And it came to pass one moonlit night in Austin—a miracle took place. They appeared as a horde of horses. Their picks were sharp, their strings had been strung, and with a touch, their boots were as flint and their instruments a whirlwind. Upon the stage they brought a flood of golden light as the crowd was baptized in a wave of sound. With each note they were drawn closer to the Divine until a moment of rapturous silence when his voice rained forth like many waters, “Well, I came home.”
I never made it to Austin City Limits, but I imagine it went like this. I know what you’re thinking, but hear me out. If you had told me in 2013 that Mumford and Sons would be headlining ACL, I wouldn’t have believed it, either. Even at the apex of their fame a decade ago, they were unlikely to emerge with any real staying power. The term ‘stomp-clap’ has been levied against them by critics who deride their signature sound. However, Mumford and Sons was always uncommon amongst uncommon men. They blend the rich heritage of English folk with the instrumentation of American bluegrass, channeling alternative and at times—vaguely religious—sensibilities. Yet, their most noble innovation lay in crafting music that matured in harmony with their audience, ultimately bringing the band and their fans together once more, a full decade later. Once, when asked about the best concert I had been to, I lied. It was one of those rare lies that happen so automatically that even they take you by surprise. I struggle to admit that I am a Mumford and Sons fan, not because it reveals that I am religious but because it reveals that I am sensitive. But as faith and fear are the first things you should know about somebody, it’s about time I told the truth. ● The arrival of Babel marked the end of the longest winter I have known. My mind remembers little of that time—only colorless geometric forms and the sound of static—but my body remembers it as a time of sleepless nights, frightful mornings, and tired afternoons. On a faceless day taking the bus home from school, I watched as leagues of beige strip-malls turned to decaying orchards and dusty, barren land. As the darkness descended, the animals fled deep into the earth, leaving me behind. Even prayer was futile, not because it didn’t work, but because I no longer cared to see tomorrow. I discovered at seventeen, waiting on college decisions, what winter meant. Sometime between midnight and dawn, I awoke to a green light on the ceiling. It was a radical, pulsating green unlike anything I had seen before. I saw, outside, the blizzard that we had been expecting for a generation. Behind the shutters, across the Hudson, and under the mountains vibrated a stillness as if a string had been struck. Had it always been humming? I watched as the first flickers of winter played off the frozen river before lightning struck the southern skyline. I remember that morning clearly because my senses began to awaken. First, I saw alabaster snow unbearable in its purity; although the sun rose slowly as I walked, I couldn’t have known its vastness would be so blinding. Then I smelled the electricity of last night’s storm by its frenetic sparkling signature, atop notes of freshly-melted peat and carbon picked up from elsewhere. Standing perfectly still, I felt the first flakes fall on my head and retreated under my hood. Bearing down, I took out my iPod and put on “The Cave.” Between lilting guitar strings, “The Cave” opens with allegorical emptiness. My friend Lea and I had successfully convinced our parents to see their concert in a few weeks in Brooklyn, but I had just now allowed myself to become excited. By the time I looked back up, the landscape had transformed. In all that dazzle of light I was surprised to see a color I had never seen before—an incandescent blue so brilliant in its lonesome. That was when I heard, “But I will hold on hope / And I won’t let you choke / On the noose around your neck.” I had never been in love before and wondered if someday, someone would feel that way about me. Standing still on that frozen hill, I had somehow been seen. Before Mumford had finished the chorus, I had crawled out of a cave of my own and became a beam of light. So, what is it about Mumford and Sons’ music that speaks so pertinently to us today? Their use of Biblical allegory will always find an audience in those of us attempting to make sense of our own epic mistakes. After all, what subject is more eternally captivating than the perilous pride of man? Babel reconstitutes a life-long attempt to build a tower only to witness its eventual collapse. Yet, ten years on, Mumford and Sons better helps us understand the types of mistakes that may require a full generation to be made fully manifest. ● The seventh period bell rings and I am at the wheel. Check the rearview, side mirror, side mirror. Pop the disc. It’s loading, and I have just enough time to buckle, click, open the sunroof, check the rearview again, put it in reverse. Roll down the windows, roll on the afternoon. Press