Three
things tend to strike me in songs like Priscilla Ahn’s Torch
Song. Strike
me less because these are exceptional things that leave me passed out
on the floor in admiration, but more because such things are absurd,
and make me laugh.
First of all, such songs are written in
the second person and address a specific human, in all
likelihood the musician’s lover. More often than not however, this
person is not in fact present, and resides it seems in the musician’s
past. Long
ago I thought I heard your name
Priscilla
begins Torch
Song, using
language that suggests this person were present, but singing as
though reminiscing to herself. So which is it? Is
Priscilla addressing this other person, or addressing no
one? It’s never made obvious in songs of this sort, and often
strikes me as absurd. (Of course I recognise this is half the
charm.)
Second of all, though the musicians in these songs sing as
though recalling the Greatest Love on Earth, no one has much specific
to recall about it. You
were the only one to know me
Priscilla confides to her audience and absent partner, pouring her
heart into the line, but telling us nothing at all. This, of
course, is not something unique to Priscilla Ahn. I tend to associate
such songwriting with Coldplay, though I’m sure others
mastered it long before them.
Last of all, though songs like these are
intended to be romantic, look past the sentiment tone and
it seems these musicians have real emotional problems. Take
the line quoted previous for example. Examined alone, it
characterises Priscilla as an isolated woman, unable to connect with
other human beings besides this absent partner. Either that, or she
is in literal terms describing her first ever acquaintance. This of
course puts a huge burden on this absent man, perhaps explaining
how Priscilla finds herself alone in the present(!) The Police’s
Every Breath
You Take is
perhaps the archetypal example of this song and, for people not
inclined to sentimentalism, makes such tracks both absurd
and a little bit terrifying.
Of course, the reason I chose to
describe Torch Song in terms of archetypal traits is that I found
little interesting to write about in the song itself. Perhaps the
most interesting thing is that Ahn uses forceful strums on her
acoustic guitar, to counterpoint the soulful sustained notes in the
chorus. That aside, this is the kind of generic thing that might
have emerged from the Recdep of Orwell’s 1984
almost.
