Damien Rice has released a new album. His third. I bought and downloaded it over the internet while in Kumasi, and have been listening to it ever since. His voice, the melancholy and honesty. Its addictive.
In the song “The greatest bastard”, he sings: “Am I the greatest bastard that you know? When will we learn to let this go?” and I feel like he’s singing me.
We hurt each other. We, humans, as part of relationships, we’re jealous and petty and vindictive and we hurt the people that we love. I’m no exception. It doesn’t happen very often, but I have a sharp tongue and when I’m hurting I have this passive aggressive snake that likes to show its head. And it’s the ones I know the best that I have the ability to hurt the worst, of course. I know exactly what words to say to make them really sting, and it scares me. That I am capable. And relationships – oh, life is complicated.
And Damien gets this. I guess it’s a weird thing to feel connected through, our ability to hurt other people, but right now I feel as if we get each other on such a profound level. I’m addicted, again.
Reading this much into a song. I must have regressed, back to the teenager I once was. When a song could give me an almost religious experience.
Damien and I go way back. I even wrote a kind-of-paper about him once, for a creative writing assignment in English. This is what I wrote:
25 March 2007
yesterday, I met this boy
When he finally walked on stage, I felt that my legs were killing me. Earlier on the day I’d had a riding lesson on a horse that had made my hands bleed, and my muscles were telling me that they couldn’t take any more. Thanks to my friend Kirke, we had managed to get to a spot right in front of the stage, there was just a girl in a baseball cap between me and the fence. I had full view over the stage and it was just made to be a great concert. But my legs didn’t care. They thought that I should’ve got a ticket for a seat, and not this stupid immature standing-for-hours-to-get-as-close-as-possible-
to-the-stage-idea. Would my legs let me survive this night? The candles and the incense that was placed out on stage didn’t help a bit.
But then, suddenly, the lights were dimmed and he just stood there, Damien Rice, with his guitar in the candlelight, singing The Professor and La Fille Danse. With a glass of French wine in one hand and playing on his guitar with the other, talk-singing the words. He had me wrapped around his little finger and my legs were gone, my body was gone, it was just me and the crowd and Damien’s voice.My relationship to his music is very tightly connected to strong feelings. Not really positive feelings. The first song I heard by him was The Blower’s Daughter, a guy sent it to me the autumn I was sixteen. I had a crush on him, the music sending guy, and he claimed to be in love with me.
Then, right after New Year, the owners to the pony I had been hiring for two years, cancelled my hiring contract, just like that. I really loved that pony, she had been really hopeless when I first started to ride her and I had worked like hell to make her the wonderful, sensitive pony she was now. And just when I was about to start enjoying the results of all the effort I’d put into her, they cancelled my contract. They needed her for something else, the owners claimed. And as if that chock wasn’t enough, the guy that I had a crush on suddenly stopped talking to me, he didn’t return my e-mails and hung up the phone when he heard that it was me calling. When I ran into him months later and asked why on earth he had ignored me like that, he just said that it was for the best. We wouldn’t’ve worked out. Well, nice to hear.
I spent most of the early spring when I turned seventeen crying and burying myself in school books. And it was about then that I bought O. It was the only album I listened to for months. Damien’s lyrics went right into my heart and his voice became my best friend. Still, when I hear Cannonball or Amie, it’s like stepping right back into the seventeen-year-old Katja.
I bought 9 Crimes when it was released last autumn. My grandmother had just been diagnosed with lung cancer and I kept on getting reports from my uncles in Finland that she was just getting worse, her lungs were filling up with blood and she couldn’t breath. I listened to 9 crimes, got the same kind of intense love and fascination to every syllable as to O when I was seventeen. It was my diary and Damien that kept me company in my despair. I became totally dependent on the songs, I had to listen to 9 Crimes and Elephant every morning to be able to manage the effort it took to eat breakfast and take the subway to school. And I put the album on repeat first thing every afternoon when I got home. 9 crimes became me that autumn.Seeing him live, on stage, just a few meters from me, made me relive all those feelings. The intensity of his voice and being able to see the expressions on his face made it almost too much to bear. At first. He sang I Remember, and I felt like crying. But then he mixed it up with Bang Bang (My Baby Shot Me Down) and made me smile. He started talking. Telling things between the songs. “This song is about…” and then a long story about how the song was born, often pointless but always funny and very personal. He made me see the songs in a different light. They didn’t have to force a pressure on my lungs. They didn’t have to make my want to cry. They could be just beautiful, powerful. What in my lonely room seemed so ultimately sad, could with new live arrangements fill me with a warm, fuzzy, butterfly-y feeling. Make me shiver. Make me laugh.
And when we applauded him back after the last song, he entered the stage drinking from a glass of wine and the band started to play modest chords behind him. He took the mike from the stand and walked to the edge of the stage, slowly took a sip of his wine, looked out in the crowd and then started to tell a story. But even before he had made it through the first sentence, his voice changed direction and casually asked “Does anyone have a cigarette?”. I don’t know if he expected an answer, but suddenly I heard my friend Kirke shouting “I do”. And just like that, she picked up a cigarette and a matchbox from her bag, reached out and gave them to Damien. He took them, lighted the cigarette and gave the matchbox back to Kirke. “Oh, you can’t smoke here? But that’s part of the show.” And so he continued the story, there was this guy who met a girl, lady, thing, whatever, at a pub in Dublin and the guy thought that this was a night to remember. Damien sat on a speaker right in front of me, sipping on his wine and taking puffs on Kirke’s cigarette, telling the story. All while the band continued to play modest cords. In the end, the guy was left alone at the pub, feeling failed and bitter, and without ending the story, just continuing it as if it were the guy’s own thoughts, Damien started singing Cheers Darlin’. And in the middle of it, he started to come up with new lyrics. “It’s kind of ridiculous … that you all paid money to come here and see me get drunk on stage. It’s kind of ridiculous … that so many would come to see me. It’s kind of ridiculous … that we all search for something that we can’t seem to find…”
The last song he sang was Accidental Babies. First him, the words and the piano. Then the cello stepped in. And then the whole band, making this subtle ballad into something huge, creeping down my spine, lifting the roof. I couldn’t breathe, I didn’t need to breathe, I could live entirely on the song and the sight of Damien playing it.
Now, I need air again. And water and food and sleep. But apart from that, I won’t need a thing. I’ll live on this concert for days.
I liked using big words already back then, at nineteen.
Gosh, nineteen. How much life that has passed since. It’s crazy.
Katja Malmborg 