♪♫ ♪ ♪♫

The Fat Lady of Limbourg
Artist: Shivaree
Album: Who's Got Trouble
Year: 2005
♥: All about the words.
Above all else, I'm a word person. Music is a close second, artistically speaking, but if I was going to go deaf or blind first, it'd be deaf. I'd kill myself after 4.2 seconds, but those 4.2 seconds would be spent reading.

I love instrumental music, but differently, I think, than I love music with lyrics. To bring together music and words in a way that breaks or builds a heart is something only the very best literature or most intense instrumental music can do -- the intensity with which I feel a perfect moment in a song isn't quite as powerful as when I read something of similar perfection, but oh it comes pretty damn close ------- and it happens more often.

ALLLLLL about the words.
I first encountered Shivaree on Mix96, in 1999, believe it or not -- when they had a "new music hour" every Thursday at 10. I'd stay up past my bedtime (I was 12) and tape songs whose intros I especially loved. It's how I discovered the Tea Party, and it's where I first heard "Goodnight Moon". Fast forward six years: one of my favourite parts of Paris 2005 was the secondhand CD shops. I picked up this album, vaguely remembering how much I'd loved that "Goodnight Moon" song, but didn't really listen to it until that fall.

My heart stopped the first time I heard "The Fat Lady of Limbourg." For a long time, I put it among my Top 5 Songs of All Time -- it's still in the Top 20. So imagine my surprise when I realized it was a cover of a Brian Eno song. "Well gosh, I love Brian Eno!" I exclaimed to myself, and hurriedly downloaded it.
AND HATED IT.
My skin crawled in a way I'd never felt before.
Shivaree's cover: so raw, vital, vibrant, alive, beautiful, stunningly structured with harmonies and violences and liberties and. and. I really thought! ---- all of it ------- ALL OF IT!!! was the lyrics!
"for it was only a candle, a Roman scandal."
i died at that line: you're kidding. could we be wittier.
I wanted to name everything after the "jellyfish kiss,"
but that wasn't Shivaree's ---------------
that wasn't the music;
that wasn't the arrangement;
that was entirely Brian Eno's.



The original's slightly more palatable now, with another six years of musical education under my belt, but listening to it again for the first time since then -- my lip still curled in disgust. A rare case of a cover being infinitely, infinitely better than an original.

So is this song really, technically, all about the words? No, but that's kind of my point. Sometimes, despite all my posturing about how I am a ~word person~ ------- the music, the vibe, the ambience, matters just as much as the words. I can love a song primarily for its lyrical content -- and oh, for this one, I do -- but if you fuck up one component of the song, you fuck up the gesamtkunstwerk.

"I assume you understand that we have options on your time
We'll ditch you in the harbour if we must."
&
"But her sense of taste is such that she'll distinguish with her tongue
the subtleties a spectrograph would miss
and then announce her decision
while demanding her reward: a jellyfish kiss."


My heart will always stop.
For this,
for words,
(for words that I have to feel,
words I have to INTERPRET;
this song is a little bit of Dada, really.).
But when it all goes together, in a way that breaks you:
!!!!
there are no words.