The Private Canon: The Half-Healing of "If I Laugh"

Sometimes a song sneaks up on you, having hidden in plain sight for a while before casting its full spell. That happened with Big Thief's "Paul," and it's just happened again with Cat Stevens's beautiful deep cut "If I Laugh," which I first heard as one of Madison Cunningham's great covers of singer/songwriter gems, though in this case it was led mostly by one of her guitar idols, the unassuming Adam Levy:

I immediately liked it but had other Cunningham cuts to fall in love with, original and otherwise. I happened to catch it again recently and got hung up on its odd, iterative chord progression and aching sadness, achieved with almost no recourse to minor keys. In fact it's all played in a gorgeous open major-key tuning—C in Levy and Cunningham's very faithful cover, E in Stevens's original.

There are two chords that snag the ear here, and a few structural quirks that create their own off-center gravity, suitable for the song's painful ambivalence. The first is the G# under "didn't have"—a deeply unexpected chord, a major III of the home key that follows a descending pattern, after a major V and IV. Though it's a bright major chord, it creates a tense, tentative sound, a precipice off which the song hangs for a moment:

The second wrinkle is that F#7 under "and live," a major II that isn't all that odd in itself, though it's also a bit unexpected harmonically. Then look at what happens next: We have a bit of contrary motion, a trick I've noted in a few other songs, where the melody goes up as the chord goes down—and then it reverses course again, with a downward melody over an upward-moving chord, a move back up to the F# for another bite at the apple. It then concludes with the song's most repeated gesture: an instrumental descent from the V, IV, then back down the scale neatly to the I (minus that odd III, as if that weird sound can only emerge under the vocal).

As with "Paul" and so many other songs I've treated here, this odd push-pull motion perfectly captures the road-not-taken regret of the lyric, which seems to be about a near-miss, might-have-been relationship—or, more heartbreakingly, a full, intimate relationship that only now, as it's ending, has been revealed to have been empty, like the almost-over limbo dramatized in Elvis Costello's "Still Too Soon to Know." Is our narrator regretting the chance he missed to really know the song's subject, despite their ostensible closeness? How else to explain the final verse, in which he hopes he can live past this chapter and "recall the way I used to be before you, and sleep at night, and dream."

(The second verse, perhaps unwittingly, suggests a darker impulse, with its rueful talk about "plans I didn't use to get you at home with me alone." If we hear this as a relationship breakup song, we can read this verse as saying, "I wish I'd somehow found a way to make you stay with me," rather than, "If only I'd spiked your drink and locked the doors.")

Either way you hear it, the saddest, most moving thing here is the song's hopeful premise: that somehow if our narrator laughs "just a little bit," or somehow tries to find the humor amid his despair, that he'll be able to will away the latter. (There's even the suggestion that we've caught him in mid-thought; the original has him saying, " 'Cause if I laugh." Where's that "'cause" come from? I recognize it as a sort of folk singer's tic, a sort of axiomatic life-lesson framing, but it's still weird.) I hear not only the whole song's sunny major key but also its gorgeous instrumental/vocalese break as the singer literally trying, and mostly succeeding, at laughing himself better. Stevens is a master at these melismatic passages, extending words over many syllables—"you're there" in "Don't Be Shy," or "never" in "The Wind." This one has become another favorite.

He does sound genuinely better, a little happier, by song's end. Maybe this laugh therapy thing is doing the trick? Tellingly, though, the voice doesn't make it all the way back to the home key; the guitar gets the last word, with that emphatic, off-beat descending figure. The pain of this ending has left a mark, and this song, a half-healing gesture, is still tracing the outline of that scar.