ANIKANIK || onebighappymess

It’s been a while since I sat down and read a book. I have all my books stacked in my messy shelf above my computer, but never really paid any attention to them recently. Normally I’d blame my busy schedule, but let’s face it, I’ve just been really lazy. It’s just now upon Cheekie’s goading that I re-read Nick Hornby’s 31 Songs again, after leaving it half-read for almost a year since I bought it. It turns out we both love Nick Hornby, our first book of his being High Fidelity. This discovery was made during lunch hour while I was smoking and she inhaling the second-hand smoke (yes, she really is a good friend). And then I realized that forgetting to read your books, or simply becoming lazy to do so, is just as nasty a habit as chainsmoking.

So now I’m re-reading this non-fiction by Nick Hornby. 31 Songs is a collection of essays about his favorite music, and of course I wasn’t able to put it down since, save for this moment as I’m typing this and Youtube-ing Smoke by Ben Folds. This song is really the whole point of this entry. I’m currently on page 90, where Hornby is explaining why he loves the song—the brilliance of the lyrics primarily.

“‘Smoke’ is one of the cleverest, wisest songs about the slow death of a relationship that I know… the heartbreaking thing about Folds’s song is that it manages simultaneously to convey both the narrator’s desperation and the impossibility of a happy outcome.

In ‘Smoke’, the central conceit is that the relationship is a book, and so its unhappy recent history, the narrator wants to believe, can be destroyed by burning it page by page, until ‘all the things we’ve written in it never really happened’… Wiping the slate clean is the fantasy of anyone who has ever got into a mess with a partner, and the metaphor is witty enough and rich enough to seduce us into thinking just for a moment that in this case it might be possible, but the music here, a mournful waltz, tells a different story.

‘Smoke’ is, I think, lyrically perfect, clever, and sad and neat… it’s also one of the very few songs that is thoughtful about the process of love, rather than the object or the subject. And it was a constant companion during the end (the long, drawn-out end) of my marriage, and it made sense then, and it still makes sense now. You can’t ask much more of a song than that.”

I have that song dwelling in my Ipod as soon as I first read 31 Songs. I must admit that I was intrigued by what I read, and it’s true—the effect of that song the first time I heard it is still the same as of this moment. It’s the type of song that will make you press the rewind button as soon as the track bar is slowly starting to hit the closing lines, I myself must have played it atleast 10 times since I began listening to it this evening. It’s quite addicting in the sense that you want to savor every line of the lyrics, thus you want to keep listening to it. It’s emotional without being EMO, but perhaps “honest” would be a more apt term. And Hornby was right about it being clever and neat, its lyrics and melody gave out a new take about a dying relationship, and I haven’t heard anything like that from a pop song.

Excuse my lengthy introduction, just let me share this video I found on Youtube. This is Ben Folds performing Smoke with Western Australian Symphony Orchestra. This collaboration made the song even more amazing. :)