Back To Shore

This morning when I checked Twitter for the first time in a few days I saw this

Divulge your favourite Operation Mincemeat lyric 🎶⬇️

— Operation Mincemeat (@mincemeatlive) December 8, 2023

I tried to narrow it down and sort of categorize them. My picks also might change as soon as tomorrow depending on my mood, but here we go:

My favourite witty ones for their word play and rhythm and audacity

For fortune favours bravery
And a fortune’s what I’ve got

Look up victory in the dictionary
There’s a picture there of me

Foreigners aren’t great coroners, see
And no-one in Spain is as clever as me

My favourite one for modern-day relevance

You think we’re badass? You ain’t seen nothing
Democracy, you won’t see us coming

The ones I could/can relate to the most, both from “Dead in the Water”, which my ” ‘I Want’ Song” as much as it is Charles’.

But it’s part of my biology to start with an apology

One day I’ll metamorphosize
The scales shall tumble from their eyes
And thus shall end this wretched old routine

And then there are the many many inspirational ones

But life is much more pleasant when you’re living in the present

It’s no life if you’re forgetting to live

and of course

Set your hearts to the horizon
Leave your fears upon the shore

Thanks to my tendency to do long write-ups for events I loved, I knew there was at least one memorable lyric which was lost over time. For good reason probably, but I still have fond memories of it, because it stayed with me for a while. From a previous version of “All the Ladies”

Stage a coup
For your mothers and your sisters too

And while I’m at: Can I have moment of remembrance for “Let Me Die in Velvet” and the audacity to rhyme pretentious with trenches ? That definitely would have made this list 😉

shoutout to my fellow cute SAD girlies who will now be moving through lead until April – this WILL not last forever! They CANNOT pass a law about it !

— Natasha Hodgson (@NatashaHodgson) October 30, 2023

I don’t know if it’s the constant rain or whatever but I’m feeling this so hard this year. And I never really used to or at least not to this degree. But the fact that it’s getting light so late and dark so early is properly messing with me at the moment. It might be a slight post-COVID effect. Maybe something hormonal? Either way, I don’t like it.

Music #01 | I went to see The Lottery Winners in Cologne on Tuesday.

While I was driving there during heavy rain and typical rush-hour traffic, I was questioning the decision for quite a bit. After just few minutes in the car in fact, because the motorway was jammend and my sat-nav sent me along streets I never had to drive on before. Up and down the hills, in the dark and heavy rain. But I made it to Cologne safely and in good time, so all was well. It was a 200 cap venue and sadly there were only about 50 people in attendance. I felt so sorry for the band who were great and made the most of it and engaged the audience and we all had fun, I think. I chatted with some of the band at the merch table afterwards, which was lovely. I joked that I’d like to take a photo with them now, before they get too big for that kind of fan interaction. Which I honestly think they might manage to in the UK anyway.

Music #02 | Jess Guise released a new song on Friday: “Wish”. It’s about how she wishes her dad – who had passed away when she was 18 – would still be around and I think anyone who has lost a parent too early in life can relate to what she’s singing about here.

She had shared the song via her Patreon page a few times before, so I knew what to expect and how I’d react to the song. With a few tears of course. Even more so this time, because it’s a polished version with full instrumentation and you can’t turn that up in most emotionally fraught (for me) moment and not expect me to react with tears. When Jess had released “Brother in Arms” – another song about that experience – in 2020 I wrote a long post about how much I could relate and how much it moved me. How it made me remember / work through some of the stuff I hadn’t thought of for the longest time. My dad passed away when I was 14. That was 34 years ago. I wrote this back in 2020:

You would assume I’m over it. And I am. But also… I’m not. I don’t think you ever really ‘get over it’, because losing a parent at that age is such a traumatic experience, which shapes you like not much else. And to me that is what this song is all about. I’m now at a time in my life, where I only very occasionally think of my dad and this loss anymore. That’s why hearing my whole experience described in such fitting words all of sudden and quite unprepared absolutely floored me.

My own blog in November 2020

I’m not going to another long review post of “Wish” now. But I thought it’s worth noting that once again some lyrics absolute took my breath away, because they mirror my own experience and emotions to a T. Something I haven’t thought of in decades. Did I repress it? Did I ever even share it with my friends, once I had managed to talk about my dead dad in any capacity? I don’t remember.

