Marissa Nadler & Stephen Brodsky - "For the Sun"

Here's the song.



The cool thing about music--as opposed to, you know words on a page, or a screen--is that you can affect the meaning of the words in a way that reveals (if you're into that kind of thing) how little words actually communicate. That is to say that inflection, tone, nuance, pace, etc. play a bigger role in creating meaning.

Take this bleak beautiful goth-drone from Marissa Nadler (of Marissa Nadler fame), and Stephen Brodsky (of Cave-In though I remember playing his 1999 solo thing when it came out; here's a link to a great lost 4-track indiepop song). The song's lyrics are straightforward enough. The singer is waiting for the sun. Just like Jim Morrison did. But this makes The Doors song sound more like someone waiting for a bus, or maybe a beer. "For the Sun" is 3:30 (it's also a three and a half minute pop song! with a catchy melody!) of paranoia and dread, sung from the perspective of someone who has cried and bled all the hope out of their body. It's strikingly (picks up thesaurus, looks for synonyms for beautiful...) pulchritudinous.

The absence of drums results in a lack of forward momentum, a kind of icy languor. The album will be out in April. As a former Massachusetts resident, I can say with certainty, that the sun will start to emerge around that time. Though I remember most of my May birthday get-togethers up there being fueled by a kind of collective psychosis that was (partly) the result of six months of gray, and cold, and static electricity, and bouncing in place while waiting for public transportation. All of which feels more prosaic and mundane than what the song here is putting across. There's a difference between "waiting for the sun," which is what we were doing, and WAITING FOR THE FUCKING SUN WHICH IS PROBABLY NEVER GOING TO COME ANYWAY SO FUCK EVERYTHING ESPECIALLY YOU AND ESPECIALLY ME, which is more like what this song is doing. Though if I'm being totally honest, I've had a few of those moments as well. A poem I wrote during that time (which got published on a real-life small [very small] press and in an anthology) contained a line, "I believe Boston is a coffin / filled with frostfingers & neglect." I'm pretty sure Marissa Nadler & Stephen Brodsky would know exactly what I was talking about. And even if they don't, I can hear all that, and so much  more, in this.