Are you going with me?

A few thoughts on repetition, repetition, repetition in songs, which then led me onto a few other thoughts about Cass McCombs, Philip Larkin and Alan Partridge

I have a vivid memory of my Dad playing me ‘Are You Going With Me?’ by the jazz guitarist Pat Metheny, and of him saying something like, ‘You can tell that he’s been through a lot, can’t you?’ The assumption being that the song must have sprung from some formative experience of pain – you can’t create something that powerful without having experienced some profound loss. And, not only that, but the emotional backstory is there for everyone to hear. Even in the abstract art form of instrumental music, the song communicates something of the pain from which it originated.

At the time, I wondered what it was that Dad could hear in the music. When I was older, I wondered if Dad wasn’t in fact projecting something of himself into the song. Now I’m even older, I think I can hear what it was that Dad could hear. At least I think I can.

Metheny’s guitar synthesiser solo on the live version of ‘Are You Going With Me?’ on the Travels album is astonishing, and it’s so moving because it sounds so expressively vocal and nakedly human; to the extent that his phrasing actually sounds to me like a person pleading. The way Metheny worries at certain melodic lines, stressing them over and over again – it’s like someone saying, ‘I tried and I tried and I tried,’ or, ‘again and again and again.’ There is a desperation to the playing – to be forgiven, or not to be abandoned.

The solo builds and rages (‘You cataracts and hurricanoes’) to a point of ecstatic release – a high G that rings with crystalline purity. Words fail me in trying to describe that moment, but it sounds to me like transcendence (and it always gives me goosebumps).

In an interview with Rick Beato, the pianist Brad Mehldau talks about the epiphanic moment of hearing this solo for the first time when he was 13. It was an overwhelmingly intense experience (which was probably aided by the fact that an older friend had given him a hit of mescaline before putting the record on), and what particularly struck him was how the solo represented ‘the value of telling a story’ with music. Mehldau compares Pat Metheny to Miles Davis, mentioning how both musicians fill their solos with ‘sentences and phrases’.

I recently came across this interview with Pat himself on Instagram where he reiterates this idea:

I started on trumpet, very young, I was terrible, but one thing that is true is that even as I got into playing guitar, I breathe as if I’m playing the trumpet, meaning if I’m doing to play a phrase I go [inhales] and then I play what I’m going to play. We need those breaths because it’s just like in conversation, if somebody just talks all the time you tune out after a minute, and music is a representation of the way we talk and the way we communicate.

So, I don’t know exactly what Dad could hear when he listened to ‘Are You Going With Me?’, and I wonder if I can hear the same thing. But I do know that, when I listen to it, I can hear something akin to what Metheny is talking about: a representation of human communication itself – what Kazuo Ishiguro described in his Nobel acceptance speech as the power of art to say, ‘This is the way it feels to me. Can you understand what I’m saying? Does it also feel this way to you?’ There is pain in that solo, but there is also joy at overcoming pain. And, as well as that, I can hear something else, an intimation of something beyond understanding; a mystery, a kind of divinity, that words cannot get close to, but – somehow, magically – music can.

Listening to ‘Are You Going With Me?’ made me think that maybe music is better suited than other mediums at representing a fundamental element of consciousness and human interaction: repetition.

To compare with an example from fiction, it’s often said that we know more about Leopold Bloom from James Joyce’s Ulysses than we do about most real people in our lives. He is remarkably fully formed and we are lucky enough to be able to spend hundreds of pages in the company of his (mental and physical) perambulations. However, I do sometimes wonder whether the ‘feel’ of Bloom’s consciousness is truly realistic. Because the truth is that, throughout the day, we don’t just think a thought once, we think it multiple times. Repetition is part of the way we experience life and the way we communicate. When we meet friends we tell the same comforting stories we’ve heard a hundred times before. If we’re upset or emotional we’ll repeat the same statements and questions again and again. I just can’t believe it. Talk me through it again. How did this happen? I just can’t believe it.

