MOG

I can't even come close. There's a quote from Elvis Costello I run into every so often that I can only paraphrase: "Trying to write about music is like trying to dance about architecture." Every time I see that, it annoys me for some reason I've yet to put my finger on. But the man with the serious spectacles has a point. I can't impress upon you with any of my words anything truly at the heart of this song, or any other. I can't describe guitars that percolate between chimes and bubbles — I can stretch metaphor to absurdity; I can reduce chord structure and technique to mathematics and wave graphs, and neither would bring you any closer to understanding the sounds in my head. I can't explain the desperate, lonely joy I hear in Pat Fish's voice when he sings, "Sometimes I swear that I can see them there." Even if you listened to the song yourself, it wouldn't be enough. You would know your song, but I can't bring you any closer to my song.

But I do try, sometimes. I tell a little story that clumsily tries to illustrate something about the song — how it makes me feel, in what direction it points my memories and imagination. I think that maybe if I mark a trail, someone following it through the music may pick up a little of what I'm trying to get at. But even that feels like trying to explain winter to a Saharan nomad with nothing but fairportfan's snowflake creator.

For this, I would probably write up something about hallucinations in the middle of the night, standing in the middle of a room full of ghostly, glowing people you could hear talk to each other as if from very far away, people who couldn't hear anything you said or feel a touch that passes right through them. But even the words for that aren't there tonight, and even if they were, they wouldn't be the words that tell you what a song really is.