It’s twenty minutes until the clock strikes Sunday. 

I’m sitting at the end of the tube carriage after a late shift. The central line train screams and howls through every tunnel as if it’s claustrophobic. It always feels weird to see such a loud and demonic sound met with a carriage full of indifferent faces. Opposite me, a group of teenagers chat amongst themselves about their lives, school and the various teachers with a vendetta against them. They’re dressed up, the girls plastered in more makeup than they seem happy with. Among the boys, there’s not one shirt that isn’t tucked into a pair of tightly fitted chinos. There’s also a slight nervousness with everything they do. The boys avoid eye contact with the girls aside from a few nervous glances up. The girls come across a lull in the conversation and all look blankly ahead, nervous for the night in front of them. I get the feeling that this is one of their first ‘big Saturday nights out’ and none of them want to admit the dreaded secret: they’re a little scared.

At the other end of the carriage, a woman sings loudly and out of key. Her friends are clearly trying their best to stop laughing and silence her, but are failing. She closes her eyes to hit the high notes but it doesn’t quite work. She seems to be in her forties, on her way back from a night out and is clearly having the most fun out of all of us. She holds a smashed iPhone in one hand and a Strongbow Dark Fruits in the other. She’s a veteran at big Saturday nights out. The nervous teens and I look over amused and slightly envious at the complete renouncement of inhibitions.

They go back to their conversation and I begin thinking about the idea of a Saturday night out. What it can mean to different people, what it can entail, the full range of emotions that people can associate with it. The song Saturday Night Inside Out by The Avalanches sees it as a night where, more often than not, memories are made. The track is a wistful poem looking back on a love that was found and then lost. Through explaining his nostalgic memories of his many memorable nights, the poet pours out all his thoughts and emotions. Saturday night from the inside out.

After a lot of pacing the room muttering thoughts to myself, I have found the two main components that give this track such a beautiful quality: the fragmented, spoken word lyrics and the bittersweet emotion the song invokes. I’ll discuss the lyrics first, as I feel this is probably the more effective of the two in making the track so special. Here are some extracts:

Did that make any sense to you? It didn’t to me either. It’s cryptic and in fragments. We gather an overarching theme of love being found and lost but the story how this happened is cut up with major parts missing. We don’t even know who these people are.

Instead, we are given verbal snapshots of moments in the story. The dog eating out of an old tambourine on the floor, his first sighting of her in a megastore, a moment of admiration in a motel. David Berman, the poet, cherrypicks the most evocative and intriguing fragments of the story and keeps everything else to himself. This, however, is exactly how our memories work. Seemingly unextraordinary events are picked up by our brains for no reason. Then over time the other memories that satellite that event such as how we were really feeling or what worried us at that time soon lose their orbit, leaving the event dusted with layers of nostalgia and sentimentalism. Soon enough, his memory of her standing in the motel, despite probably being against a backdrop of cheaply painted walls and thick asbestos smell, over time becomes ‘a motel masterpiece’.

It points to an odd flaw in human thought. Why do we see the past as better than it was, the present worse than it is and the future less resolved than it will be? Most humans sit between not being intelligent enough to learn from this and yet too intelligent to ever truly live in the moment. Myself included. If there is a God, this is surely some bug he’s wired into us to keep us needing him. 

The Avalanches provide a remedy to this type-2 fun manner in which our brains work. Their music sounds and feels like a living memory and allow us to experience this warm nostalgic feeling not just in retrospect, but as it’s happening. It’s the closest a lot of us come to living in the moment. Coupled with the memory-like style of writing, the track creates a truly realistic reflection of an old love. Berman has planted these beautiful ready-made memories directly inside our heads, as if we had made them ourselves.

The track is also a fairly accurate representation of our dreams. Its patchy lyrics perfectly match how dreams glide seamlessly through completely unconnected situations, with the occasional main protagonist disappearing and others popping up inexplicably yet unquestionably. The lyrics constantly jump from memory to memory and never tie the two together. The Avalanches enhance this by sprinkling random sounds into the background. Between Berman’s words we hear police car sirens, sonar beeps, string crescendos and hushed voices. It’s like we’re being guided by the hand through one of his dreams. Even from the very start the idea of memories and dreams are induced, with jittery vocals and clicking percussion sounding like an old ticker-tape photo reel. This is, in fact, how a lot of Avalanches tracks feel – a collage of assorted voices, instruments and samples from throughout the musicsphere, all stitched together into a beautiful patchwork blanket of music.