play. Turn up the volume, look into the sun ahead. Bright strings. Three drum kicks. And now—I’m flying. Sixty miles north of the City is the road that connects my school to my boyfriend’s house. I remember it as an objectively perfect drive. Buzzing behind young apple orchards, across the fields, and by the pond, it gave me just enough time to repeat “Babel” a few times before moving on to the “better” parts. Even the street names unfurled before me like destiny—Bethlehem to Moore’s Road then Mt. Airy. But the ride really starts to get good once you hit Rt. 94. I had it timed so by the time there was a stretch of open road ahead of me, “I Will Wait” would play. My favorite moment of Babel is the transition from “Whispers in the Dark” to “I Will Wait.” Pregnant with the void, it begins not with a bang but a crash. Fingers dancing on the dash, it signals that if I catch a string of green lights, I will be at his door and in his arms in exactly four minutes and thirty-six seconds. Thinking back now, it’s hard to believe I would ever want to leave Newburgh. At the time it seemed there was little to do apart from idling in the Dollar Store parking lot listening to music. Our town had just gotten a Starbucks, and even that was impossible to get to because the lines were so long. I had resigned myself to long nights of studying Latin until he came along. The mere thought of seeing him was enough to give meaning to most days. When I arrive at his house he is already outside waiting. He asks what I was listening to, whether I thought of him, and if I had eaten something yet. He must have known what I was going to say, because his car is already running and so we hop in and take off. If you were there on Rt. 94 in March 2013, you might have seen it. Maybe you were at the ice cream stand. Or maybe you were pulling out of the train station. But if you were there on that early spring day, you would have seen—tooling around the road over the dam and behind the train tracks—two kids fall in love. It was like seeing color for the first time. You see, there is a culture of driving Upstate. Long-gone were the days of listening to the iPod on the bus—the car was the final frontier of music consumption. My CRV sported a mere 6-disc CD changer and, I, only one CD. But his parents’ S60 had Bluetooth and therefore had more than twelve songs to enjoy together. The car’s system recognizes him as Prince of Egypt II. We never quite figured out why, but we decide to keep it because it was a pretty neat name for a car. I liked him first and foremost because he was a good decision-maker, but secondly because he was the coolest person I knew. He suggests that I name my car Babel, and so I do. He insists it’s safer if he drives because I will get too distracted by the music. He’s right, once again. Once we’re strapped in, he tells me about his dream from last night when we drove until we ran out of gas. Before I can ask what we were listening to, “Dust Bowl Dance” begins to play. ● “Dust Bowl Dance” is a slow burn. It opens with an uncharacteristic piano sequence and nearly a minute of narrative verse. He tells me he is learning to play it on piano, although I can’t understand why. The song perfectly captures the anxiety of fresh love as the moment you are transformed from a gentle breeze over a far-off field into a cyclone howling, howling into the open sky. Although it is one of their most experimental songs, “Dust Bowl Dance” to me best reflects Mumford and Sons’ appeal. Their music is exactly the opposite of what you might expect. Listen carefully and you will be rewarded. Most know Mumford and Sons for their folksy-love songs. However, fewer recognize that their songs of love and regret are inverted. It’s hard to believe that the same man who sings, “Raise my hands / Paint my spirit gold,” is the same who sings, “There will come a time I will look in your eye / You will pray to the God that you’ve always denied.” In their universe, true love takes on a masochistic tenor and true regret lasts even longer. Listening to Mumford and Sons feels like encountering your destiny on the very path you take to avoid it. Fate is, after all, the most powerful aphrodisiac. It’s a shame I appreciate it more fully in his absence than his presence. In hindsight, I hadn’t been able to appreciate just how he knew every word—I had been too busy trying to induce his love for me in the lyrics to no avail. The closest I come is the vow when Mumford rattles off his penance, “Seal my heart and break my pride / I’ve nowhere to stand and nowhere to hide,” which more closely resembles enslavement, in my view, than love. Still seventeen, I haven’t been kissed yet and am worried that might happen soon. Worse yet is the fear of what is to follow. I hadn’t understood how you could share your honor with someone and face your father without shame. I think he knows how much my honor matters to me, because he lets me keep it. As the music picks up pace, a terrible threat wells up inside me. We had been religious precisely long