Time to talk about a song in an obsessed way that will make you concerned for my well-being!
I love you by Fontaines D. C. is one of greatest songs of all time, a conflicted love song to Ireland. It begins understated with the bass, builds up to a contradictorily monotonous rage in the chorus, and dies back down, a total negation of the previous outburst. Forgetting. Only the drums are disrupted by the first chorus, suspended in shock almost before coming in unfazed for the next verse. Life goes on.
It feels so raw and urgent, but somehow so tonally apathetic, as if they’re so done that emotion has drained from their very words. The way that Grian Chatten sings the words “I love you” with no sense of love is nothing short of powerful, painful. He’s almost bored.
This sense of singing about something emotional with a sense of apathy is something I have a real love of in music. You hear it in Crumb’s Ghostride - one song I obsessed over. One of the first songs I heard that captured this emotion, albeit in a much more explicit way than the subsequent works I’ve found, was I Don’t Care Much from Cabaret. This song had such a profound effect on me, and I really can’t overstate how the emotionless state of the singer amplifies the emotions felt by the listener. We hear someone broken, past the point of feeling. And that is devastating.
It is something that has translated to my own music in its own unique way. You’ll hear it in my new EP that is coming out later this year. In the meantime, go listen to I Love You. Know that I’ve listened for hours on end, letting it seep into me, or else bleeding out.
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