At the end of the track Berman repeats the idea that introduced the song of living a long time on just the love of a dog. To me, this makes the lyrics even more poignant as it shows us the tragic cyclical nature of this story. In loneliness and nothing but a dog’s love, he stumbles upon her. She briefly changes his life into a dreamlike memory before slipping back out of his life and leaving him back where he started. Nothing had changed. Nothing to show for it, aside from some wistful memories and the ability to ‘relight’ again. The classic better to have loved and lost cliche is an old but reliable tool for conjuring up the bittersweet. A lot of the most renowned romance tales have played this card: Romeo & Juliet, Titanic, Atonement, The Notebook, Wuthering Heights, Shakespeare In Love, La La Land, 500 Days of Summer, Call Me By Your Name – I’ll leave it there but could definitely go on for a few more lines. When a writer does this it leaves their audience holding back a tear, feeling disappointed but understanding and apparently hurling Academy Awards at them. 

There’s more to it than that though. There’s something about a bittersweet ending that we find beautiful, even if we can’t figure out what that thing is. Aristole thought that watching something that elicits certain emotions will purge you from that emotion and leave you feeling better afterwards. This theory explains why horror movies are more popular with young people, as it feels cathartic to purge feelings of fear and anxiety during a time of uncertainty and fear in one’s life. Tearjearkers and dramas, on the other hand, tend to be more popular with an older audience, who would find more comfort in purging their difficulties and regrets through a good cry at a film. In other words, watching someone go through a problem that is similar to yours but much worse makes you feel a lot better.

With bittersweet endings, we are purged of despair and given some glimmer of hope to help ease the whole purging process. The Avalanches knew this trick and believed that their debut album was successful thanks to it feeling ‘halfway between happy and sad’. The band made an intentional effort to create that same bittersweet limbo on their second album. I believe that this song, being both wistful and celebratory; beautiful and bittersweet, does this better than any of their others. 

I may as well begin this with what I would say is my favourite album of all time, specifically the final track. That seems like a good enough place to start as any, no?

That album is Illinois by Sufjan Stevens, an expansive encyclopaedia of the history, culture and everyday people of the Prairie State. It’s also the most critically acclaimed record of 2005 and and the proud owner of the world’s longest song title: The Black Hawk War, or, How to Demolish an Entire Civilization and Still Feel Good About Yourself in the Morning, or, We Apologize for the Inconvenience But You’re Going to Have to Leave Now, or, I Have Fought the Black Knives and Will Continue to Fight Them Until They Are Off Our Lands! The song itself is somehow even more over-elaborate. But fear not, the track I am discussing today is the much punchier Out Of Egypt, into the Great Laugh of Mankind, and I Shake the Dirt from My Sandals As I Run.

But fear not, the track I am discussing today is the much punchier Out Of Egypt, into the Great Laugh of Mankind, and I Shake the Dirt from My Sandals As I Run.

• 

I first came across Illinois about seven years ago, as a teenager. I can’t remember where exactly, but I probably have to some ones and zeros over at the Spotify algorithms to thank for it. Initially I was lured in by the songs Casimir Pulaski Day and John Wayne Gacy, Jr., both in which Sufjan sings saccharine melodies on the acidic topics of cancer and serial killing. From there, other favourites quickly followed. Jacksonville is an uplifting homage to the past and present of the city of the same name, They Are Night Zombies! is a cheerleader-chanting eulogy to all the long forgotten heroes who the state once praised.

At first, the album seemed to be a collection of nice little stories about some place I’d never been to. It wasn’t until a few years later that I started asking myself questions like ’Is this song good or not’ much less and instead would wonder ‘What is it about this song that I like so much? How does it use its instruments to convey what it wants to say? How does this fit in with all the other music I’ve listened to? How does this song improve my life in any way?’