There is repetition in Bloom’s thoughts of course. For example, his mind keeps returning to his wife’s afternoon delight liaison with Blazes Boylan (although these thoughts are often curtailed, quashed, suppressed), and he repeatedly ponders who the man in the brown mackintosh was at Paddy Dignam’s funeral. There are also fragments of songs and conversations that regularly come back to him. But, in my experience at least, a thought can nag at you in the same form for a whole day, unvarying and unchanging, just repeating itself over and over again like a mantra. What was I going on about in the pub last night? Why did I say that? Why aren’t they texting back? I might have fajitas for tea tonight. Why did I say that? Do we have any sour cream in the fridge? Why did I say that? I need to buy a printer, which one should I get? Why did I say that? Why aren’t they texting back? Worries can circle around your brain unceasingly. Why did I say that? But Ulysses would be an infinitely less enjoyable book if it was just page after page of Bloom worrying about whether or not to have fajitas for tea (and, let’s face facts, fajitas probably weren’t on the menu at Davy Byrne’s in 1904).

But this is why I think that music, which is rooted in repetition, is much better at conveying this defining feature of the human experience.

I recently heard Julia Jacklin’s album Crushing for the first time and was blown away. In ‘Body’, the first song on the album, the narrator remembers an intimate photograph that an ex-partner took of her:

I remembered early days
When you took my camera
Turned to me, twenty-three
Naked on your bed
Looking straight at you
Do you still have that photograph?
Would you use it to hurt me?

Slow-burning and never releasing its coiled tension, ‘Body’ ends with Jacklin repeating the lines, ‘I guess it’s just my life / And it’s just my body’ over and over again. There is a cold fury to it, and a dark sarcasm – something of the, ‘Why would I care, it’s nothing important, it’s only my life we’re talking about.’ But something changes as the words are repeated. At first the lines are like one of those inescapable thoughts that your brain can’t stop thinking; but, in the same way that the chord progression changes the emotional quality of the melody, so the words seem to take on an incantatory power the more they are repeated. The song is resigned, and that tension is never released, but there is a sense of emancipation in that repetition; the narrator has escaped a toxic relationship, and, as she sings in an earlier line of the song, she is taking back control: ‘Heading to the city to get my body back’. As a contributor to the an online discussion of ‘Body’ puts it: ‘Now that she’s ended her relationship, she is once again in control of her body and her life, she needs to remind herself that they belong to her.’

There’s a fantastic blogpost about ‘Body’ here, which also digs into the musicology of the song. The post references an interview with Jacklin where she described ‘Body’ as, ‘a long and exaggerated sigh’, another example of music being a mirror of human behaviours and interactions.

For me, the coda is the sound of the song’s narrator wresting power back from the man who photographed her. It’s devastatingly effective, and I can’t think of another medium where repetition like this would work so well.

Another song I heard recently which, to quote Yeats on reading Tagore, stirred my blood as nothing has for years, is ‘Lorene’ by Poor Creature, an Irish folk group featuring members of Lankum and Landless.

‘Lorene’ is a Louvin Brothers song about lost love. The narrator has written a letter to Lorene and she hasn’t replied. The song exists in a frozen spot of time, between the letter the narrator sent and the letter he’s waiting to receive. Will she ever reply? The Poor Creature version sounds so utterly bereft that it answers this question for you. The more Cormac MacDiarmada pleads for Lorene to write back, the more plaintive the song becomes, and the more the listener understands that the letter is never going to arrive. The repetition is a form of howling at the moon (like Pat Metheny’s solo perhaps), an act of trying to cling on to a last vestige of hope; but the more the narrator clings on, the more it sounds like that hope is being extinguished.

Lorene write me a letter
Answer the last one that I wrote to you
Lorene I hope you’re still waiting
But your last letter is way overdue

I know many times you have started to write
Darling I wonder what’s taking your time
Lorene I hope you’re still waiting
But your last letter is way overdue

Lorene stop me from hurting
All it would take was a letter from you
Lorene you seem to be near me
But your last letter is way overdue

If you’ve found another since I’ve been away
Don’t let me return for it’s best that I stay
Lorene I feel I have lost you
For your last letter is way overdue

I love the peculiar phrasing of that line: ‘your last letter is way overdue’. Shouldn’t it be your next letter is overdue? There’s a strange kernel of ambiguity there. If it’s Lorene’s last letter and the narrator hasn’t received it yet, does that mean that he’s expecting it to be her last letter (in other words, he knows she’s going to finish things)? The song ends with what the listener has understood all along: ‘I feel I have lost you’.

