Un uplifting little number about a long-term relationship coming to an amicable conclusion.
O.K., not really.
Some songs seem well suited to getting you out of bed in the morning. If I had to be up and at ’em, I figure you couldn’t do much better than, say, Me and Julio Down by the Schoolyard, that is, if getting out of bed in the morning didn’t make you feel as inconsolable as it does me. In that case, good ol’ up and at ‘em! songs are just a very great pain in the large muscle groups. Me, I come at morning from the other side, and identify most with the sort of songs you play at 3 AM, when you’ve been up all night, the world is quiet, and everything you’re most afraid of sits there keeping you company, grinning, patient, biding its time. That’s when you really respond to a song like this one, one that evokes the sound of gentle night breezes rustling through oak leaves, and trains in the distance chugging across dark, empty landscapes. A song for for the alone who aren’t lonely.
“Fink” here is actually Fin Greenall of Cornwall, England, who’s also a famous DJ, producer, and sometime songwriter who used to specialize in electronic music before dabbling in the acoustic folk-inspired singer-songwriter genre, and even getting into the Blues, as well as working with the likes of John Legend and Amy Winehouse. This is the Thing was released in 2007, and made him moderately famous, though if descriptions of the singer as “bubbly”, “enthusiastic” and prone to statements like “Wow, songs are great!” are accurate, it was somewhat out of character, making its composer sound like one of those people who, Sartre-like, views the simple existence of other people as at best a challenge and at worst a form of torture.
My kind of guy, in other words. What he did here really resonates.
Call me anti-social, or think of me more generously as simply introverted (I come out INFJ on Myers-Briggs, so there you go), but from where I sit solitary confinement may well be the purest torture you can visit upon most folks, that’s what they tell me, but voluntary separation from the rest of the world is pure salvation, the only way to repair your losses and steel yourself for another foray into the noisy clanging of the daytime, and the incessant clack-clack-clacking of human tongues. Likely, nobody’s even going to notice you’ve been gone for a while, it’s not like you loom large on anybody’s landscape. This is the thing:
And the things that keep us apart
Keep me alive
And the things that keep me alive
Keep me alone
Hey, I don’t always feel this way. I’m moody and complicated, OK?
the needlefish 