Traitor: Three Songs To Listen To This Week

This week, local artist Traitor recommends us three songs and shares what they mean to him. Before reading, be sure to check out his music on all streaming platforms.

Bob Dylan – ‘As I Went out One Morning’

I discovered this song, which is from Dylan’s 1967 album John Wesley Harding, at a key moment in the writing process for my next couple of records. At the time I was thinking a lot about what ‘folk’ music could mean in this day and age, wanting to write in the pastoral mode but with my own voice. ‘As I Went out One Morning’ was a perfect education in this.

Formally speaking the song is so simple. It is just three verses of equal length, with a bit of harmonica in between. The chords are simple, the melody is straightforward. It has none of the things that usually draw me to a song: passionate emotion, incredible melodies, visceral intensity. But it is what it does with its apparent plainness that is so special.

Of course, as this is Bob Dylan we’re talking about, the song lives and dies by its words. I think the lyrics in this track are masterful. It would be foolish to try and explain them. Not a lot really happens. In the first verse the narrator meets a girl in a field, a ‘fair damsel’; in the second verse they talk a bit; and in the last verse a farmer comes to separate them and apologises for the girl.

The meaning of all this is extremely vague. There are strange hints. The damsel ‘walks in chains’; she speaks ‘from the corners of her mouth’; she wants to ‘secretly accept’ the narrator. By the end of the song there is no clear resolution, and the last burst of harmonica serenades a sense of semi-charmed confusion at what has just taken place in one’s imagination.

Ultimately what I get from this song is a compelling image of human entanglement. Two figures come together in a field, and are changed by it in ways they struggle to comprehend. The simplicity of it, and the sense of unavoidable, elusive tragedy is an enduring obsession for me. I wouldn’t say I like this song; I would simply say that it haunts me, asking me questions that I won’t ever be able to answer.

‘As I Went Out One Morning’ is basically a mystery, and that is where its power comes from. It is the most compellingly mysterious song I know. I am always playing it, thinking about it, trying to interpret it. The song always eludes these efforts. Its core beauty remains always beyond conscious understanding. I think it is a pure work of art.

John Frusciante – ‘Regret’

Lyrically speaking, this track by John Frusciante – the guitarist of the Red Hot Chili Peppers – is the polar opposite to the Dylan song. Far from having any mystery to it, ‘Regret’ contain only two lines, both very literal: the verse is simply ‘I regret my past’; and the chorus is ‘stay alone’.

Despite being so straightforward, I think the song has a rare and profound power. It is one of those examples of a piece of music that seems to cut through any di􏰀erences or divisions we have as human beings; I think it’s a timeless song...you could play it to someone in hundreds of years and (provided they understand English!) it should connect with them.

This is one of the songs that I have loved the longest. I discovered it in my early teens and it has stayed with me ever since. It’s also important to me because I remember my Dad saying he liked it. I’m sure he’ll forgive me for saying this, but as well as obviously being from a di􏰀erent generation, my Dad is a relatively unsophisticated music listener. If you’re going to write a song that connects with my Dad, it needs to be very direct with a clear and recognisable meaning that he can relate to. It always struck me that it was specifically this song – with its single main lyric – that got through to him.

There’s a lesson in there for songwriters about not wasting words. I know from experience how easy it is to write a song that tries to say so much but ends up saying very little. Songs can very easily become impotent when weighed down with extraneous material. ‘Regret’ is a beautiful example of a song gaining power from being lyrically stripped down.

The recording is also magnificent. Again, there is nothing extraneous. The arrangement is crystalline with simple, impactful parts. It’s just guitar, synth, bass and drums. It obviously helps that Frusciante is an outrageously talented musician, but even with more pedestrian playing this production would cut through the speakers. It’s gorgeous.

Frusciante’s singing is also perfect; soaring, emotive and raw. His singing from this period of his career was really creative and I’ve always found it inspiring to listen back to. He would consciously add these very gritty and almost harsh moments to his vocal delivery that had all the more impact because they were relatively rare. It’s like he was testing out di􏰀erent voices to really push the expressive range of his singing. There’s so much to learn from that willingness to experiment. It’s very easy to settle into a certain groove as a singer and just do what you know. Listening to John Frusciante’s work always lifts me out of any creeping complacency.

The Streets – ‘Weak Become Heroes’

It’s easy to forget nowadays in our personalised digital bubbles that music has always been primarily a communal experience. From the apocryphal tribal gathering with ritual song performance to the modern-day nightclub, our relationship with rhythm and melody and timbre has generally been inseparable from our relationship with other people and the groups that form our social reality.

This track by The Streets, which came out in 2001, is a beautiful document of the last time within living memory when communal experience of music had a central place in our lives. Although it came out this century, it’s really a celebration of the rave and club scene that had its heyday in the early 1990s.

I’m not sure a more thorough or more compelling account of a time and a place, of a culture, has ever been committed to record. As anyone who is familiar with The Streets will know, Mike Skinner is an unbelievable lyricist. His fluidity, and his ability to elevate everyday detail into the artistic realm, makes him, in my opinion, one of the greatest ever MCs. There are so many memorable lines in this track, lots of hilarious ones and lots of beautiful ones. One that sticks out for me is:

A sea of people all equal, smiles in front and behind me. Swim in the deep blue sea, corn fields sway lazily All smiles, all easy

That really sums up the euphoric but also kind of bland happiness that one seems to experience on drugs. Obviously as a track about the rave scene, ‘Weak Become Heroes’ has the ecstasy pill as one of its central themes. It’s there that the central irony of the song lies; you can only experience this exalted sense of human communion through the artificial hacking of your brain that amphetamines allow.

I’ve never done drugs, and I’ve never really been into clubbing that much, but I love this song for what it speaks to in the human condition: our fickle desire to be at one with each other without tension or di􏰀erence.

Primarily I love ‘Weak Become Heroes’ from a historical standpoint. It sums up a whole cultural movement in an amazingly succinct and powerful way. It makes me wonder what an analogous song for today’s times might be. Can a beautiful song even be written about the social aspects of our lives today?

Ultimately this track makes me question where great songs come from. Although Mike Skinner is obviously a genius, perhaps it’s not even individuals that are really responsible for their art. Perhaps it has a lot more to do with the times we live in and the human possibilities that arise. But there’s always something that the individual artist can find in other times to inspire them. When I listen to ‘Weak Become Heroes’ I feel connected to the past, and feel that a new artistic expression might be possible today.