DB's Song of the Day (day 301): "THE TRAPEZE SWINGER" (2004) Iron and Wine

Today’s song, I admit, is here because it refers to Halloween. It’s a song of looking backward and there’s nothing quite like holidays such as Halloween and Christmas to make us think back to childhood.

Sam Beam’s song brings together scenes from childhood with scenes from teen explorations of love and Christian images of the afterlife to create a fabric of memory that also projects into the future with the reiterated request that the speaker be remembered.

I first encountered Iron and Wine (Beam’s recording name) on the soundtrack to the film I’m Not There (2007) where Beam did a particularly successful take on Dylan’s “Dark Eyes.” I then picked up the I&W album of the time, The Shepherd’s Dog  (2007), which featured rhythm tracks similar to the Dylan track. But come to find out—on Our Endless Numbered Days (2004)—that I&W’s dominant sound till then was more acoustic, laid-back and lo-fi. That album is nicely relaxing, and the collection of B-sides and soundtrack songs and the like, called Around the Well (2009), introduced me to more of the older I&W sound, including today’s over 9 minute hypnotic tune, “The Trapeze Swinger.”

The song consists of 8 verses of 8 lines each, so of course it takes a while to get through them all. The tune is highly repetitive, moving through each verse with no chorus or bridge, just stringing together the verses, much as Dylan often did in his long songs, though usually he used a refrain. Here, the refrain is actually the opening line of each verse rather than the final line, as in most of Dylan’s songs: “Please remember me,” with the repeated phrase receiving a modifier to complete the line and rhyme with “me.” In fact, internal rhyme occurs in lines 1, 3, 5, 7 in each verse; while the final words in lines 2 and 4, and in lines 6 and 8 “rhyme” (often with off-rhyme).

It’s a pleasant structure to hear come around again and again, and Beam’s aim on the rhymes gets better as he goes so that the song feels tighter as it moves through the second half to its conclusion. And the background instrumentation, with choir-like vocals, gets more insistent, particularly the piano part which gets busier later, giving a sense of the “uphill clawing” the speaker mentions.

The main image in the first half is the “pearly gates” with “some eloquent graffiti” that gets mentioned in verses 2 and 4. In verses 1 and 3, a childhood memory is recalled: first, kids planning on raiding their piggy bank to take off on a journey—the good old “run away from home” fantasy—then kids out on Halloween “making fools of all the neighbors” (the first memory is older than the second, like maybe grade school then middle school). The fifth verse, after the present time of verse 4, goes back further to a dream “we had as rug-burned babies” and the possible gift of getting to see a trapeze swinger “high as any savior.” The height of the swinger immediately recalls the high tower of verse 4, which is a grown-up verse with “happy hours” and the girl “lit up by the city.” The change in verse 6 is that the speaker mentions his own misery, “and how it lost me all I wanted” (which might include the girl), so that the graffiti comes back as “who the hell can see forever,” written behind a statue of St. Peter, or on the pearly gates behind Peter himself. The rhetorical question, we might imagine, gets at something the speaker is suffering in the song—that memories from the past, no matter how happy or fond, can’t help you see into the future and how you will lose things you want to keep.

Verse 7 gives us one such scene where the speaker and the girl he’s been recalling are in a car at the carnival and she turns away from him—the expected intimacy signaled by his hand between her knees—and says “the trapeze act was wonderful but never meant to last.” Which at once puts that “gift” of seeing the circus performer in the context of a savior that failed—the identification of the speaker with the trapeze swinger becomes the main idea that surfaces again at the conclusion that brings together the trapeze swinger and a drawing that takes the place of (or represents the speaker’s contribution to) the “eloquent graffiti.” It’s a drawing the speaker wants to make, if he manages to get to the pearly gates, to leave upon the wall of the holy kingdom.

A key moment in this relationship comes when he admits that her comment about the trapeze swinger and her turning away makes him “come up with anger” so that the “element of danger” of the circus dogs in the parking lot can extend to his reaction to being rejected. “Anger” and “danger” making for a nice off-rhyme and letting us know why he’d prefer that scene to be remembered “seldomly.” “Finally,” she should remember “all my uphill clawing”—which may be his ambition but also his intention to get “high as any savior.” So that the final vision of what he’d draw on the pearly gates references Good and Evil—“God and Lucifer”—the sexes (“a boy and girl”), the stages of evolution (“a monkey and a man”), an image of salvation—“an angel kissing on a sinner”—or maybe even of temptation (which should be “saved,” the graffiti says), and a marching band and trapeze swinger from the circus, frightened because of his status as an emblem of his uneasy human relation to the other images—gods, angels, devils, apes, mankind, boys and girls. All needing somehow to be redeemed.