enough to learn our virtues but not long enough to properly cultivate them. Before I have time to stop him, Mumford wails his vow once more and takes off into the bridge—his guitar taking on a non-human tempo before going into double-time. For the first time I am scared he will run us off the road. Mercifully the song ends. He must have accurately sensed my fear because he puts on “Little Lion Man” next. ● I listened to Babel differently at different points in the relationship. That spring I planted myself in the album’s “love” songs. I imbibed “Babel” in April for its warmth and energy. By May, I had been secure enough to listen more passively. I enjoyed “Whispers in the Dark” until I realized it was about infidelity and summarily cast it out. “Lover of the Light” was enticing too until I began to listen to closely and heard: “I was not stable / But flawed by pride / I miss my sanguine eyes / So hold my hands up, breathe in and breathe out.” I discovered that Mumford and Sons’ “love” songs are singed with regret before I had understood how that could even be possible. That’s when I discovered Babel’s B-sides. Late June, our love turned to curse when we sealed it with words. On “Lover’s Eyes,” Mumford captures this moment when he sings, “Love was kind, for a time / Now just aches and it makes me blind.” I hadn’t thought too deeply about it at the time. So, too, I skipped “Hopeless Wanderer” until I could no longer deny my denial. By the time I made it to “Reminder,” in late July, I knew then what had to be done. I decide privately that if he cannot be my love he will be my regret. Generational choices rarely announce themselves and always arrive when you least expect. I believed that there was more ahead of me than beige wastelands and driving in circles. So desperately had I wanted the walls of my town to come crumbling down that I listened to the others in my life. The problem was that there was no problem. I was advised to cite distance as the reason knowing damn well that Cambridge and Providence weren’t terribly far at all. Our failure was not a logistical one but a spiritual one. ● Of course I knew the risk. I knew that by leaving him I would plunge us back into winter. It didn’t take him long before he figured it out. He hadn’t understood the source of my sudden sadness but could tell from the music that the cold had moved from my head and into my heart. The more I shunned him the more clinging he became. Even his kindness brought me sadness. I rued the moment his understanding would turn to defiance. And I knew that once I extinguished that sacred flame, I couldn’t be forgiven. When I saw him last, we met at the Starbucks that, too, had lost its novelty. We leave from there and decide to take my car because he had just gifted me Sigh No More on CD. Driving to our favorite spot of concrete ruins overlooking the Hudson, we listen to “Little Lion Man” one last time. 247 seconds. We sit in silence for 247 seconds. I count each as judgment. One second takes me back to that fear I experienced on our drive long ago. I simply hadn’t been prepared for our love. Nor was I prepared for the unequivocal fear of failure, too, which had been new to me. If he had known then that the true reason had been my pride, a fear of failure masquerading as reason, he would have done anything to get me to stay. This is why I must leave. In 70 seconds, my fear turns to resentment. I was mad because he deserved better and didn’t even know it, but madder yet because he hadn’t been listening to the lyrics. Hadn’t he heard on “Sigh No More” that, “Love, it will not betray you, dismay or enslave you / It will set you free”? At 90 seconds, I can’t decide whether a woman who loved him would have never let him go in the first place or would let him go if it meant ‘doing the right thing’. I reason that I am letting him go because I love him—that I will set him in a basket and allow life’s sacred stream to carry him forth to his destiny. But privately, I worry I am making a mistake. 140 seconds is just long enough to brace for impact without having an inkling of what comes next. I had been so immersed in the present that I failed to recognize the future was coming. 247 seconds is not long enough. My sentimentality fails me just when I need it most. I don’t even have the grace to cry. It is only when he rejects my plea for friendship do I realize my mistake. I respected him first and foremost because he was a good decision-maker. And once again, he was right. Of course, friends would never break each other’s hearts. Of course, a friend would not be so selfish as to start something she couldn’t finish. Of course, a friend would not have opened Pandora’s box and left him to deal with its aftermath. That is why he knew it had to end in order for it to have mattered at all. His heart in my hands and his head on my lap is how we sit in the embers of my pyrrhic victory. It takes exactly 247 seconds before my love is squelched and shame is all that remains. ● I don’t speak for a week after it ends. My parents