Keeping the Thread

Some mornings arrive low. This one did. I didn't try to lift it. I followed one sound and let it hold me.

By Rafi Mercer

Some days start quieter than others, and not in the good way.

You know the kind. Nothing has happened. There's no news, no bad letter, nothing you could point to if someone asked. The day just arrives a little heavier than the one before it, and everything takes a fraction longer to pick up. Today was one of those. I noticed it before the coffee had finished, and I didn't argue with it.

I went for a drive instead. Early, before the day had decided what it was. I left the radio off, on purpose. On a low morning, every voice that wants to tell you something feels like one too many. So it was just the road, the engine and whatever turned up.

What turned up was an orchestra.

Not in the car. In my head. Low strings first, with nothing on top of them, and then, a few seconds later, the song they belonged to. Massive Attack, "The Spoils", Hope Sandoval's voice coming in from somewhere behind the music. I hadn't thought about that song in a long while. It had simply been waiting.

Low days do a particular thing to listening. They make you restless. I came home and changed the day's record three times before ten o'clock. Simon & Garfunkel first, because it seemed like the right kind of comfort. Then Llorca, because a member had mentioned the name in passing and it had stayed with me. Good records, both of them, and neither was the one I needed. I wanted depth, and I kept reaching for it in the wrong places. That's the low day too: you know what you need, you just can't find the shelf it's on.

So I went back to the sound from the road.

This is the part I want to hold on to. When I finally sat with "The Spoils" properly, I went looking for where those strings came from. I'd always assumed someone added them at the end, a finishing touch. They didn't. The orchestra was written by Dan Jones, a Bristol composer who works in film and theatre, and he co-wrote the song itself. He arranged the strings and conducted them. Then, halfway through the song, he does something brave. He takes them away. The orchestra drops out, and you're left with her voice and the space where it used to be.

You don't notice the strings until they've gone.

I sat with that for a while, because it's exactly what a low morning feels like. Nothing is wrong, exactly. Something is just missing, and you can hear the shape of where it was. The song doesn't panic about it. The voice keeps going, a little more exposed, a little closer. That's all. It keeps going.

One thread led to another, the way it does when you let it. The strings led me to film music, and film music led me to Ma Fleur, the Cinematic Orchestra's album from 2007. It's the soundtrack to a film that was never made. Jason Swinscoe had been working on it and got stuck. The music was there, but he couldn't see the shape of it. So he did the thing most of us find hardest when we're stuck. He handed it to someone else. He gave a rough copy to a friend, who went away for a few weeks and came back with a script: short scenes, each one a different time in a life. Swinscoe took that story back into the studio and found his album.

I keep thinking about that. When you can't see the shape of a thing, you can let someone else look at it for you. It isn't failure. It's how the record got made.

And then a voice I knew turned up.

Fontella Bass sings on Ma Fleur. Years ago, buying records for Virgin, I bought a lot of Chess reissues; the whole catalogue had come back out. Her album was among them, and I remember listening to it and pondering. She'd had "Rescue Me", one of the great soul records of the sixties, and then walked away from the label because the money never reached her. She married the trumpeter Lester Bowie, went to Paris, sang with the Art Ensemble of Chicago, raised a family, and largely disappeared from view.

There's a detail in her story I didn't know until this morning. She said she was at a low point in her life when, on New Year's Day 1990, she switched on the television and heard her own voice singing "Rescue Me" in an advert. Her song, still out in the world, still being used, long after she'd stopped expecting anything from it.

She came back. Not all at once, and not to where she'd been. But she sang again, with jazz players and gospel choirs, and eventually, in her sixties, with a young London band who'd built part of their sound on a record she'd made in Paris thirty years before. By the time she sang "Familiar Ground" on Ma Fleur, her voice had been through all of it. You can hear that. It doesn't perform the weight; it just carries it.

I'm not going to pretend a record fixes a low day. It doesn't, and I'd be suspicious of anyone who says otherwise. What a record can do is give you a single thread to hold while the rest of the morning sorts itself out. Not a playlist. Not shuffle. One sound, followed patiently, to see where it goes.

That's what focus looked like today. Not a burst of productivity. Not a list ticked off. Just refusing to let go of the one thing that had arrived on its own, and following it, slowly, from a car on an empty road to a string arrangement in Bristol, to a script written for a film that never existed, to a soul singer who heard her own voice on the television at the lowest point of her life and kept going.

By the time I looked up it was nearly eleven. The day was still a little heavy. But it had a shape now. One thread, and everything I'd found hanging from it.

I think that's enough for a low day. You don't have to lift it. You just have to find one thing to hold, and hold it.

The orchestra arrived first this morning, before I knew what it was for. I'm glad I didn't turn it off.

What is "The Spoils" by Massive Attack?

A Massive Attack single released in July 2016, sung by Hope Sandoval of Mazzy Star. It was written and produced by Grant "Daddy G" Marshall and Stew Jackson. The strings were arranged and conducted by Bristol composer Dan Jones, who also co-wrote the song.

What albums are good for a low day?

There's no prescription. On a low day, records that move slowly and don't demand anything tend to work better than ones that try to lift you: Ma Fleur by the Cinematic Orchestra, Night Walks by Hidden Orchestra, Mazzy Star's slower songs. Listen to the whole album, not a shuffle. One thread is easier to hold than fifty.

What does it mean to listen with depth?

It means giving one record your full attention, from the first track to the last, without skipping or doing anything else. Depth comes less from the music itself than from staying with it long enough to hear how it's made, what it leaves out and where it might lead.

Rafi Mercer writes about the spaces where music matters. For more stories from Tracks & Tales, subscribe.

Every month, The Listening Club gathers around the world. Join here.