Red Paint on the Tracks
Of the many things I admire about Bob Dylan, that his music often traces his life is chief among them. His albums present honest snapshots of the man Dylan was at any given time. Yes, his marriage to Sara fell apart, and spawned arguably the greatest breakup record of all time (Blood on the Tracks, 1975), but equally honest was the album that saw Dylan bow before the altar of his love and devotion to her five years earlier (New Morning, 1970). They are two albums that stand on opposite ends of an emotional spectrum, yet each, in its moment, was wholly true.
Years before I started releasing music as A Metropolitan Guide, I used my own name for two EPs —The Part to Play (2010); After the War (2011). Aside from being my earliest attempts at songwriting, these two EPs illustrated my misguided, but sort of dork-charming, notion that songs were supposed to have some kind of a lesson, a life truth that makes you walk away with a different view of the world. For me, this often meant exploring songs about love.
I can’t imagine someone more unqualified to be writing about love and relationships than Brian, aged 22. That I was trying to do it at that age is equivalent to an ostrich lecturing a bunch of blue jays on the finer tenants of flight. I had what amounted to one significant relationship that was informing my views on the subject. I can hear the echoes of that relationship in some of those songs, sure, but these songs were more about unpacking the emotions tied to that romantic fallout, rather than the actual events of the relationship.
And then there’s just the songs that were me trying to be romantic, with no tangible target for that romance. Inventing scenes and stories because I thought it made me deep, or more experienced. Take for instance the chorus of my song, “Under the Northern Sky,” the closing track of After the War:
Not sure what we’ll see, either the storms or stars
Whatever we find, well take from above
And make them ours
All things considered, I don’t believe that to be an awful set of lyrics. Maybe a little trite, but I have written much worse, I assure you. However, this chorus is sandwiched between two verses drowning in vomit-inducing pseudo-sensitivity:
The constellations crowd this quiet scene
Recalling that they’re up there, but forgetting what they mean
The celestial sight above, glimmers in your eyes
Just walk with me by the light of the night
Under the northern sky
The moon watches over as we walk along
As quick as the night began, soon becomes the dawn
The stars they may fade away, simmer and die
The world may collapse though we still stand
Under the northern sky
A phrase like “the world may collapse though we still stand” is so charmingly naïve, appearing at a point when my relationships couldn't survive a college departure, much less some apocalyptic cataclysm. The verses sound precious —an inexperienced, clunky attempt to write a beautiful love song— reinforced by my equally inexperienced vocals. It is difficult to hear my delicate crooning and think mine was a voice of someone who had been there and done that.
To the contrary, I sounded just as I was: Clueless, trying to write the song I thought I was supposed to be writing. Forgivable, perhaps even a little endearing, but once you add in that nothing in this song —nothing!— ever remotely happened, the embarrassment mounts. And what is the point of an intimate song journal if I don’t bask in the embarrassing moments every bit as much as the prideful ones?
I don’t bring up “Under the Northern Sky” to simply trash my younger self, or to begrudge me my most fragile developmental years, but to illustrate the transformation from that idealized version of love (that I probably still have, honestly), to the more realist versions that have appeared in my catalog since. That idealization has often been replaced with frustration. “Under the Northern Sky” turned into “The Balloonist,” or “The Girls You Sang to Sleep” —songs that are not only better written, but come from actual experiences, not an idealized, hypothetical one.
In that transformation, I see my inner-Dylan start to glimmer. My perfect girl, walking with me under the light of the stars, has been replaced by the ones who have broken my heart, or rejected me so outright as to never have given my heart the chance to break. A little of my own blood is on the tracks now, instead of the red paint I was trying to slather all over them in those earlier years. And later, when someone shows up to bring me into my new morning, those songs will all be true, too.