Some songs, you just can’t stop listening to them. This week I can’t stop listening to Midnight Train. And Glass in the Park. The best songs, well the best written ones anyway (as opposed to haphazard / praxis songs that do what they do) are Schneekugeln. You pick them up, there’s a world inside, and they shake the emotions inside you – you become that snowstorm, a world within a world, a universe in miniature, and moonbeams shoot out from your soul.
Midnight Train is a song about transience, about passing, about lots of things. It enacts its subject matter by passing too quickly, you just about think you’ve captured its essence, then it’s off. So you put the needle back to the start and time travel back three minutes and 49 seconds. „Midnight train / going, going, gone / The beating of my heart is like a drum / I never know the meaning of your kiss / Midnight train, must it end like this?“ It’s like there’s no value in permanance, only in fleetingness and glimpses. Presumably this is why the central character in Werner Herzog’s Nosferatu is so miserable. He is potentially immortal – it’s only the garlic and the crucifix that can save him. Save him by simultaneously finishing him off for good: one eternity swapped for another. Ordinary mortals just get on with the business of life’s cosmic blink.
Glass In The Park. Great title – we’re talking second law of thermodynamics here. And vicissitudes. „There’s glass in the park / and now that I’m up off my knees / I’ve picked up the speed to jump your pallisades / Then I shoot through the night / and suddenly all those once-lost concoctions froth / and chase the day away …“ A genius lyric. The glass shards in the park are the unforeseen hurts of love. But the central character is soaring above all the sorrow below, leaving the glass fragments behind, which then magically reform as brittle sci-fi Pyrex receptacles: the unbroken cups where the „once-lost concoctions froth“, the shake of the emotions in a universe within a universe, a trillion moonbeams bouncing off everything everywhere and passing right back through the centre of the soul.