As a teenager, I remember hearing that some of great songs – Purple Haze by Hendrix, Yesterday and Let It Be by The Beatles – had presented themselves to their respective songwriters in the form of a dream.
Struggling as I was to write my own music at the time, this was a ray of hope: my musical genius may be inaccessible to my waking mind, I reasoned, but all I have to do is pay a bit more attention to my dreams, and the timeless anthems will flow forth. Right?
Inspired, I kept a notepad next to my bed for weeks, ready to capture the ideas that were sure to brew in my sleeping juvenile mind. The only problem was that nothing stuck in my head long enough to scribble down. I was (and remain) a fairly deep sleeper, and by the time I was fully conscious, everything had evaporated before I remembered that I was supposed to write them down.
But then one night, I woke with a start and realized that a phrase was stuck in my head. No, not a phrase, phrases are for regular people…this was a lyric. Sheer poetry, a line that would resonate through past present and future. A line that would end up tattooed on people’s arms because it summed up what it meant to be human.
I wrote the lyric down and went back to sleep.
The next morning, I was almost done breakfast before I suddenly remembered the previous night’s inspiration. Strangely, I couldn’t remember the lyric, but I knew it had been significant. “Good thing you wrote it down,” I told myself, pleased at being both a lyrical genius and a clever dream-wrangler.
I darted back upstairs to see what it was that I had written down the previous night. I couldn’t recall the line, but I vividly remembered the weight of the line’s importance. Into the bedroom. Open the book. Read the line.
Scrawled, barely legible, but written with obvious confidence and doubly underlined:
“Map melting is the thing.”
As you may have guessed, the notepad didn’t stay by my bed for long after that.
Alan Hampton is not only a talented bassist, and not only the composer of last week’s song performed by Andrew Bird, but he also – not surprisingly – is a much better songwriter than teenaged me could ever have hoped to be.
His music is both poppy and experimental, as if Jack Johnson had a lucid dream in which he collaborated with Sufjan Stevens. This track is one of his best.
What makes this a beautiful song:
1. The chords are dreamy, in that the song spends most of its time avoiding the tonic, or “home base” of its key.
2. The vocals are dreamy, because the lines often carry across the bar line, as with the lyric, “so I don’t ever have to know about your fantasy” – the end of the lyrical phrase and the end of the musical phrase rarely line up, adding to the feeling of unfinished business of the chord structure.
3. The video is dreamy. Any video with a human heart warming itself by a campfire is good enough for me. I would have included a melting map, but no video is perfect.
Recommended listening activity:
Flipping the pillow over to the cold side.