Tuesday, May 30, 2006

"Whispers and Moans"

And while this title may sound like a song that could just possibly be about sex, it isn't. This is a song about escape, about running away and getting off the production line: "Dull, dull grey/The colour of our times/Cool, cool space/That I still hope to find." Or even "Slow, time bomb/The clamour of the street/I hear this town/It never goes to sleep." The sort of life, the sort of time and space where "I will catch the taxi driver/Weeping like a wounded beast." Doesn't that give you chills? The idea that our world can be so hurtful, even in its inert, deadening weight, that it reduces us to our innermost instinctual response?
What a song, what a simple, elegant expression of the storm within. It's an ackowledgement of the hammering sameness of most of our days, very similar to the one that Del Amitri sing about here.
This is simply a gentle call for release, a plea for freedom. And if that freedom comes from within, from the exalted state that we clamber into when we meet our match, our soul's mate, then we don't have to really *go* anywhere: "Then I wake up in your room/To share one piece of your life/When tomorrow comes we may not be here at all/Without your whispers and moans."
I like the idea that we can fashion our own little piece of space out of time, out of place, where we can just be, where the rest of the world falls away like a melting piece of film. Or, as Crowded House put it so much better: "We are the mirrors/Are the mirrors of each other in a lifetime of suspicion/Cleansed in a moment of recognition/You gave your life for it/Worth it's weight in gold/And growing empires and art collectors/And Alan's sound investments/Will one day be forgotten/One day be forgotten, yeah."

1 comment:

Natsthename said...

I LOVE Neil and Tim Finn! Probably some of the most talented to emerge from the 80's with their cred firmly intact. Excellent choice!