And that’s what the constant invocation of memory is meant to do: redeem the whole. Those great moments of bonding in “a vision too removed to mention” as much as in counting “every black car passing / your house.” The point of “I heard from someone you’re still pretty” is to place so much of this in a deep past, where time has not only changed them but put so much distance between them that he can’t even say for sure what she looks like now. The leap from that comment to the list of graffiti is, we might say, as daring as leaping from trapeze to trapeze, where even angels “with their great handshakes” [the internet seems to think its “gray handshakes”—but the lyric sheet provided with Around the Well says otherwise, even if you can’t hear it yourself] can recall hands grabbing other hands as in aerial ballet. The graffiti gives us some odd slogans: “we’ll meet again” might stand for what the speaker feels toward the girl, but it can also be taken as the sort of thing one entering the pearly gates would want to leave to those left outside . . . much as “fuck the man” might apply as well (and here the pearly gates sound like prison gates) and “tell my mother not to worry”—a perfect consoling thought for the gates of heaven. [The image above is of the great handshake between an angel and a former angel (Peter Falk) in Wim Wenders' film Wings of Desire (1987) from which also come the images of the trapeze swinger; Natassja Kinski as a comforting angel comes from the sequel Far Away, So Close (1993).]

The Halloween memory—which is my reason for posting the song this week—is charming with a feel for the uneasy nature of youthful attachments. They got so caught up in the fun they forgot one another, and then he felt ashamed of forgetting or of enjoying it so much or of both. “Only now it seems so silly.” Nothing to get hung about. One of my favorite lines is “That season left the world and then returned”—“that season” isn’t simply “the fall” but rather the “season” of his infatuation with her. It took a turn away and then returned only to find her “lit up by the city.” Moving on into bigger things.

The picture that emerges in verse 4 is of the speaker “mistakenly” thinking there’s some current rapport possible. This verse is the “now” of the song where trying to harangue passersby from the highest tower is akin to graffiti on the gates of heaven. Though now “don’t look down” and “lost and found” indicate, perhaps, the problem of coming to terms with their new relations. Temptation needs to be saved; lost, their affection needs to be found. And looking down—from heaven, from the tower—is liable to make one feel frightened at how far they’ve come.

So let’s go back to a dream as crawling babies getting rug-burned, and among trees asleep with visions of lions and ladies “who call you what you like” and might dispense gifts for good behavior: the chance to see the trapeze swinger, which now completes the idea of not looking down. The swinger as savior. Beam seems to want to find a figure for a spiritual dimension not available in those pearly gates or St. Peter. The trapeze swinger will do.

Not meant to last, not able to see forever, the poor trapeze artist is a “fleeting chance”—a glimpse of something astounding, not earthbound, almost miraculous. An image, finally, like dogs chasing trains “with colored birds around their running,” of rich, expressive movement without rest, but arrested in a drawing on this side the pearly gates. “Heaven is a place where nothing ever happens.”  Let’s stay out, and remain where temptation might make something happen.

And, since the internet is not respectful of verse form, here’s the final verse with the rhyme pattern marked:

So please remember me,¹ finally¹ 

And all my uphill clawing,² 

My dear, but if I make³ the pearly gates³ 

I’ll do my best to make a drawing² 

Of God and Lucifer,⁴ a boy and girl⁴ 

An angel kissing on a sinner⁵ 

A monkey and a man,⁶ a marching band⁶ 

All around a frightened trapeze swinger⁵

It’s a song that feels melancholic with the sense of time gone and things living on in memory that become more bittersweet the longer held onto. And, as it involves things like dreams and circuses and schemes and fun of childhood and a child’s sense of heaven, it strikes a common chord with the memories of many, and the implications of how people close at one point become strangers later run through the song. On the internet many comment they’d like the song played at their funeral. Everyone wants to be remembered well.

But please remember me fondly