try everything. My father switches my car to one with Bluetooth—a beaming white Eos beautiful as Pegasus—but it is of no use. I lost him, and now Babel, too? My mother supplies me with canvasses and sets me up in the booth in our kitchen. I begin to paint the clocktowers of Harvard, perhaps silently trying to convince myself that it had all been worth it. I don’t stop until I complete them all. Staring at the canvas, all of the colors look the same. When I finally arrive in Cambridge, I begin to feel my sense of pride reawaken. Encased in a tomb of red brick, I inhabit my prayer for one glimmering moment. Only when I see my parents’ tears does it occur to me to be afraid. How could I be trusted with the future when I had just cast out all the color from my life? The next morning, I awake to a thunderbolt so spectacular in its suddenness that I wonder whether he hears it in Providence, too. One day I stopped listening to Mumford and Sons. I am not sure when, exactly. I remember the time by the changing leaves and the coldness sweeping in, so it must have been a little more than ten years ago. The only reason I remember is because it’s around that time that I stopped praying and started writing. ● The morning of ACL, I decide to listen to Babel for the first time in ten years. Still driving my Eos, I wonder how it will sound. Enabled by Bluetooth, I skip directly to “I Will Wait” and take off. I can hear it miles away in my mind—a song of revelation. I envision how it will come to pass, one moonlit night in Austin. They will appear as a horde of horses with their picks sharpened and their strings strung. With a touch, their boots will turn to flint and their instruments a whirlwind. I can see the color now—a golden light will flood the stage as the crowd is baptized in their sound. With each note, I am drawn closer until coming much closer, I hear another sound. I crash my car at the intersection of Transit and Hope. I normally don’t go that way, even if it’s by the church I go to, sometimes. It was only a matter of time. I could no longer outrun the spiritual forces I had been evading for so long. When you get into a car crash, the first thing everyone asks is if you’re okay. They don’t ask what song you were listening to, or who you were thinking of, or whether you had eaten at all. They aren’t interested in whether you are okay at all—only if you have been hurt. But the truth is, I had been hurt. My love of flying had been replaced by fear and a seatbelt-shaped bruise. I have a lingering headache that I can’t seem to get rid of, even weeks later. I haven’t smiled since and I worry that something deep inside of me is broken only I don’t know what. It’s the sort of hurt that has no cure except for time and forgiveness. The owner of the Milk Store across the street runs out and grabs my hands. She must be confusing me for someone else because I have never seen her before, but she recognizes me by my silence. She’s begging me to speak and suddenly I see my parents in the kitchen ten years ago. A different woman with an odd familiarity pulls me in off the street. She convinces me to call my father, and now finally I must share with him the effect of my shame. She has his green eyes, and I am convinced she is an angel before I place my head in her lap and cry earnestly for the first time. The crash left me with strange memories and nervous nights. When I close my eyes, I see the pregnant void. I feel myself climbing, climbing, and now I am falling off a tower and suddenly I’m flying. The stop. The silence. The crash. I think of the woman with green eyes, as much of a stranger to me as I to him. I hadn’t been prepared for our love to burst forth in the form it took, now as different as a wasp to an orchid. I wonder if he, too, placed me in a basket and sent me downstream to her. ● I may not have made it to ACL, but here’s what I did instead. If you were in Austin that second weekend, you might have spotted us flying in a lifted 4Runner taking off from the lake, around Barton Springs, up into the mountains and away from Zilker Park. As the sun casts its final glow on the canyons, Ike remarks that it looks like Utah. I had never given it much thought, but I suppose he’s right. The colors in Texas are different than New England—more muted earthy pastels with occasional moments of brilliance. The Northeast could never be so subtle. He hands me the aux and I put on “Little Lion Man.” Ike hasn’t listened to Mumford and Sons much, but he is primarily disappointed that they are not, in fact, his sons. He doesn’t have much to add and lets me stare out the window. I don’t listen with seconds counted, but with sympathy. Listening to Mumford and Sons all those years ago, I never understood how someone who could experience love so strongly be condemned to lust after it for so long. That, to me, is Mumford and Sons' signature brilliance. Their music serves as a mirror reflecting one's own relationship with fear and faith. Depending on how you listen, you may realize who occupies the