Most people live lives of quiet desperation, goes the old adage. And it is hard to deny. It is hard to be happy because we are all gonna die and we know it. And of all the things that hang over us, our imminent demise hangs heaviest. To paraphrase Conor, sorrow is heavy and joy holds you with the fear that it will soon be gone. The reason for the fear is because we are right: it is gonna go.
The problem is we are animals with built in obsolescence and the knowledge of that makes even the greatest of happiness transient pleasures. In the real world we either die young or decline, decay and die, soon forgotten and so what if we're not soon forgotten?
Morbid, right? But love can bring us happiness, right? Right. Except love is the most fragile of emotions, anything at all can end it, even nothing at all can end it. It can just finish and with that much pressure, the pressure to be happy, it dangles on a thread. The problem remains, and this is true of all love, not just romantic love, is that we mistake it. We think it gives us the right to be cruel, with friends, children, family, but it actually does the opposite. The closer we are to people the easier it is to hurt them and we must be very careful to treat them with kindness… or lose them. But there in lies another problem, if love isn't sturdy how can it survive? So the thing that is bringing us the most pleasure is built upon fault lines and even if it survives death will end it.
I've been in love for a couple of years now and I have found it exceedingly difficult to:
1. Be happy when I am happy.
and
2. Find songs that fit my mood.
For the latter I tend to go with songs that have significance not within the songs themselves but as a secret code between the woman and myself. "Bringing In The Sheaves" is a hymn with nothing to do with love, but I consider it a love song.
This is a problem for me. All the brokenhearted get the best songs. There is no equivalent to, say, Jackson Browne's "Fountains Of Sorrow" or Bright Eyes "June On The West Coast". Oh, the humanity, as Les Nesman once put it.
The reason for that is simple enough: we are not usually happy and we don't quite know when we are happy. So it is a hard emotion to capture. Take a look at two McCartney tracks from Revolver: "Good Day Sunshine" and "For No One". Both are excellent songs, but they are bookends, there is no "Good day" without the following morning dismissal of "For No One". "For No One" is a reverse "Say A Little Prayer" (itself a song of delayed gratification): she dismisses the man completely: "she knew some one but now he's gone, she doesn't need him" is such a devastating dismissal. I'm sure you have, as I have, been so completely cut out of somebodies life that you cease to exist for them. On the former, McCartney manages "I'm in love and it took sunny day". A masterful song but a shallow emotion.
Irving Berlin proved my point with "Blue Skies" -where every note makes a mockery of happiness. so the only way to express happiness is the same way it hits us, obliquely, from the side. John Lennon's "Dig A Pony" is a great happy song because the chorus ("All I want is you everything just gotta be the way you want it to…" nails his obtuse metaphors of fulfillment in the verses: "where you can imitate everyone you know" "syndicate all the boats you row" "indicate everything you see" "celebrate anything you want". A sort of intense pleasure in life thru love and if you miss the point, George Harrison's solo after "All I want is you" is so beautiful, mature and joyful it does what only music does. Totally nails that this is an immensely happy song.
How many others can you think of?