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Cold Water Symmetry
Artist: Fiction Plane
Album: Left Side of the Brain
Year: 2007
♥: I'm surprised at how difficult this theme was for me, especially given my tendency to wax about love songs on non-theme weeks. But, as always, the moment in this comm is key. Initially I thought I'd take advantage of "silly" to post one of those ridiculous female pop stars I'm only a little embarrassed of listening to. In the process of listening to all those silly love songs, though, I found myself getting increasingly frustrated. Most days, most weeks, I can stand them -- not only that, I kind of guilty-pleasure-love them. But this week, none of them were right. And I worried I was letting this theme slip away without using it "properly" -- strange how that can still happen after a year and a half, huh?

Fiction Plane is Britrock fronted by Sting's son (Joe Sumner), and I picked up this album based entirely on the cover art, back in July '07. I was working at Babies R Us and would frequently pop by Future Shop on my lunch break. For a couple weeks, I kept being drawn to this album...until I finally shelled out the $10 and, sound unheard, popped it into the car I had before Lexy (my dad's blue BMW 735). And -- in one of those experiences you can only get when buying a physical, hard-copy CD with no idea what you're getting yourself into -- I fell in love; listened to it constantly; danced in the car. Listening to Fiction Plane brings me right back to that time, which -- as I've mentioned in other posts -- is generally an emotional deadzone for me. But somehow, I remembered this album a few weeks ago, and was absolutely shocked at how much emotional memory came back to me.

Love is a rough concept for me, and one which I'll probably be defining for the rest of my life. In the spirit of our 'asparagus love' conversation, I'm not sure there can ever be a common experience of love -- not only between relationship types, but between people, and between moments. Love is transformative, but that doesn't mean it itself is static...probably, it means the opposite. Love shifts, warps, twists, slides, moves, seeps into cracks and creates holes. This week, I can't post a silly love song because right now, I'm eminently aware of how unsilly love actually is (but, as love shifts, so do my thoughts on it: had this theme come earlier or later, who knows what I would be posting). And the love song is a big deal. You come back to your favourites; they shape your concepts of what real-life love can be. And since I've never really believed that love can just be roses and sunshine (well, all the time, anyway), a song about love being roses and sunshine just wouldn't be right.

"Cold Water Symmetry" -- my favourite song on Left Side of the Brain -- is absolutely a love song, but it's not a silly one. It's an honest one, with a little bit of how love can devastate:
Love is an angel that smokes cigarettes
She's trying to kill me / I can only say yes

how love can consume:
I can't leave you behind, you live in my mind
Cast out on the silver sea

how love can be distracting, how it can be everything you need:
All the baby spiders fill my heart with dread
I need no science in your arms

There's no such thing as silly love, I don't think, and I realize it more and more every day. Love eats its victims even as it exalts them. And in Joe Sumner's voice, and in the aching guitar line of "Cold Water Symmetry"'s melody, and in the core of this song: that conflict is captured beautifully. Not a silly love song, but a gorgeous one -- if the listener can take the honesty.