52 Essentials: No. 13, "Beginners", Paradise, Slow Club (2011)

Welcome to Maps & Legends, a project by two new parents looking forward to sharing our favorite art and culture with our new edition. Each week in this space, we'll pick a personal favorite of ours (or at least a favorite of one of us) and write about what it means to us and why we're excited to pass it down.

Every Wednesday, we post a survey question for our followers on Facebook. Last week's question was: "What song lyric gets you every time you hear it, no matter how many times you hear it? It might make you cry, pump your first, or just remember a great time, but it works every time." The questions are picked more-or-less at random, but that question was inspired by my own answer to that question, the track "Beginners" by Slow Club and--in particular--the following lyric:

"And you know you haven’t got all the answers
If you did you would be screaming them out
And I know I haven’t got all the answers,
If I did I would be screaming them out, screaming them out"

Those four lines can bring me to tears over and over again, whether I'm sitting alone in my car (like that Wednesday morning before I posted the question on Facebook), at home with family or out hearing them sung live from the band on stage. They burn a hole right through my heart and fill it at the very same time. 

Max's mom first introduced me to the English duo after she heard them play on an NPR showcase. I was predisposed to like them since they take their name from the fictional night club featured in Blue Velvet, and anything that's even David Lynch-adjacent gets a leg up from me. I was also briefly obsessed by their mesmerizing video for "Two Cousins." After seeing them perform live in support of their second full-length album Paradise (available at Amazon), they became one of our very favorite bands.

"Beginners" didn't start out as my favorite track off of Paradise. I can't even say that I would've put it in my top five favorite Slow Club song at first. It probably wasn't until Daniel Radcliffe, a fan of the band, starred in a showstopper of a one-man video for the song that I finally stopped and paid it any attention.

I wouldn't even say that video really captures the spirit of the song, in my opinion at least. When I finally gave the lyrics a close look, what I heard wasn't the devastation of love recently lost. It wasn't the sound of freshly cut wounds that are still stinging and raw to the touch. What I heard was woeful acceptance and melancholic appreciation for a relationship that simply wasn't to be.

The imagery in the lyrics is practically parental, suggesting one half of the relationship was on a different end of the maturity spectrum than the other ("And in a moment it all came to this / The time it took for your muscles to grow and grip ... As your bones grew / Why did you become you?"). There's consolation in the singer's words to her lost lover, a sense that she's already been around the block and has perspective to impart ("You know these moments, they take years to pass / You gotta be coping, gotta be hoping the hands fly by fast").  And even as she accepts that things are over between them, she knows it's painful for both of them ("See the sun rise now, this has to end / Don’t let it be the one to walk us home again"). The final note of the song tells us that she wishes her ex-lover happiness, genuinely and wholeheartedly ("Keep breathing, keep breathing / Find a scheme you believe in").

So what of the lyrics I highlighted above? What is it about those lines in particular? In my opinion, they're the pinnacle of the whole track. The climax. Up until that point, the singer seems in control of the situation and she has her feelings in check. She's consoling, not collapsing. She's never so vulnerable until she finally admits that she doesn't have all the answers any more than her ex does. She is screaming, losing control for the first and last time. And it's cathartic. It's cathartic for me, at least, to realize that being confused isn't a personal shortcoming. It isn't a failure. It's the human condition, and it can bond us to each other even as it pulls us apart.

This series is all about the art and culture we want to pass down to Max. It's an odd thing to say that I wish a good heartbreak on my son, that I hope he feels that good kind of hurt that can remind you that you're alive. But then I don't have all the answers, and I won't pretend that I do. I just know that it can take tearing your heart in two to know how good it feels to sew it back together.