try again. fail again. fail better.
'jesus' blood never failed me yet' and 'dawn chorus'
There's a lot of really exciting stuff in the works at tiny mammal kingdom: a wonderfully stupid piece about Knives Out, Gideon the Ninth, and murder mysteries, alongside interviews about subjects ranging from tennis to tentacles to '10 Years' by Daði og Gagnamagnið. This week, though, my body is too busy producing antibodies against COVID-191 to produce very much content. So in the interests of not breaking my plan to do a post every week, here's a shortish piece on Thom Yorke's 'Dawn Chorus' and Gavin Bryars’ ‘Jesus’ Blood Never Failed Me Yet’, songs which feel extremely appropriate for self-isolation.
In 1971, composer Gavin Bryars was ‘working with a friend, Alan Power, on a film about people living rough in the area around Elephant and Castle and Waterloo Station,’ many of whom would break into ‘drunken song’ as they were filmed. One of them, who did not in fact drink, sang a simple religious song:
Jesus’ blood never failed me yet
Never failed me yet
Jesus’ blood never failed me yet
This one thing I know
For he loves me so
The recording did not end up being used in the film Bryars and Power were working on. Bryars brought the unused tapes home and, listening to this song again, realised that it was in tune with his piano and that its thirteen bars looped effectively and ‘in a slightly unpredictable way.’ He brought it into the Fine Art Department at Leicester, where he worked, and left the tape copying onto a continuous reel while he went to get some coffee. When he returned, he found the room outside his recording room ‘unnaturally subdued’, many ‘sitting alone, quietly weeping.’ Eventually he realised that it was because the song had been playing the entire time he’d been away.
The voice of this singer — still unknown, despite efforts to locate them — now forms the core of Bryars’ ‘Jesus’ Blood Never Failed Me Yet’, a twenty-six minute piece featuring only those five lines above repeated approximately sixty times, and a hauntingly gorgeous orchestral accompaniment composed by Bryars. Listening to it is mesmerising. Although the song itself never really varies, the shifting accompaniment and the sheer repetition alone make it profoundly affecting and mean it transforms itself as it goes. Their voice isn’t classical, it creaks and strains a little and there’s a noticeable accent, but it’s in tune and there are moments — as they sing ‘failed me yet’ the third time, for example, or the slide on ‘loves me so’ — where their reach towards softness and beauty is stunning because they come slightly short. The true wonder of the piece is in how such deep and moving beauty can come from the repetition of a hope that might never come true, and the texture of the piece — its flaws, its roughness — is vital for making that happen. It’s about trying again, and trying again, and trying again, and eventually becoming transcendent through the faith that there can be — is already — something better.
‘Dawn Chorus’ is very different to ‘Jesus’ Blood’ in quite a number of ways, but I think it’s similarly gorgeous. It’s a self-consciously unbeautiful track: the synths which provide the bulk of any instrumentation are rough and penetratingly high in the mix as they follow unpredictable patterns in complex chords, and seem at moments to hesitate or pause; Thom’s vocals mostly mumble, staying very low and feeling very close to the listener; the lyrics are frequently fragmentary and opaque and repetitive. It feels very much like Thom talking to himself, trying to reach a conclusion but frequently going backwards and forwards as he constantly returns to the line ‘if you could do it all again’. The pronouns shift, with the first and third verses in a second person clearly addressed to himself and the second verse in first person as he addresses another person. It’s a song about loss, and change, and stasis, about how ‘I think I missed something / but I’m not sure what,’ and the synths provide an image of that dull monotony of wanting, of living. Listening to it with headphones on feels somehow at once overwhelming and recognisable and comforting.
Yet there are moments of beauty here which shine — somehow — through it all, like the brief moment of awe as,
In the middle of the vortex
the wind picked up;
shook up the soot
from the chimney pot
into spiral patterns
of you, my love.
This image transfigures dead ash into something profoundly moving: ‘you, my love’ likely refers to Rachel Owen, Yorke’s long-term partner and the mother of his children, from whom he separated in 2015 and who passed away in 2016. His voice breaks out of spoken word into a slide — or maybe it just breaks — as he sings ‘chimney pot’ and somehow the reminder of how beautifully he can sing makes the whole song even more affecting. The idea of ‘spiral patterns’ of Owen — not images, per se, but ‘patterns’ — is wondrous. It seems to answer the parenthetical question of a line in Anne Carson’s rendering of Catullus 101: ‘and talk (why?) with mute ash’. You might not be able to speak to or see the dead, but you can see patterns of them and remember what they meant. It recalls, too, the ‘thousand tiny birds singing’ of a dawn chorus, and while Yorke complains that ‘it’s a bloody racket / it’s the dawn chorus’ the song ends, after he’s sung ‘if you could do it all again / this time with style,’ with a distorted sample of birdsong. Beauty ends up emerging through, not in spite of, the artefacts and the hesitations.
Both of these songs insist that beauty can happen, in spite of yourself and your circumstances, in spite of heartbreak, and it can happen only through repetition and connection; nothing means anything without that. Hope is, at its root, about putting yourself at the mercy of a future you cannot control and the others you’ll reach it with — it’s a collective activity, a meaning-making ritual. It’s entirely possible to imagine a world in which the singer of ‘Jesus’ Blood’ was never recorded, or in which Bryars never came across or did anything with the tape; where Thom Yorke kept the inner monologue of ‘Dawn Chorus’ to himself; where these songs never saw the light of day. They did, though. Probably the unknown singer is dead, by now, and the grief of Owens’ loved ones is their own; but through these songs, we can feel connected to them, can share in a peculiar and unlikely optimism. Thinking about that helps me get through this period of illness and isolation.
For the record: I’m fine; I’m fully vaccinated and really it just feels like a bad cold, which is to say unpleasant but manageable.