The Latin word aspera roughly translates to “adversity”; however, when you drop the “a,” getting spera, it means “hope.”
The phrase ad astra per aspera — translated as “a rough road leads to the stars” — is inscribed on a plaque at Cape Canaveral in memory of the three Apollo 1 astronauts who died on the launch pad in 1967, trapped in their burning spacecraft during a routine training mission.
These are sober themes for Mirah to be introducing before we’ve heard note one of her newest album, (a)spera. Yet they set the appropriate tone for what is, when taken as a whole, an exploration of the idea of loss through one of my favorite vehicles: the break-up album.
Initially I was dismayed to hear a friend of mine brush the whole thing off by saying that this was “just another break-up album.” Melodramatic songs to/about lost love are nothing new — the old “do I listen to pop music because I am miserable, or am I miserable because I listen to pop music” holds true — but I hardly think it fair to give an artist a limit of the number of times she is allowed to have her heart broken. If only we were all so lucky.
Yet with people clamoring to declare that downloading music has killed the “album” as a unit, the “break-up album” shows us something more than just a collection of tracks. Because the break-up album is, as breed of concept album, focused not just on the pain of having lost love but also the process of grieving for a specific individual. The album is the yellow brick road from aspera to spera. You have to actually travel the road to get to the end; you wouldn’t have believed the end of someone simply told you at the beginning.
My touchstone for the (arguably) perfectly constructed break-up album is Tori Amos’ Boys for Pele. The album can take a while to get a grasp on because there isn’t really one hot track; you take none of it, or you take it as a whole. You don’t get “Hey Jupiter” without “Blood Roses.” And while I suppose that the rest of my opinions on this will have to wait for the “reviews from the way-back machine” series, suffice to say that (a)spera works along similar lines — we get to hear Mirah actively working her way through the different stages of loss. It’s the only way to get to the stars.
The first track, “Generosity,” opens big and orchestral. It sometimes takes that many strings to get through the first, incredulous stages of the break-up — you haven’t even grasped what’s happening yet. She sings, “I am empty / I won’t give more.” Yet, really, if you are “empty” it’s not much of a choice whether or not to give more. It’s more of an issue of “can’t” than “won’t.”
The winding path through break-up-ville continues through subsequent tracks: the feeling that outside forces — in this case, the sea, the wind — are responsible for the destruction of the relationship (“Hear the briny call, the ocean’s gusty gnashing of her teeth / Breaking up the pretty cups and taking what she needs”); the realization that half the pain is being forced to realize your own naiveté, your own complicity in the downfall (“And we were just a child with the mess that children make / And we were running wild, no thoughts for what we'd break”); and now that this knowledge has been gained, you can never go back (“. . . When we return, we’d find all the leaves have died”). This again is another feature of the break-up album — these aren’t unique feelings. Everyone, at some point, will have their heart broken. Yet the actual experience is itself isolating, because it is based around loss. So, in effect, the successful break-up album is able to universalize the experience of feeling isolated.
This is a rather delicate and quietly sexy album, as one would expect from Mirah at first glance. “Country of the Future,” and the horns and marching drums at the end of “The Forest,” are about as rambunctious as we get — there isn’t a “Cold, Cold Water” on this one. Yet comparing their love to “a deer running free / ‘Til its last breath found your window,” then calming singing that “We killed and drove on indecently / Oh how you screamed” betrays the violence running under the surface.
But while all of this knows both the beauty and pain of loss, it is mostly a form of dancing around the heart of the matter, slowing spiraling down to the center. That honest piece is so difficult to get to, so difficult to admit, that it would lose it’s power to just saying it by itself. It’s like most clichés we hear. It is not the knowledge that is powerful, but the process of gaining that knowledge. For example, it is kind of trite and boring to say that lying is bad. Sure, people will agree, but quickly move past that. Until, of course, someone important to you, someone you trust, lies to you. At that moment you feel the depth of a concept like “lying is bad” in a way that you could not have in keeping it as a separate thought.
The inner piece of wisdom in (a)spera is “The River,” a song that doesn’t quite fit outside of the album as a whole. It is so direct, and heartbroken yet accepting, that on it’s own it can come across as trite and not a little embarrassing. It doesn’t help that at first listen the song itself seems quite simple, a little guitar, some background vocals. One wants to cringe as she sings “And you don’t want to hurt me / But you don’t want to need me.”
But the simplicity of this is deceiving. There is a lot more going on musically, lyrically, and emotionally in this song, but you have to go through the process of peeling back the other things before you can hear it. You don’t get to start with “I want you / and I let you go.” You have to earn that.
Once through “The River,” though, we are finally on the other side — we even have a chalk “borderline to not cross / mind out manners, keep in place.” We have to get here before we can look back, “at least enough to recognize the storm is just a storm.” The final track, “While We Have the Sun,” pulls it all together — it’s the bright dawn burning off the fog. But again, we couldn’t have started at this point. “Live your life with a compassion you can be proud of,” set to lightly layered vocals, xylophone, harp? You’d think that little animated bluebirds were about to fly out and help her sew a dress for the ball. Until you realize the rough road she had to take to get there.
The phrase ad astra per aspera — translated as “a rough road leads to the stars” — is inscribed on a plaque at Cape Canaveral in memory of the three Apollo 1 astronauts who died on the launch pad in 1967, trapped in their burning spacecraft during a routine training mission.
