"so many never do"

July or August 2005.

Someone in office had a hits collection of Dan Fogelberg, whose LP Phoenix (1979) I had just heard; I had been listening at the time to The Innocent Age (1981), some songs from which were on the collection.

One song stood out, which I will talk about some other time on this blog for sure. It was "Sutter's Mill", a tale of the American Gold Rush.

One day, I heard what was the tail-end of "A Love Like This", probably from the most dramatic part of the guitar solo till the end.

Dan Fogelberg has done some decent, emphatic rock on his LPs, but "A Love Like This", believe it or not, sounded far louder than any of his songs I'd heard up to then. The right word has to be "louder" - it was, to start with, a question of volume. There is a lead guitar solo that is really, really loud. Melodic, yes, as was always expected from Dan, but also loud, which was surely not expected. I thought what anyone who knows anything about Dan Fogelberg would have thought - that there had to be some compelling reason why this particular, specific song had to be done so emphatically loudly.

When I listened closer, I found a piano that was also loud, but which played some really iconic chords and progressions. I was beginning to get hooked to it, and then I heard the words. Initially, of course, I thought it was just a very loud love song Dan had done for some reason. Nothing really exceptional. There was nothing on his other LPs I had heard that was so crassly loud, and that too just a love song.

I am just another boy; of course I don't take to 'love songs' that easily. I still don't, as a matter of fact.

After I thought I had the song all figured out, then, and only then did it just cut the floor clean away from beneath my feet. To this day, there is no other romantic song I have heard that is so sold out with abandonment, so utterly without restraint. After I had 'connected' to what Dan was saying here, the song became (and remains) an icon for me. I understand 'why so loud'. I would hear it every evening, at what I call the 'magic' hour - between quarter to five and half past - when everything beautiful becomes positively spellbindingly more so. I thought about finding a 'love like this', about getting tongue-tied, clumsy, bumbling and sweet sixteen when I was around....well, whoever she would be.

Being one who believes in The Divine, I don't really think much of what is claimed for human 'romantic' love. But "A Love Like This" helps me believe that there is much about romantic love which can indeed touch the divine. One of the song's only faults (and admittedly a very significant one) is that the words on the last verse (among the most grand and breath-taking words Dan has ever penned) describe something surely no human being can do for another. The 'light that guides me home', can only be Divine. There can be some level of this that a human being can reach, but not all the way. Only God can do that. Only God can be 'the star by which I steer, the only star I know'. Human beings can only go so far.

I must open my heart to you a bit, dear reader. If I might have 'fallen in love', as it is understood under the sun, this song captures it better than any song I've ever heard. If indeed there is 'romantic love', it must be so drunk with the one who is loved, that there is absolutely nothing held back, no cost weighed, no caution, no plan B, no soul left to be sacrificed, nothing. The die has indeed been cast, all the money's in and the bets are down, and all the fat is in the fire, all the eggs in one precious basket. My life for yours. There are no ducks in a row. It is ALL and ALL is lost if the one who is loved fails or is somehow removed.

Frightening? Yes, indeed. Cold and sweaty palms, heightened heartbeats and breathlessness are just trivial. But what if one really does find such a love under the sun? This is no small thing and I beg of you to consider this soberly - don't mistake it for less than it is, and don't mistake something less for it. It is quite common for many not to ever, ever find it, because there's only that much love to go round and also because it is not a fair world and this has to be accepted. It's a harsh truth and I must say it as indelicately as possible, lest one fail to take it seriously.

A love like this
Is so hard to find
And so many never do
And loves like this
When they even exist
Are precious and few
You know they're precious and few!

Aye, there's the rub. SO MANY NEVER DO. That, after the song has cut the floor off under you, brings you back down to earth (whose floor has gone).

Many say and believe (and I among them) that love may be romantic in the beginning, but as it grows over time it is hardly about romance; and so they discount this no-holds-barred opening. I do not. If indeed human love is what is claimed for it and expected of it, it cannot exclude the romantic. Just cannot. At any stage into which it grows.

And I hate what I've written. It is so lifeless, pedantic, boring, moth-eaten and so bereft of any soulfulness. But I will let it be, because though I do want to open out this song to you, there are places you cannot come with me. I am not exactly free to tell you all. Let what should never be known indeed remain forever so. Rather than reveal more than I should, let me suffice to say this much without lying.

....and about Dan Fogelberg? There will be other opportunities and I will use those to tell you about this gentle, beautiful soul.

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What remains is to talk about the song's music. There is one chord that I still haven't figured out, a lovely chord, the 6th chord in the intro (and it repeats on all those lines that close the verses). it is also the sequence which ends the song when the lines 'the light that guides me home' is repeated three times.

Much, much later, I discovered that "A Love Like This" appears on Dan's River of Souls (1993) LP, about which I know nothing else and, to the best of my knowledge, heard nothing else from.