‘You seem to be near me’ is a remarkable line too. Lorene is a ghostly presence in the narrator’s mind, and that ghostliness is there in the Poor Creature version; listen to the way the vowel sounds in the word Lorene evaporate eerily into reverb.

And another recent song about lost love, which also feels like an exercise in self-deception, is ‘I Never Dream About Trains’ from Cass McCombs’s new album Interior Live Oak. When I listen to it I think: Cass doth protest too much. Despite his repeated assertions to the contrary (and his claim that he never lies in his songs), I’m certain that Cass in fact does, like Robyn Hitchcock, often dream of trains.

I never dream about trains
I never dream about the open range
Riding and roping
Wind flowing through my pony’s mane
I never dream about holding you
On the sand in Pescadero
While the herons dive into the waves
You know I never lie in my songs
And I never dream about trains

I never dream about trains
I never dream about the open range
Riding and roping
And all them old cowboy clichés
I never dream about holding you tight
On the sand in Pescadero
Knowing I’d never hold you again
You know I never lie in my songs
And I never dream about trains

I never dream about trains
I never dream about the open range
Just drifting like pollen
Blowing around any which way
I never dream about you curled up
In that old Army jacket
On the sand in Pescadero
I never lie in my songs
And I never dream about trains

I never dream about trains
Dreams are nothing but a waste
Having cooled all desire
I don’t require a thing from the Fates
I never dream about you or any sand
In any town in San Mateo County
You know I never lie in my songs
And I never dream about trains

I never dream about trains
I never dream about riding the rails
Busting out of jail
Escaping across unknown terrain
I never dream about looking into your eyes
On the sand in Pescadero
And the vow we made
I never lie in my songs
And I never dream about trains

I never dream about Mexico
Going south with no particular place to go
When I’ve killed enough time
Head north on the line to where the big trees grow
I never dream about walking with you
On the sand in Pescadero
While the pregnant moon wanes
You know I never lie in my songs
And I never dream about trains

The narrator never dreams about trains, and he never dreams about a former lover (or ex-wife, depending on what kind of vows they did or didn’t make). The whole song is a series of denials – and the denials are so detailed (the old Army jacket!), and are repeated so often, that the listener can’t help but question the trustworthiness of the narrator. He never lies in his songs, except maybe he does dream about trains, and he does still think of Pescadaro – otherwise why would he keep mentioning it? (Elsewhere on Interior Live Oak, Cass sings, ‘And I mean everything I say / Or something not unlike it’.)

If the song wasn’t so desperately sad it would make a fantastic comedy routine. It’s like a version of the joke that is used brilliantly in the Alan Partridge radio series Knowing Me, Knowing You. Alan’s guest Nick Ford, a lawyer played by Patrick Marber, suggests that Partridge could be sent to prison for his treatment of an earlier guest, the child prodigy Simon Fisher (Alan thumped him). Nick, having been interrogated by Alan about his bisexuality (‘the point is, there are blokes involved’), says, ‘I don’t think you’d like it in prison, all those men.’ Partridge replies:

What are you insinuating? What are you saying? Are you saying that I, Alan Partridge, would end up in prison and maybe get friendly with some bloke and, maybe, I’d be in the shower with him and maybe, we’d just start wrestling and mucking about, and then he’d probably start soaping my back down, and then, you know, we’d kiss each other tenderly. Is that what you’re saying? Because that is untrue!

The absurd vividness of Alan’s fantasy makes a mockery of his denial of Nick’s insinuation. (A side point, and it’s been remarked upon before, but the note of repressed homosexuality is a recurrent feature of Partridge’s character.)

Speaking of repression, there’s something of Philip Larkin’s poem ‘Mr Bleaney’ in the Cass McCombs song too. ‘I Never Dream About Trains’ and ‘Mr Bleaney’ both feature a narrator who is perhaps telling a different story to the one they are purporting to be telling, and, like Alan, revealing something of themselves in the process.

