temporariness of this honeymoon romanticism and an uncomfortable awareness of mortality, ‘If you leave this world, show me how to fly ‘coz I’m going’. There’s an unavoidable itch that it’s all too good to be true and one could easily be cast back into the blackness at the beginning of Deep Inside. Perhaps this is what gives happiness and romance their unique value: the fact that they could be easily lost.
Don’t you ever feel that you don’t want to sleep, thinking this could be a vision in your head?
I CRY…
I cry for anyone who’s living outside where the wind blows pain
What might have been an itch in God Gave Me A Chance has become much more serious; suddenly you’re confronted with a contrast between finding love and losing it. The previous track talked about the fragility of it and this brings that fragility even closer. The verses paint pictures of desolation and pain with which the persona empathises:
‘I cry for all those dreams forgotten anywhere.
It’s sad to run away, to waste your life, to lose a child,
It’s hard to say goodbye, to leave a friend, to miss someone…’
While it’s wonderful to feel liberated by love, it’s tragic to suddenly be denied it and you only need to look around to see that it happens all the time: ‘It’s tough that everyday, don’t you know, somebody’s gonna lose someone’. What seems to make empathy and compassion possible in these situations is the love that one feels and experiences: ‘Don’t leave this pain over me, I need to find you’ If I can’t find you in all of this, I can’t cope with it . Empathy must be the result, then, of experiencing the vitality these relationships first hand. ‘This life is so fucking good since I’ve been loving you’. Who can understand heartbreak if they’ve never experienced being in love? Furthermore, could you feel compassion for people who agonise over their loss if you’re as badly off as they are?
This world is so fucking gone but I’m still feeling love
SEVEN YEARS IN COMA and THE SUICIDE?
No one hurts me, never… in my head.
In Seven Years in Coma the persona has been digging deeper and deeper into a dream to escape a world that’s too cruel to face and to ‘meet’ this person implies climbing inside their mind:
‘Close your eyes to see what’s inside my head,
between my thoughts flowing you’ll find I exist again’.
It’s an extreme reaction to some of the anxieties that have come up previously: feeling alienated, afraid, lonely or unable to cope with the cruelty of life but with a very different outcome: rather than ‘still feeling love’ this person fabricates an existence that doesn’t need it, you could say it’s the ultimate consumer product: a video game instead of a life. Given the choice, the persona prefers that womb-like security: ‘If there’s a place where I am happy, why should I go through that pain? I’ve been here for seven years and here’s where I want to stay.’
It’s a powerful antithesis to I Cry… and even harsher in its realism because it shows a type of existence in coma rather than a life, the severity of the indifference or fear of confronting real life flies in the face of the previous track’s empathy and compassion: ‘I don’t want to get out there, I don’t think I’d bear it!’ A coma existence where nothing hurts because it’s not necessary for it to be visible.
The Suicide? Seems to address an indifferent listener, like a rather pedantic psychiatrist, a busy parent or a partner who isn’t really interested enough to listen properly; someone who’d rather skip round real problems and hope everything will somehow manage to be hunky-dory if you just smile bravely and battle on regardless, in short, someone not so different to the persona of the Seven Years In Coma. But what effect does this have on the people around them? The chorus: ‘I don’t wanna tell you something‘ projects the angry feeling due to emotional marginalization: I don’t want to explain my situation so you can analyse it clinically or cynically pass it off as somebody else’s ‘fault’ I don’t want to tell you things so it looks to everyone else like we’re having a relationship. ‘Feel my pain, cut your veins’ is a violent counter-attack to that indifference and absence of compassion; a reaction is better than coma-like indifference. But the piece doesn’t end with the frustrated person committing suicide (signalled by the question mark in the title). Instead of feeling marginalised and misunderstood, which could lead to self destruction and the subsequent frustration of all their dreams, this person admits that he needs to start by loving himself and working on making those dreams come true.
Feel how your dreams come true, love yourself.
I’M MISSING YOU and GONE AWAY
I’m Missing You parallels the anguish of I Cry… and recreates the dark ambience of Deep Inside. The persona is living his grief and accentuates the immediacy of it with the continuous verbs in the present: ‘I’m missing you… Can you feel that I’m loving you? I hope you’re hearing this song… I can’t stop missing you at all.’ Something to listen out for is the singing in parts like ‘People say I will see you again’ and ‘Doesn’t matter where you go…’ where the voice shows exceptional colour and range. Paradoxically, it’s a sad song which is very enjoyable to listen to bringing to mind Every Breath You Take by The Police, which works in a similar way.
Gone Away behaves as a second movement to I’m Missing You. The piano finishes the previous song and after a few seconds’ pause launches into a new mood. The two songs link in mutually enriching opposition. Gone Away recreates the love story that’s been lost and is agonisingly missed in the previous song with hints back to it with ‘Don’t go, I came here just to find you’. It’s predecessor is a slow lament and this is an upbeat love song, sinisterly named Gone Away from the chorus: ‘I’m Gone Away’, reminding you again that this love story is now absent.
NOTHING’S GONNA MAKE ME FALL
My heart is broken and you’ve ruined my life
This song revives some of the defiant survival language and self confidence of The Suicide? Compare:
‘I could break but, hey, I don’t need to cry‘
‘I can feel some loneliness but nothing’s gonna make me fall.’
Differently to The Suicide? it’s angry and energetic. Its hints at blues and electronic music fit the mood of angrily exorcising the ghost of an abusive and indifferent lover:
‘I don’t really need your love,
I don’t want an empty soul…
Why don’t you leave my head and go!’
The encounter of the two song halves in the middle is so atmospheric you can almost see it. This characteristic musical interlude builds up to the anthem style ending ‘You know it’s real that I’ll never need your love’. The song touches on something very personal and profound, a type of hopeful liberation from something dark and oppressive, echoing sentiments from songs like I Will Survive by Gloria Gaynor and Labour of Love by Hue and Cry. It gently hints back to the change in Deep Inside because this liberation and change is a rejection of the loneliness and despair of being oppressed.
FROM HEAD TO TOES and NOBODY KNOWS
These two tracks have sounded to me like two halves of one piece of music divided by a brief pause. Their upbeat and optimistic tone and their powerful confidence work up to a resolution and the two pieces focus on the projection that has been working its way continuously through the album:
‘Happy even though I’m getting old
someone has revived a brand new hope.’
This first part communicates the enjoyment of love and intimacy: ‘nothing makes me feel so good’. The second thread is taking control of the fear of mortality and the unknown: ‘I’m not ready yet/ I have to find many things that I have never seen’ and making the best of the opportunity to live rather than subsisting in a coma-like state.
RELEASE
So frail is the brief thread of life, live it right.
The closure of the album is in the form of an exhortation:
‘Go, do everything you wanna do,
Be free and chase your dreams, go on…
…Leave everything you really hate,
search and liberate your soul’
You’ve probably noticed that the subject of the pieces has changed. Previously it was nearly always the persona of the songs or a ‘you’ who was directly involved in the situation. Release is directed at the listener: what you’ve heard throughout the album ought to motivate you to pursue your dreams more closely, to break out of the bleak loneliness (Deep Inside), to be compassionate and empathic (I Cry..) and to endeavour to ‘liberate your soul’ from abusive or apathetic relationships (The Suicide? and Nothing’s Gonna Make Me Fall) and to make the most of the opportunity to live (Nobody knows).
The most obvious image for these eleven pieces is that of a jigsaw, they link into each other and share a similar tone or image or contrast strongly with the pieces next to them. All together the pieces make up an entire picture in the same way that all together, the experiences we go through refer back and forwards to each other and create a whole picture of your own ‘Path Stages’.
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