A friend of mine is seeing Richard Thompson perform live for
the first time today. Exciting. And that’s reason enough to post about a song
from Thompson’s most recent LP, Electric
(2013).
Thompson has been someone whose career I’ve followed ever
since the album at the end of his marriage to and collaboration with Linda
Thompson: Shoot Out the Lights
(1982). After that, but for maybe an album here and there, I’ve pretty much
stayed up to date with whatever the guy is laying down. And that’s because the
satisfactions of a Richard Thompson LP never really change: good, sometimes
great, songwriting, a mix of the melancholic, the ironic and, sometimes, the
satiric that I find fits most of my moods, his very clear and direct vocals,
and, really, there’s no one I’d rather hear play guitar.
Thompson’s guitar-playing combines the qualities that matter
most to me: taste, timing, and feeling. OK, sometimes his breaks can be a bit
pro forma, but if so, they’re still elegant enough to make the break an
addition to the song. And sometimes his breaks and fills add so much feeling to
his usually somewhat wry lyrics that it’s hard to imagine the song without his
guitar. And he can write songs that are as clean as an oldtime folk tune, where
you feel the singer is truly some kind of Everyman getting down what it felt
like to be alive.
Today’s song has that quality. It’s lyrical and sorrowful,
but also comical. Thompson is a great writer of “persona songs”—songs that are sung
from a point of view, a particular person or type of person is letting us in on
their state of mind. He’s also good at story songs, that he narrates, or songs
that tell stories indirectly, as here.
In five verses we get the whole story of this marriage (or union), told
by the husband as his wife/ex-wife/former partner is leaving with the kids. I suppose it’s
supposed to be the final scene (with “her bags all packed to go”), but I also
imagine a divorce with custodial visitations. She’s got the kids and so,
every time she comes to take them back, this poor sap has to relive a little of
what they once had and where it all went wrong. We feel for him, regardless of
whatever his failings were.
More than that, we get his view of his ex. She still
dominates his feelings; what’s more she’s clearly the one who has always called
the shots—to be with him, to have kids with him, to not be with him any more.
This long-suffering dude just has to take it. “She’ll find some other pilgrim
who’s braver.” (One of the delights, of
course, is the rhymes Thompson finds for “favour”—my favorite is “And I didn’t
exactly enslave her”). The ticking off of “small things in her favour” is the
point of the song, a tally of things that
make this guy still “hers” in a way. Because what the “favour” means is
what makes him partial to her, over other women he’s known. We might imagine
this guy gets his heart stabbed, his teeth kicked in, his guts dragged through
the mud fairly regularly. This chick, at least, treats him civil.
And the two verses that begin in a bit more operatic
register (“She said she felt bad / For the home that we had / And the effort I’d
wasted to save her” and “Now there’s trouble and strife / But we once had a
life / For a while our vows didn’t waver”) get down some of the feeling of what
was. Both know it was really something, that it really mattered, and we can
imagine there was some stepping out on both sides, but even if we lay it all on
him, the “effort wasted to save her” indicates, I think, that there was something
he was trying to save her from. She knows he put in some time on this one.
The little touches that make this pure Thompson are things
like “She kissed me once more / As she gently slammed the door”—playing to the
cinematic final scene and winking at it too—and “She told me as much / As she
slowly let out the clutch” which makes me chuckle every time. Parting shots as the car
pulls away. Oh yeah.
“I relied on her smile / And her love, for a while / That’s
another small thing in her favour.” In
the end, how many can he really say that about?
These small things become the minor mercies that keep him from hating
her and wanting to tear her apart. It’s stoic, perhaps, in the end, the way
this guy keeps it together and Thompson—I’m not sure how he does it, other than
the pacing of this song—manages to imply a lot of grief and maybe even rage in
the speaker. He needs those “small things” and she knows how to give them so
that, in the end, he’s still grateful rather than angry or defeated. And that’s
no small thing.
I’ve seen Thompson three times—twice solo, once with a
band. He’s a very entertaining fellow, a good showman, a raconteur, and his
fans treasure their time with him. Today's concert’s playlist will come from
audience requests. I think I might’ve
requested this one. And when he solos in a song / He never goes on too long / That's another great thing in his favour.
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