Once I did that, I realised that every melody and every instrumental part in Illinois had been crafted masterfully to encapsulate the theme and statement of the song. I’ll use one of its tracks as an example. Come On, Feel The Illinoise describes the 1893 World’s Columbia Exposition, a flamboyant fair held in Chicago to celebrate the New World’s four-hundredth birthday. Not even ten seconds in and a blaring brass band playing a jerky 5/4 rhythm jumps out into your face with the same ecstatic six notes over and over. This intro itself, in my opinion, teleports you to the fair entrance, laden with stalls, banners and ten or so old-timey salesman calling at you to ’step right up!’ and see their latest invention. This exposition was the first time anyone had seen a Ferris wheel or tasted a hamburger. It was the youth of modern capitalism and the peak of American optimism, and Sufjan mixes this excitement with his 21st century scepticism perfectly, just as much through the music as the lyrics.

Why such a fixation with Illinois? Partly because this album was the second installation of a ludicrously ambitious project to write an album for every one of the 50 states. He ended up making albums for two states and claimed the whole thing was a publicity stunt. To be honest, I don’t mind the white lie. To me, the albums Carrie & Lowell and Age of Adz that succeeded Illinois seem a much better trade off than some haggard Sufjan desperately trying to inspire himself for a song about The Barbed Wire Museum of Kansas for album #37. But the Illinois fixation can also be explained by the fact that Sufjan had just turned 30 at the time and arguably at the peak of his creativity. After some highly experimental electronic albums, the 50 states project seemed more than anything else to be a direction in which Sufjan could aim his wild creativity and, in a sense, tame it.

• 

The album plays like a great monument to the state, with cherubs and ornaments decorated at every corner and engravings top to bottom that tell the fables, history and people of small town Midwestern America. In fact, the album bursts with so much information that you could easily imagine those engravings to be the manic scrawls of a lunatic driven crazy with an obsession for Illinois trivia. After twenty one of tracks narrating the highs and lows of the state, Sufjan closes up the album with the instrumental Out Of Egypt.

The track begins with a single piano tapping away at the G key, not a single note louder or softer than the last. This is a minimalist track, a form of classical music in which melody and narrative take a backseat in order to force the listener to appreciate other elements of the song. These elements may be harmony, instrumentation (what’s playing what), or texture (the feel of the combination of sounds playing). 

It is around this point, 4 bars and about 13 second in, when I think things starts to get truly stunning. A simple piano melody is played, consisting of no more than three descending notes that repeat down the octaves. The notes hint towards a Eadd2 chord, one often used to build up anticipation for the listener. By suspending the 2nd note of the scale (in this case, F#) the chord is arranged to sound as though it is begging to resolve back to a E major. No music theory needed to hear this. Sit down at a piano, play a E major chord (the E, G# and B keys will suffice) and place an F# on top. Chances are you’ll feel an urge to move that little finger on the F# key either up two steps to a G# or back down to a E. It’s begging for it. Through this simple piano melody, Sufjan is tantalising us without us even realising.

After a few seconds of that same piano note tapping, two pulsating woodwinds slowly come out of the woodwork, both also playing just one note. A lot of minimalist pieces are comprised of this same steady pulsating feel, as well as very short, simple melodies which are repeated throughout.

Then come more instruments. Horns show up and play that same 2nd note, only in long draw out long breaths. The suspense is less subtle now. Then more horns, then more woodwinds, and the instruments stack on top of each other more and more until they are no longer individually distinguishable, but form a tall and soaring pulsating sound that towers over the simple piano melody.

But this is not the climax. Sufjan builds more and more on to this huge monument of harmony by adding violins over the top to jitter alongside the pulse. The violins ascend higher and higher, and the anticipation becomes almost unbearable. This cacophony of instruments stacked on top of each other sounds half like a spectacular symphony soaring you into the sky and half like a primary school music class who have only been taught one note so far. It’s overwhelming and yet magnificent at the same time and when I listen to it I can’t help but feel elated and get carried away in it all.

Truth be told, I still can’t figure out exactly what it is about this song that I find so moving. Maybe it’s one of the things I’ve discussed, maybe it’s the fact that it concludes one of my favourite albums with such a euphoric mood, maybe it’s the irony of ending a very maximalist ‘more-is-more’ sort of album with a minimalist song. Maybe it’s all of these things. All I know is that I think it’s great and find an indescribable special thing about it that I hope is now a little more visible to you.