My mind is pogo-ing this week. I’m trying to launch my own small business, which involves the fiddly collection and alchemisation of human remains into something wondrous and unique that I can’t reveal just yet. (But, wow, kudos to everyone who has ever started a small business – I had no idea, you guys.) I’m also helping my boyfriend get his padel courts ready for opening in four weeks’ time, here on the Mornington Peninsula.
What’s padel, you say? It’s like doubles tennis played in a glass temple. Just don’t call it pickleball. It’s my job to figure out how to work various booking apps, banking systems and back-ends. And it’s HIS job to turn this:
Into this:
Who’s having more fun? It’s difficult to say. Anyway, with such a flummoxing and overwhelming to-do list, no amount of dexies has been able to help me focus on one thing for more than a few minutes.
Thankfully, we always have music to soothe our souls and so it’s music I turn to for this latest missive. Specifically, have you ever wondered if songs come true? If lyric writing can be a dark art?
Wonder no more, because I’ve got two spooky tales for you, firsthand, from the songwriters’ mouths…
I’m alive
Wondering if I’m dying
When I asked Grace Cummings if her songs ever turn out to be prophetic. I hadn’t expected “two code blues” to feature in the answer.
I interviewed Grace for The Guardian, ahead of the release of her new album, Bloodhorse!. You should know that The Guardian loves Grace. A contributor previously described her voice as appearing “to spring from a deep well connecting her diaphragm to the massive tectonic plates below” and as being “powerful enough to pound granite into dust”.
I had my own superlatives, but there was also this strange part of our conversation that didn’t make it into the story:
In the lead up to the release of the album, Grace found herself alone in a hospital room, upside down, wondering if she was dead. She had just experienced her second ‘code blue’ – hospital speak for ‘fuck’.
A stampede of doctors and nurses had rushed in, strapped her down and tilted the bed to get the blood flowing faster to her heart. Eventually, when the beeps and squiggles righted themselves, everyone left.
“I was barely there,” she told me, about being left in the room. “It was a long weekend and Moomba festival was on. There were fireworks outside the window and I thought that I had died because all I could see was flashing lights.”
The roof’s become kaleidoscopic
Morphine
I can lie my head back in the sky
That I sit and stare at every night
With Morphine
By this point, Grace had already recorded the album’s opener, The Hills Are Alive With the Sound of Morphine. It’s a song that shifts from cabaret to 70s rock opera. Lyrically, she meant it to be metaphorical, “about pain and searching for escape from it”:
And now, months after writing the song, it turned out that the morphine she’d been given in hospital to treat another condition was a big contributor to her medical emergency.
“I thought, well. Isn’t that fucking funny?”
Since then, she’s reflected on the fact that life as a musician is so hard to sustain that each output can feel like it might be the last. She even told a friend as much, which alarmed him.
“I said, ‘No, no, no, not like that,’” she says. “It’s just the way I approach making an album. And I kind of want to take that approach with everything now.”
Here’s the song:
There's just one thing that I wonder
Will it all crash down like thunder?
And who will shake my black tambourine?
Lo Carmen is one of those artists in the true sense of the word. Literally everything she does is for art. Here’s her newsletter Loose Connections, for instance: five years’ worth of observations from the road and from her record collection. She also makes a podcast about death, called Death Is Not The End. In this song, Black Tambourine, her twin interests collide in a most moving way. Lo told me she wrote Black Tambourine when “thinking about my own death like as if it was a movie with me lying glamorously in a coffin”. She started thinking about what she’d leave her children, “and I realised I didn’t own anything of any value, except my crappy collection of musical instruments. But then I thought, if I love these things, then so will they.” She considered that her tambourine, in particular, would be a great gift, because whoever shakes it continues the connection between you both, from this life to the next. “So I wrote a song inspired by all this with the repetitive refrain ‘Who will shake my black tambourine?’
“Not much later, an old friend of the singer Wendy Saddington – who was very much a mentor and idol of mine – turned up at my house with a suitcase of Wendy’s stuff that he thought she would want me to have.” Lo pulled out a shabby, half-broken tambourine that Wendy had probably owned since the 60s, or at least the 70s. It had little stars on it. And it was black. “It felt incredibly meaningful and prophetic. Like I was meant to somehow carry on her story.”
What about you? Songwriter or not, have you ever written anything that later came to pass?
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