I wish I could apologize for the teenager I was before you died

“Wish” – Jess Guise, 2023

The evening before my dad died from cardiac arrest, he and I had gotten into an argument over something silly. The TV? I don’t recall the details. I do remember lying on my bed crying the indignant tears of a teenage girl. For some strange reason I have a vivid memory of my mom sitting on the bed next to me trying to smooth things over and to calm me down. I don’t think I saw my dad or talked to him that evening again. We definitely didn’t have any kind of “clearing the air / make up” moment. I didn’t see him before I went to school the next morning either. Around noon I got home from school to the news that he had passed away.

I don’t have any clear memory of how this “not making up” affected me in the days, weeks, months, years after. I vaguely remember that a sort of guilty feeling crept up every once in a while to haunt me for a bit. Like I wrote in 2020 we definitely would have benefited from grief counselling, but we never got any of that. It was a different time back then and we all muddled through somehow. At some point with the passing years the guilty memory was replaced or at least amended with the belief that he didn’t hold that stupid little argument against me. He wasn’t resentful and I know he loved me. Of course I wish we wouldn’t have left things unspoken between us. Just like I wish for so many of the other things Jess sings about in this song. I guess that will never ever change.

Prompts on Hold | I had a few more rambling thoughts to share. About Social Media. About “Zen-doodling” (that’s what I’ll call it for now). Dragging up memories about my dad and all that put me in a sentimental mood now and I can’t be bothered to write much more.

Lyrics: “Better Man” – Robbie Williams, 2000

Every once in a while it’s good to remember that other songwriters wrote lyrics I could relate to even before Frank Turner came into my life. He did and does it best, of course, but I had found songs with words that rung true to me before him. Robbie released that song in 2000. Where / who would I be now if I had considered therapy back then already? What a waste of time in a way. Anyway….

New Sound Experience | Back in October – before this bout of COVID – I was determined to take part in NaNoWriMo. To be able to focus more on my writing I decided to replace my old slightly broken Over-Ears Headphones and after some researched ordered a new one. Active Noise Cancelling and all.

It took till today that I finally unpacked it and set it up. Definitely a nice experience. I’m not sure if the active noise cancelling is something I actually needed and I so far I haven’t really noticed the difference from “normal” to “active noise cancelling”. Maybe because my volume is usually turned up high.

Sad Music Moments | Earlier today while I was finally doing some admin in my finances (like moving my income tax refund to a saving account) I was listening to a mix on TIDAL and the opening chords of Frightened Rabbit’s “Swim Until You Can’t See Land” came through the new headphones. I had to pause what I was doing, because I haven’t listened to Frightened Rabbit in too long and it’s such a good song. Even though I’ve never been a proper fan or knew all that much of their music, it still breaks my heart that Scott decided to leave this world.

For reasons explained further down this evening I sentimentally went on Google Maps and looked up the area around the multi-function arena I knew as the Stockholm Globe. I then saw what it had been renamed to and my heart felt heavy once more. Again, I’ve never been a proper fan, but I liked some of his stuff and it’s sad to know that Tim (aka Avicii) also decided to leave this world before his time.

Robbie Williams | I don’t watch a lot of TV at the moment except maybe put on vintage Gilmore Girls as a background sound for other stuff. Probably while switching that off again I came across this brand new (as in released today!) limited series / documentary

I’m usually not into these kind of celebrity documentaries, because how candid and real is the content after all? It is the version the director and/or subject of the documentary wants us to see and I sometimes – maybe unfairly – think that it’s all a bit phony and maybe just a means to an end to promote the new album / film or whatever.

Having said all that I tuned in the first episode and I will watch the others over the next few days. I admit I always had a soft spot for Robbie among all the guys from all the boybands of the 90s. I was a bit too old to be a fan of either band, at least neither ever really caught my interested. But I liked that goofy kid in that band. I didn’t directly follow his career after the band broke up, but I have quite vivid memories of buying the “Angels” CD single (!!! yes those kind of things) in a mall near the Globe in south Stockholm in the winter of 1997/98 during my term abroad. (Hence the check if the mall is still there etc).

For a while I followed Robbie’s career when it took off, bought the CDs and all that. I did and still do love quite a few of the songs from that time. In his lyrics he sometimes was quite open about his mental health struggles like in “Better Man” and “Strong” and that was something I could relate to. Quite a bit of the documentary so far has been him being confronted with “behind the scenes” film material from the early days like him being off his tits for most of the recording of the first album. At least that’s what it seemed to me. Material from the time around his (first?) stint in rehab and all that. It was painful to watch even for me and I’m not involved in any way.

I’m curious to see what the other parts will focus on and to go on a sentimental journey back through the last 2.5 decades, because that’s how long he’s been around as a solo artist. We’re soooo old.