There’s an uncommon quality (as in rare, infrequent) in great music – a personal, thoughtful quality – when a musician sounds like they’re addressing themselves through music. When an artist isn’t communicating to a real (or implied) audience, but is talking to and for themselves. That inner conversation manifesting outwardly.
It’s hard to describe these discrete moments because our words for musical inwardness are inexact and woolly. They’re poor approximations, and not Italian.
introverted
interior
inner
self-directed
meditative
contemplative
cerebral.
Using these words might colour my intentions as a music writer; make me sound high-falutin or in possession of a personal connection no-one else could share, because only I hear it that way. And because these words are so near to soulfulness and feels and introspection, my inward-subjective read might be the total opposite of your experience of the same. It’s a tricky game of shared terms and assumptions... but I still think there’s room for common exploration here.
So let’s stick with this: an inward, cerebral quality of music.
These are some of the artists and performances where I hear it most strongly.
Neil Young – Sugar Mountain
From Decade (1977, but recorded in 1968; multiple versions).
A song about growing up, suddenly becoming too old for youth’s innocent pleasures. But listen to Neil’s dynamics – how he varies the loudness and proximity of his voice and playing. The chorus/refrain is loud and bold, but then he makes his voice small and delicate in the verses. The effect is to draw the listener in, to make the lyrics more intimate, connected. Sure he could be doing this carelessly, moving in respect to the microphone or just not feeling like projecting big all the way – but it works – either as intent or as effect.
The second person You addressed in the song is Neil; comforting a version of his past self maybe.
“I had a meeting in my head about this song..." he says during the Royce Hall 1971 performance, tongue in cheek. "I was pretty heavy at 20.”
But then again, you have to lighten up something that’s so personal.
Joni Mitchell - Hejira
Listen to the road undulating, rising and easing with the chords. Listen to a poet analysing and sharing her (inner) reality:
I'm porous with travel fever
But you know I'm so glad to be on my own
Still somehow the slightest touch of a stranger
Can set up trembling in my bones
I know no one's going to show me everything
We all come and go unknown...
Well I looked at the granite markers
Those tribute to finality to eternity
And then I looked at myself here
Chicken scratching for my immortality...
We're only particles of change I know I know
Orbiting around the sun
But how can I have that point of view
When I'm always bound and tied to someone
As she says of this album, "I was thinking of Amelia Earhart and addressing it from one solo pilot to another..."
But there's something generous, openly generous in this sharing of inner dialogue and honest questioning.
Her gentleness is itself a vibe.
Miles Davis - Two Faced
From the master of the inward voice. Let me pull a few mood words from his Allmusic list, to get us in the mood:
intimate
melancholy
nocturnal
reflective
cerebral
poignant
cathartic
but also:
brooding
detached
fiery
intense
ominous
provocative
volatile
The In A Silent Way album, and especially the Complete Sessions box set, is a treasure-portal of Miles at his inward, expansive best.
This track above (cued to highlight Miles, but worth hearing in full) stands at the fulcrum-point of Miles' electric phase, where his sensibility and scope maximised in the studio. It's a spacious, haunting and probing examination of melody and call & response.
You hear Miles the cerebral melodicist, the introverted leader feeling out new lines as he rallies his players back to the head (of the arrangement). Every note Miles blows is a statement, a map of possibilities, and yet that picture has enough negative space (or silence rather) to make *listening* the magic key.
The ensemble playing is magical, delicate, complicitous. They're all playing for space.
This is the music of exploration, inner and/or outer. For thinking, questioning into the night.
It’s worth capping this track (and this piece) with the Zawinul-composed coda of the album:
This is Miles addressing something deep and solitary in the night. I hear it as torch-like, a beacon of the heart. It crackles with electricity, an uncanny purity beyond words.
It doesn’t sound like 1968; it’s transcendent.
Coda
Maybe all this is a matter of perspective, an artefact of how we listen and what we choose to attend to as we build the mechanics of connection with an artist. Of sincerity and exchange.
Or the times; all of the above tracks were released within 10 years of each other. Maybe the spirit of the times normalised these sensibilities.
But I’m reminded of David Foster Wallace talking about country music, and its endless broken hearts and cliches of loss (italics mine):
I realized that, what if you just imagined that this absent lover they’re singing to is just a metaphor? And what they’re really singing is to themselves, or to God, you know? “Since you’ve left I’m so empty I can’t live, my life has no meaning.” That in a weird way, I mean they’re incredibly existentialist songs. That have the patina of the absent, of the romantic shit on it just to make it salable. But that all the pathos and heart that comes out of them, is they’re singing about something much more elemental being missing, and their being incomplete without it.
David Lipski, Although of course you end up becoming yourself (2010)