I tend to have the, undoubtedly annoying, habit of associating everything I talk about to a line from a pop song or poem. Fortunately, there are songs that concern themselves with this. Spencer Krug, songwriter of Sunset Rubdown and many other vessels, is one of the most self-conscious lyricists I know. He seems to be aware, among many things, of being a songwriter, and of it constantly seeping in his personal life. The Taming of the Hands concerns itself with this. At the start of the song he asks:
Do you think the second movement has too many violins?
A verse later, crucially, the protagonist is too occupied with his craft to help out the person reaching out to him.
She said: "my sails are flapping in the wind."
I said: "Can I use that in a song?"
An awful enough retort as it is, but he makes it worse:
She said: "I mean the end begins."
I said: "I know, can I use that too?
It is a strange thing to imagine the potential audience that might read whatever you're writing, see whatever you're painting or hear whatever you're composing, and once you occupy yourself with it, it affects your work. You get apologetic in advance, and Krug's work is teeming with examples of this. He's keen on revisiting themes - as am I - but once he does he feels like a broken record. See, for instance, this line from All Fires:
I've said it before, and I'll say it again,
All fires have to burn alive to live
When he employs that same metaphor again in Nightingale / December Song, he acts similarly and for some reason the insistent hammering makes it one of my very favorite quotes of his, because it says something about the person as well as his ideas.
So let me hammer this point home,
I see us all as lonely fires
that have burned alive as long as we remember
These introductory phrases serve as balance, to make his epic tendencies less epic, his defeatism less defeatist. When, on the very last lines of the album The Taming of the Hands features on (Random Spirit Lover), a second voice finally does lament the number of violins (a metaphor for too much sweeping drama?), it's a final and fatal apology.
Why so many, many, many, many, many violins?