Cass’s song defines itself by what it is not. I never dream about trains, I never dream about the freedom of the open range, I never dream about you. ‘Mr Bleaney’ concludes, brilliantly, with a comparable lack of assertion: ‘I don’t know’. In Larkin’s poem the narrator imagines what life was like for the previous inhabitant of his barren rented digs. But this shadow roommate is surely a version of the narrator, or, let’s be real, Larkin himself.

These are the last two stanzas:

But if he stood and watched the frigid wind
Tousling the clouds, lay on the fusty bed
Telling himself that this was home, and grinned,
And shivered, without shaking off the dread

That how we live measures our own nature,
And at his age having no more to show
Than one hired box should make him pretty sure
He warranted no better, I don’t know.

By the time the absurdly elongated subordinate clause in ‘Mr Bleaney’ is resolved with ‘I don’t know’, we can barely remember how the sentence began. Larkin could have started the penultimate stanza with the more grammatically straightforward, ‘But I don’t know if he stood…’ but that would have been a lot less interesting. The surplus of detail before the delayed ‘I don’t know’ shows us how fully realised the imagined life of Mr Bleaney is in the narrator’s mind; complete, and exact in its definition of what the rented room means (if we don’t have much to show for our lives, maybe that’s what we deserve).

Like Cass (and Alan), the narrator of ‘Mr Bleaney’ protests too much. If he doesn’t know, why does it take him two stanzas to say so? There’s a lovely equivocation to those words, ‘I don’t know’. Of course, it’s true (and Larkin wouldn’t lie in his poems, would he?) – he doesn’t know the literal truth of what Mr Bleaney felt and experienced in his room. But, by the time we have got through those two stanzas, we have gone beyond simply wanting to know whether or not Mr Bleaney had those exact thoughts. We have realised that, while Mr Bleaney may or may not have understood that he ‘warranted no better’, the narrator has shown us, with that accumulation of existential detail, that he knows that to be true of himself.

I never dream about the one after 909

Another reading of ‘I Never Dream About Trains’ is that Cass is telling the truth and he really does never lie in his songs. In other words, he’s over it – over the relationship, over everything. From this perspective the song reminds me of the tense interaction in Get Back when George Harrison says to Paul McCartney, ‘you don’t annoy me anymore’. George somehow manages to make those words sound simultaneously like a simple statement (‘I no longer find you annoying because I have mentally checked out of this band’) and a Zen-like aphorism (‘I have transcended beyond earthly irritations’). Maybe there’s something of that desire for transcendence in the Cass song too:

Dreams are nothing but a waste
Having cooled all desire
I don’t require a thing from the Fates

Nothing is ever straightforward in a Cass McCombs song. There’s that great thing he once said in an interview that I’ve quoted before: ‘the divine is always in a constant state of revealing and concealing’. Maybe there’s something of the divine unknowability of Pat Metheny’s guitar solo in the song too; the freedom he does or doesn’t dream about is a kind of spiritual freedom. He’s ‘cooled all desire’, left behind earthly infatuation and love, and is yearning for something greater, holier, beyond description.

Or is it just a sad song about missing someone?

I don’t know.

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Well, I’m not quite sure how I started with my Dad playing me a Pat Metheny song and ended up with Mr Bleaney and Alan Partridge, but here we are. I hope you enjoyed it, and followed along with my unreliable narration.

Before I go I did just want to recommend this interview with Cass McCombs on the Never Ending Stories podcast:

I love how he discusses the idea of ‘exile’, of only being able to really know a place (like Pescadero) when you leave it, and how he references the importance of this to James Joyce. It made me think about other references to Joyce in Cass McCombs songs, and I realised that the title of his collection of previously unreleased material that came out in 2024, Seed Cake on Leap Year, comes from Molly’s monologue at the very end of Ulysses. It feels like we’re nicely full circle now, so I’ll leave you with that:

the sun shines for you he said the day we were lying among the rhododendrons on Howth head in the grey tweed suit and his straw hat the day I got him to propose to me yes first I gave him the bit of seedcake out of my mouth and it was leapyear like now yes 16 years ago my God after that long kiss I near lost my breath yes he said I was a flower of the mountain yes

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