Morning Bright Good Night Shadow Machine

If this blog has one overarching thesis it is that the music tells the story, even when there's not a story per se. Music is the atmosphere, the architecture, the ground. The great acting teacher Sandy Meisner often used the analogy that a play's text, its dialogue, was a boat on the surface of a huge body of water, and that lake or ocean was what the scene or play was really about; what the characters say is just the little they choose to, or are able to, express about what's really going on. "Subtext" is too weak-sounding a word, "context" too vague. Like this ineffable pre-verbal drama, music is always the central content of a song, even one with lyrics.

This is all preamble to my understanding why Big Thief's sadly soaring "Paul" works so unsettlingly well. (I must credit an interview with Eleni Mandell for cluing me in to this stunning track.) Essentially a not-quite-breakup song with a possibly troubled ex, sung by an apparently similarly troubled narrator, it has a yin-yang, back-and-forth, are-we-or-aren't-we suspense to it, and it's not just in the lyrics—it's in the chords. The off-balance feeling starts at the top. We're in the key of B*, but we open with an uncomfortable G-augmented chord:

We don't land on the home key of B until the leaping melody hits an A#, creating a smudgy major-seventh, before that A# snags on a yearning appoggiatura over a G#-minor chord:

From the jump the lyrics are also signaling conflict and contradiction: The line "I was horrible and almost let him in," is like a short fuse with a small explosion at the end. In what world does being "horrible" entail letting someone in? Are we talking about a restraining-order situation here? The next line is even stranger: "But I stopped and caught the wall/And my mouth got dry/So all I did was take him for a spin." There's a suggestion of physical violence and discomfort here, but also some resolution. For letting Paul take her out rather than letting him in leads us to the sunny side of that same melody, in a sunburst of reharmonization that gives us a major-third lift along the lines of "Creep" or "Air That I Breathe," from a B to a D# chord. Listen how that high A# in the melody on "car" sounds almost triumphant rather than tentative this time:

The surge of feeling there is quickly extinguished, though, as the melody droops back down to the loneliness of a "freight train yard." And that burst of joy is short-lived, as the last line returns to the tense G-aug progression, under lyrics that give us a somewhat hair-raising denouement vaguely reminiscent of the non-consensual climax of Brecht/Weill's "Barbara-Song": "And he turned the headlights off/Then he pulled the bottle out/And then he showed me what is love." Oh dear.

The chorus that follows is an incantatory monotone vow over oscillating IV and I chords, and it is as sadly resigned as a major-chord harmony can be:

I'll be your morning bright good night shadow machine

I'll be your record player baby, if you know what I mean

I'll be a real tough cookie with the whisky breath

I'll be a killer and a thriller and the cause of our death

That's almost charming, but it's also obviously extremely foreboding, along the lines of Cowboy Junkies' ode to an abusive boyfriend "Misguided Angel." Again, that last line has a sharp snap at the end. Lead singer and presumably lyricist Adrianne Lenker clearly has a knack for this kind of stealth attack; there's another vivid one in the next verse: "I realized there was no one who could kiss away my shit."

As the song goes on, it seems more and more clear that as scary as Paul sounds, our narrator feels that she's as much or more the problem—a common pathology, no doubt, though she even describes him, in a final verse that subtly alters the chord progression, as "gentle." Here we have the surge of feeling that comes with the B-to-D# progression, but this time it conveys not the joyful abandon of a car ride, as it did the last time, but a sort of screwing-up her courage to finally let Paul go:

The optimism even seems to hold, which is how I'd explain the change of the third chord from the usual G#-minor to a B major here.

So it's farewell then? Maybe not: The last line, which abruptly ends the song on the last slumping cadence of its final chorus, is, "And I've been burning for you baby since the moment I left." This probably won't be the last time she sees Paul after all.

In this spectacular Tiny Desk concert, they do "Paul" at 4:01, though the chords are a little different (they do the sunnier B-to-D# harmonization sooner and more often), and Buck Meek's guitar solo lacks the hauntingly inchoate wounded-elephant wail of the studio version. This excellent live rendition is closer to the album. In all of them, it's the music that illustrates the querulous equivocation and conditional surrender of the relationship described in the lyrics—a relationship that probably shouldn't be but very much undeniably is, like chords that clash and resolve, then go silent.

*Actually Adrianne Lenker plays the song in G, with the capo on the fourth fret; I'm writing about what we hear.