distributedlife

I stumbled across Brooke Fraser on the album She Will Have Her Way – The Songs of Tim and Neil Finn. The album is a series of covers by female Australian and New Zealander female artists who felt strongly about or were influenced by the writing of Tim and Neil Finn. Both of whom were creative forces in Crowded House.

Brooke Fraser sung a version of Distant Sun and it’s a great cover and she has a fantastic voice. Her cover bugged me for a while, back then her omission of a few lines from the original I thought were ok even if it did break the flow of the song. Her cover omits the following line as though being a Christian and uttering those words would make her any less a Christian.

Like a Christian fearing vengeance from above

On a hunch I went out and bought Brooke Fraser’s first album What to do with Daylight and liked half of it. I didn’t know it at the time but Brooke Fraser’s music is overly religious for my tastes. Some of it isn’t or is so well written such that one doesn’t feel like they are praying as they sing along. I don’t mind songwriters being religious but I don’t want to sing about how great their god is. If they can do it with cleverly written metaphors and abstractions then I am happy.

‘Wait a minute’ you may wonder, what is the difference between my dislike for a singer who omits the words that make her seem less Christian as though her god would actually be vengeful and someone who doesn’t like to sing along with song that are in effect prayers to a god? Not much really. I don’t like to sing along with religious songs because it means nothing to me. The same energy and love that they direct towards their god I cannot. I believe that you sing along to the songs you know and love because at some level they mean something to you. To do anything else would be a lie. This is why I only like half the album and this is why Brooke Fraser didn’t include the lines from Distant Sun.

Scarlet was one of the better songs on What to do with Daylight. It is an amazing song. It’s a haunting solo piece accompanied by piano. I used to listen to it on my headphones before going to sleep. The problem was that I got to a point where I couldn’t sleep for wanting to listen to the song again. I was going to list the lyrics at the end of the article but in the end they won’t do the song justice. To truly experience the song the same way I do you should put it onto your music player; pop the headphones in. It doesn’t have to be loud but background noise needs to be blocked out. Put it on repeat and go to bed, draw the curtains and turn the lights out. Lie there in the dark and listen.

You may now be asking how this relates to me? The song speaks of exposure, revealing oneself to the world. Showing our true selves and not talking behind a facade of propriety or indoctrinated behaviours appropriate our gender, age or ethnicity. It is about someone who can’t reveal who she truly is because people know her. They might cast judgement upon her. To escape is to go somewhere else, somewhere where people do not know her name. There she slowly reveals who she is even though she has to fight herself to do so. But in the end she has to close herself in because it’s not the people that judge her but the culture around her.

How does this relate to me? Right now, the biggest blocker I have to my published writing is having people cast aspersions upon me based on what I write. The psychology of the person is based upon interpreting what is said or written. How I choose to interpret implies an underlying psyche. But when I write I try to see life from various viewpoints. It all comes from my head but is it all me. At some point I need to get beyond that and just not care.

No, Scarlet didn’t always mean this to me and won’t always will. Aside from the odd tense the previous sentence Scarlet is a beautiful song irrespective of the meaning.