These are sober themes for Mirah to be introducing before we’ve heard note one of her newest album, (a)spera. Yet they set the appropriate tone for what is, when taken as a whole, an exploration of the idea of loss through one of my favorite vehicles: the break-up album.
Initially I was dismayed to hear a friend of mine brush the whole thing off by saying that this was “just another break-up album.” Melodramatic songs to/about lost love are nothing new — the old “do I listen to pop music because I am miserable, or am I miserable because I listen to pop music” holds true — but I hardly think it fair to give an artist a limit of the number of times she is allowed to have her heart broken. If only we were all so lucky.
Yet with people clamoring to declare that downloading music has killed the “album” as a unit, the “break-up album” shows us something more than just a collection of tracks. Because the break-up album is, as breed of concept album, focused not just on the pain of having lost love but also the process of grieving for a specific individual. The album is the yellow brick road from aspera to spera. You have to actually travel the road to get to the end; you wouldn’t have believed the end of someone simply told you at the beginning.
My touchstone for the (arguably) perfectly constructed break-up album is Tori Amos’ Boys for Pele. The album can take a while to get a grasp on because there isn’t really one hot track; you take none of it, or you take it as a whole. You don’t get “Hey Jupiter” without “Blood Roses.” And while I suppose that the rest of my opinions on this will have to wait for the “reviews from the way-back machine” series, suffice to say that (a)spera works along similar lines — we get to hear Mirah actively working her way through the different stages of loss. It’s the only way to get to the stars.
The first track, “Generosity,” opens big and orchestral. It sometimes takes that many strings to get through the first, incredulous stages of the break-up — you haven’t even grasped what’s happening yet. She sings, “I am empty / I won’t give more.” Yet, really, if you are “empty” it’s not much of a choice whether or not to give more. It’s more of an issue of “can’t” than “won’t.”
The winding path through break-up-ville continues through subsequent tracks: the feeling that outside forces — in this case, the sea, the wind — are responsible for the destruction of the relationship (“Hear the briny call, the ocean’s gusty gnashing of her teeth / Breaking up the pretty cups and taking what she needs”); the realization that half the pain is being forced to realize your own naiveté, your own complicity in the downfall (“And we were just a child with the mess that children make / And we were running wild, no thoughts for what we'd break”); and now that this knowledge has been gained, you can never go back (“. . . When we return, we’d find all the leaves have died”). This again is another feature of the break-up album — these aren’t unique feelings. Everyone, at some point, will have their heart broken. Yet the actual experience is itself isolating, because it is based around loss. So, in effect, the successful break-up album is able to universalize the experience of feeling isolated.
This is a rather delicate and quietly sexy album, as one would expect from Mirah at first glance. “Country of the Future,” and the horns and marching drums at the end of “The Forest,” are about as rambunctious as we get — there isn’t a “Cold, Cold Water” on this one. Yet comparing their love to “a deer running free / ‘Til its last breath found your window,” then calming singing that “We killed and drove on indecently / Oh how you screamed” betrays the violence running under the surface.
But while all of this knows both the beauty and pain of loss, it is mostly a form of dancing around the heart of the matter, slowing spiraling down to the center. That honest piece is so difficult to get to, so difficult to admit, that it would lose it’s power to just saying it by itself. It’s like most clichés we hear. It is not the knowledge that is powerful, but the process of gaining that knowledge. For example, it is kind of trite and boring to say that lying is bad. Sure, people will agree, but quickly move past that. Until, of course, someone important to you, someone you trust, lies to you. At that moment you feel the depth of a concept like “lying is bad” in a way that you could not have in keeping it as a separate thought.
The inner piece of wisdom in (a)spera is “The River,” a song that doesn’t quite fit outside of the album as a whole. It is so direct, and heartbroken yet accepting, that on it’s own it can come across as trite and not a little embarrassing. It doesn’t help that at first listen the song itself seems quite simple, a little guitar, some background vocals. One wants to cringe as she sings “And you don’t want to hurt me / But you don’t want to need me.”
But the simplicity of this is deceiving. There is a lot more going on musically, lyrically, and emotionally in this song, but you have to go through the process of peeling back the other things before you can hear it. You don’t get to start with “I want you / and I let you go.” You have to earn that.
Once through “The River,” though, we are finally on the other side — we even have a chalk “borderline to not cross / mind out manners, keep in place.” We have to get here before we can look back, “at least enough to recognize the storm is just a storm.” The final track, “While We Have the Sun,” pulls it all together — it’s the bright dawn burning off the fog. But again, we couldn’t have started at this point. “Live your life with a compassion you can be proud of,” set to lightly layered vocals, xylophone, harp? You’d think that little animated bluebirds were about to fly out and help her sew a dress for the ball. Until you realize the rough road she had to take to get there.
1 comment:
Grief, yes, but of an odd sort. Not for someone who has ceased to exist, rather for their continued existance at too distant a valence. Also perhaps for the persona you had spun with them, a comfortable old hat that suddenly shrinks in the wash.
My sister once said something en route to Bub's high school graduation about the irony of everyone taking it as an occasion to comment on the singularities of the Class of ____, when in truth what makes the event remarkable is that it's an experience that the majority of us share and are united by. Perhaps this can be counted among the graces of a good break-up album... that in its expressions of personal grief it allows for a resonance that undercuts the senses of isolation and anxiety that inspired it in the first place.
Either way, welcome aboard Comrade.
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