Unloneliness, and how it leaves us...

Unloneliness, and how it leaves us…

 

DC

April 2009

1,081 words

 

                For centuries philosophers, dramatists, songwriters and chick-lit authors have tried to convince us that one of the scariest things in life is to be alone. When a person is suddenly single or relatively friendless, we worry about their ability to manage on their own, we try to suggest “coping strategies” that they can use until they are “okay with being alone”. So many works of art have been created about loneliness that you could happily watch, listen to and read nothing else for a year. What’s more, I believe that by doing so you would be able to feel, to understand what it is like to be lonely, even if in actuality you had a loving family and friends. I think artists have been able to capture extremely well the disconnection, the hopelessness, the sense of drift and distance that comes from being truly alone. They’ve even been able to sum up how hollow the advice of the more friend-blessed sounds when you aren’t in the same place – take “How To Fight Loneliness” by Wilco:

 

“Whatever’s going down,
Will follow you around.
That’s how you fight loneliness,
You laugh at every joke.
Drag your blanket blindly,
Fill your heart with smoke…

Just smile all the time.”

 

                A feeling which has been explored much less than loneliness, with its alternation between the stab and the echo of emptiness, has been its opposite. The thing that, for me personally at least, is just as powerful and shocking and disrupting. The thing that leaves you feeling strange and amazed and a little nauseous - the feeling that someone, be it a friend or partner or family member, means so very much to you that you genuinely can no longer fathom how you would function in a world without them in it. It isn’t always obvious why we should come to feel this way about people – it’s not necessarily proportional to the amount of time spent with a person, nor does it have to be related to romantic feelings, and isn’t always obvious why an individual has come to have such a place in your heart and mind. Everyone has their own threshold for this feeling, with some friends telling me that they have never experienced it while others say that they have a dozen or more people about who they feel this way. The one thing you can be sure of, however, is that once you have had the moment of realisation, once you’ve come to see just how much someone means to you, you will never forget it.

 

                Until recently, no song has ever managed to bottle that feeling as I understand it. No singer or band has brought together the strands of wonder, angst, amazement, fear, hope and confusion that can pass through you when “unloneliness”, for want of a better word, bites. Then I got sent a copy of an album called ”Mean Everything To Nothing” by an exceptional Southern band called Manchester Orchestra. It is a hugely strong record throughout, besting even their notable last disc “Like A Virgin Losing A Child”, but one song in particular made me lose my breath. Buried at track 10 is the sort-of-title track “Everything To Nothing”, and it is the unloneliness anthem I’ve been waiting for.

 

                When we’re analysing songs for the way they address human feelings and emotions we tend to focus a lot on the lyrics, and rightly so. The music of Leonard Cohen, perhaps the foremast artist of sentiment, is unexceptional but the lyrics are almost perfect, to give one example. But in this instance that would be a mistake, as the music is as crucial as the words are. The dragged-out opening notes set the scene, referencing those moments when we sit around thinking, toying with ideas about our lives, considering our happiness and friends and situation. Then, suddenly, the moment of realisation is ushered in by escalating, chiming guitars that seem to grab something in your chest and tug mightily upwards. That feeling of “oh my god, how do I deal with this, what do I do now, but hold on, this is amazing, this is wonderful, but this is terrifying” is sketched out by a simple guitar line.  The line repeats through the song, reinforced or twisted, but each time somehow becoming more powerful, more emotive.

 

                On top of this, the effect is rounded off by the simple but hugely striking lyrics of singer Andy Hull.  He paints the confusion that inevitably comes with the realisation that you are no longer your own person, that you are bound to someone, admitting that “I don’t know what to do / not anymore / not anymore”, while worrying that he somehow let his now oh-so-significant other down, stating that “I’m not complaining, I was just saying, I’m a man, I’m a lost one you see”.  He searches for things to help explain what he’s feeling, talking about notes left by Grandfather and making references to biblical passages, but none of it seems to really help. Ultimately, he has to resort to some of the most simple phrases possible to make his feelings clear, adding words only to emphasise how serious he is:

 

He starts with “you mean everything”. An amazing thing to feel about someone but a little generic, something someone might say while breaking up with their boy/girlfriend in a coffee shop. Then “you mean everything… to me”. And suddenly it’s personal, he’s admitting something huge and difficult, and he’s opening himself up to rejection and hurt. Then “you mean everything… to nothing”. Now it’s even larger, he’s willing to state that next to you, nothing else even registers on the scale, and he means it. You are one, everything else is zero. In this case Hull is talking to his wife, but he could be referring to a friend, family member, whoever, it wouldn’t matter. Then “you mean everything… to nobody but me”. The final step – he says out loud that idea that we sometimes have in our heads, the idea that no-one else other than you understands just how great a person is, that no-one could appreciate them more.

 

In writing this amazing song, Manchester Orchestra may truly have figured out how to fight loneliness – just try your best to remember what your moments of unloneliness felt like, and hope that you get to experience another one sooner rather than later. Remember that someone who doesn’t mean anything to you right now, maybe even someone you’ve never met, could come to mean everything to nothing to you.