place of the Divine in your own heart, ultimately influencing whether you remain trapped in a cycle of past mistakes or break free and find the potential for love. I understand now it’s a lesson that Mumford himself learned after years of torturous mistakes stumbling in search of the light. This time around, I realize that Mumford doesn’t ask for forgiveness even once in “Little Lion Man,” and that is what makes it so edifying. He seems to understand that some mistakes are so grave that they cannot be forgiven, and all is left is regret. Love and regret are twin flames. The only problem with regret is that it bonds you not with rings, but chains. It seems we have gotten lost and soon we are parked in an abandoned lot. We have just enough time to eat a powdered donut and pull up directions. Mumford finally concludes, “I really fucked it up this time / Didn’t I, my dear? / Didn’t I, my dear?” When Ike asks who hurt Mumford, we both realize it was himself. Only with regret you cannot be closer, yet. ● Ten years ago, Mumford and Sons performed under twinkling points of light to a sold-out crowd at the Barclays Center in Brooklyn. Close to the end of their set, while I had been waiting for them to play “The Cave,” they performed a song that I hadn’t heard before. It must have been on the deluxe edition because it wasn’t one of the original twelve I had access to. Taxiing at the Austin airport, many years later, “Where Are You Now” catches my eye. I started praying again. I keep ‘em short. When Mumford announces, “It came to the end / It seems you had heard,” I bow my head and ask for forgiveness. To me, Mumford and Sons’ saddest lyrics appear on “Where Are You Now.” When he sings: “And I hear of your coming / And your going in the town / I hear stories of your smile / I hear stories of your frown,” somehow it's not him that I'm thinking of. To me, “Where Are You Now,” is an elegy not of love, but of regret. The problem of regret is all about not knowing whether you made the right choice. As I slip into a cloud, it occurs to me that he doesn't know where I am now. And yet, somehow, I still feel his life inside of me. I realize that only regret, and not love, is strong enough to turn twin stars into strangers. ● Here's what I've learned from listening to Babel in Texas. Babel compels us to live authentically in our mistakes. One could reasonably conclude from listening to Babel that love and pride cannot coexist; but my favorite thing about the album is that Mumford provides us with no clear answers. Instead, Mumford teaches us that love is less about the destination and more about the roads taken to get there. For first love to become just that, we must necessarily let go. First love teaches us how to liberate ourselves from the chains of regret to be capable of loving once more. Love is as much learned as it is felt. Breathe in, breathe out. Babel taught me that love means commitment to a shared future even if we cannot spend it together. And he taught me that it is okay to have simple dreams. He taught me that it is not selfish to want to start a family out of love, and that there is no higher purpose than bringing your child onto this Earth safely so you can teach him everything you know. Just like Mumford when he sings, “And my ears hear the call of my unborn sons / And I know their choices colour all I’ve done,” I know the mistakes, all those furious mistakes, I’ve made will be worth it. So, when I finally see the photo of him holding his baby, I know now that it is love that binds us. ● Dear Love, You were the last who saw my archaic smile and, I, the future in your eyes. If we are still doing things we once spoke about, I think you should know that if you returned to Providence years after you left it, you might see how… On long nights, between midnight and dawn, I step out on my porch to play the mandolin, In my waking hours, I teach Brown students history. Lately, I’ve been telling them about Alexander the Great and Platonic ideals. But the true lesson I hope to impart upon them is of courage—for courage is pride free from fear. I pray that they will lead lives of excellence and friendship, that they might resist indifference, and pursue their dreams with urgency but not with haste. Only time will tell if they listen, I’ve been taking more walks lately. It’s best I keep the Earth below my feet. You might spot me walking the streets you once knew in my cowboy boots, my hair in braids, hidden safely behind lunar spectacles and tucked away under my headphones, For the first time, I am excited to enter winter. My favorite song now is “Winter Winds.” Its seasonal ironies brilliantly capture the optimisms and failures of thwarted love, To me, its best lines are: “But if your strife strikes at your sleep / Remember spring swaps snow for leaves / You’ll be happy and wholesome again / When the city clears and the sun ascends.” So, too, I enter winter not with despair, but with prophetic certainty of the arrival of spring. And it’s all because of you.
0 Comments
|
the Archive |