White Lies Bigger Than Us

I have been ‘in a relationship’ with music for a meaningful amount of time. It gets me and I get it. Or at least I think I do. It’s bigger than us.

I’m the kind of person that gets immersed in a band / a song / a lyric and often feels like I’ve found a song that speaks my very soul.

Recently I have fallen prey to White Lies. Being a fan of Ritual at the best of time, this latest offering takes on new levels of invaluable at times of turmoil and strife. Peppered with the right combo of happy, sad, forlorn, baleful, determined and bravado.

It’s a very chick thing to fall in love with the depth and meaningfulness of the lyrics, but am starting to realise that it’s a little naïve to think that the ‘signs’ were always there, but disguised as mere lyrics until you needed them; like the song undergoes some sort of emotional metamorphosis to get you at just the right time.

Clearly, sometimes the ‘advice’ is perhaps best evaluated in the cold hard light of day – especially when you’re looking to White Lies for the answers to complex questions. Is “gonna write your girl a letter / it’ll make everything better” really the answer or will that just stir up a whole new hornet’s nest, giving his misguided girl leverage to bleat about?

Somehow “You find some best friends / we’ll hold each other / and I’ll turn the bells” leads me to believe that you’re going to be left with just you and the bells, honey. And while you’re so busy turning those bells, hopefully this isn’t ringing others: “If I’m guilty of anything / it’s loving you too much / honey, sometimes love / means getting a little rough / this is not bad love”.

Besides the ambiguities that are thrown out for the sake of romantic clichés, to keep you guessing, make things applicable to a broader audience or just plain thrown in for poetic licence because they rhyme, there are the malleable homonyms, where you read into it exactly what you want to. Like is “past tense” meaning it’s history? Or like uber-tense, just really angry? Are the “headlights on the hillside” a welcome wagon or heading to gun you down?

But I still make space for the White Lies. Because they’re wrong when they say “There’s nothing stranger than to love someone”; it is stranger to love the messages you know are so obviously off-base. But I do love them. And I do enjoy them. Especially where it’s intimate and personal, like alone in my car when I can’t do anything but drive. Because it feels like “It feels like coming home to stay”.

And I sing the same songs telling tales of betrayal and deceit, of loves found, lost and thrown away. Yelling out how “I’ve got a sense of urgency / I’ve got to make this happen”, when all I experience is the opposite. And anyone who claims they don’t do the same (with their own ‘inner voice’ band) would be the delusional to whom I would say “You’d be the one to turn your back and cast the first stone”.

But it’s a one-way street and White Lies doesn’t hear me. Doesn’t hear my silly songs that aren’t lyrical manipulative merde, and probably that make me look more like a country song than an anthem. And so, because this is indeed Bigger Than Us, “I pray for tomorrow / and wait listening out for a reply”.

(… which i would probably get sooner if Harry McVeigh was still my friend on Facebook. Shame, the poor dear probably didn’t understand social networking when he set up his personal profile and unwittingly accepted my friend request. Sadly, now has deleted me, but if he hadn’t I’d expect that his comment on this blog would be something like:

“The only thing I’ve ever found / that’s greater than it always sounds / is this blog” )

I think i’m overdue for making a mix tape!  😉

One thought on “White Lies Bigger Than Us”

Comments are closed.