Songs As Vessels

contributor: Nate Clark (On the Stairs, Leonard Mynx, Audie Darling, Les Flaneurs), June 30, 2009

I once heard a much-respected singer/songwriter refer to his compositions as ‘vessels,’ and I have often thought about why he chose that metaphor. These days the song has been added to a growing list of accouterments one adorns themselves with to express their individualism and identity. Much like the clothes we wear, the vocabulary we use, and the circles we frequent, songs have become a medium of image-creation as much as a source of personal enjoyment, more jewelry than vessel.

Vessels are indeed, like the songs of contemporary popular culture, objects. Their outer surface makes aesthetic and stylistic decisions unavoidable. However, vessels also contain. More importantly, they are the containers by which people transport, in space or time, the objects that make up their lives. At their best, songs are not just a hallmark of our taste, but a container into which our memories, connections, and values are stored, to be retrieved at will, or passed on to others.

Hearing this person refer to his songs as vessels made apparent to me that what counts is not the perfection or veracity of a recording, but the circumstances and incidental details that surround it. The history surrounding a song defines it as much as a chord progression or set of lyrics does. Repeating old melodies is like unearthing a time capsule. Songs are things of archaeological interest, and this can inform us not only when listening to something in the past, but contemporary folk, electro-pop, black metal, or world music. Songwriters and their listeners can undermine the marketing of music as a signifier of lifestyle by paying attention to their anthropological dimension, and will get all the more out of those songs for it. This will also make apparent the profound inanity, particularly in regard to lyrics, of much of what gets peddled to us by mainstream commercial outlets. Our short attention spans and reluctance to really listen has given those outlets the opportunity to lower our expectations.

Growing-up in Illinois as a teenager, a friend and I would often visit the myriad old, abandoned farm-houses that dot the corn and soy bean fields of the Sangamon River valley (there are a number of reasons these existed in abundance). Besides providing fodder for ghostly photographs (the texture of torn wallpaper and peeling paint is a beautiful thing in black and white film, rust can color the light of a room), the houses also were also the shells, or vessels, of the people that lived there. The objects strewn about the floor by vandals, the unopened bills on top of ancient refrigerators, were a fragmented account of whoever paced those floors and intimately knew the spaces where those walls met. Those farmhouses were songs in the fullest sense, a vessel to be discovered, sifted through, and left for the next person who is looking.