And now the lonely days are done 
And with each rising of the sun, love begins anew

And if you ever ask me why I know that my love will never die 
I'll say these words to you

Of all the souls I've ever known 
Mine sings to yours and yours alone 
And yours sings just to me

In all this world I'll never find 
A heart that could beat as close to mine 
And this time I can see

A love like this is so hard to find 
And so many never do

And loves like this, when they even exist 
Are precious and few 
You know they're precious and few

A love like this is so hard to find 
And so many never do

And loves like this, when they even exist 
Are precious and few 
You know they're precious and few

Down the miles, through the years 
Yours is the star by which I steer 
The brightest star I've known 

And when I feel all hope is gone 
Yours is the love that leads me on

The light that guides me home 
The light that guides me home 
Your light will guide me home

"There are whispers at night in the halls of paintings"

Basically 90% of all songs seem to be either “Baby, I love you so”, or “Baby, you’ve done me wrong”.

What I’m saying is “What is the song?” And the song is either “I’ve done you wrong”, or, “Baby, I love you so”, no matter what style it’s played in. 

- Al Stewart, from a 2012 interview, as quoted in Wikipedia.

Elsewhere in the same interview, Al Stewart says that he prefers not to use words almost everybody does in songs - words like 'baby' (to mean a girl, or a sweetheart). So does he succeed? Apparently not. 

That's because here and there, tucked away in many of his LPs, are paeans to lonely young people, mostly women, aching to belong, to love and be loved, to find some salve for their desolation of loneliness. These songs are sometimes about historical persons (such as "Marion the Chatelaine" from 1995's Between The Wars,) or about people Al has invented ("Almost Lucy" from 1978's Time Passages and "Lori, Don't Go Right Now" from 1984's Russians and Americans,) and some we aren't really sure ("Gina In The Kings Road" from 2005's A Beach Full Of Shells.) These portraits are not superficial; Al manages to get inside the person's skin like a splinter and unearths some of their very essential, unspoken needy cries, utter isolation and desperate loneliness.

I can't seem to stop myself from thinking a lot these days that "Mona Lisa Talking", from A Beach Full Of Shells is pretty much in the same category, though it seems neither a paean to any specific person, actual or invented; nor a portrait. The song inevitably does have to do with Da Vinci's famous painting, but it seems that it does not speak ABOUT it so much as FROM it; and it speaks TO any 'pretty baby' who might conceivably deduce, from the painting's mysterious aura, that love is to be found far from home.

Mystery enshrouds Da Vinci's painting; it is now definitely one of those works about which no one really knows (or can claim to know) anything for sure. The blame for this can be laid at history's door; it always seemed to me that the painting was romanticised, deservedly or otherwise, into the historical quicksand it has become today.

Traditional explanations of it are expectedly simple - that it is just a portrait of a lady named Lisa Gherardini from the del Giacondo family, for which purpose Da Vinci was commissioned. The fact that he embellished a simple portrait with the mystifying smile definitely is deemed merely coincidental. It is also deemed that instead of the marital ring, he painted her hands with her right hand resting on her left, to suggest virtuousness and fidelity. These little touches, inadvertent or not, seem to have played into the hands of those who wanted to romanticise the work. But I guess this was a foregone, inevitable thing, seeing as it even today impresses me as a curiously 'live' and 'current' portrait rather than as a sterile record of someone called Lisa Gherardini. Mystery is surely promised, if not delivered. What we DON'T KNOW about the portrait (and the one whose portrait it is) has kept us going feverishly down the centuries, that's for sure.

This seems to make Al's lyric in "Mona Lisa Talking" all the more comforting and correct - especially in the refrain:

Go home, pretty baby
Go on home, pretty baby
You will go home to the one who is waiting for you,
Anything that you want, anything that you do
You will go home to the one who is waiting alone for you.

As always, Al makes his point delicately yet cannily and knowingly; but to put it in brutally didactic language, he might seem to be saying that the mystery must now finally be swallowed up in fulfillment and the wanderer in search of love must go home, because that's simply where love always was and continues to be found, before the 'romanticisers' came and confused things terribly by their treasure-hunting in the streets. The Mona Lisa is just an ordinary, faithful, virtuous wife with a wonderful smile full of mystery. No more, no less.

Al's bridge and last verse in "Mona Lisa Talking" definitely seem to support what I've just said:

Oh I know, you think you're part of a tragic song
You can show reasons it's over, but I know you're wrong

These renaissance girls know what they're saying
There are whispers at night in the halls of paintings
You think you're the first to come untethered
But we've been watching you forever

So often, the women Al writes about seek love in places where they should never expect to find it - in a smile that promises but does not deliver, on the streets in search of 'mystery'. It's time now to go home, where love always is, and where it is most pleasurably and rightly to be found. A tribute to right living and fidelity, if you like, to put it in brutal black-and-white. Just like the traditional explanation of Da Vinci's painting - a virtuous wife.

Does this seem to take a lot of promise and bite out of the Mona Lisa? Yes and no, but admittedly more 'no'. The smile is still promising; so what if it is no longer just mysterious but also merely familiar? The ultimate fulfillment of promise and mystery is to find love at home and not in the transitory face of a stranger in the dark - we have come full circle indeed.

The soul always aches for home doesn't it. So then, go home, pretty baby.

*************************************************************

Many critics box Al's music into a very convenient category called 'folk-rock', which is okay in its way but there's so much more than merely that going on in his songs. For my part I hate categorisation unless it clarifies the musician's roots, if needed, to some extent. In the 2012 interview I referred to earlier, Al says that his songs end up being 'geographical, historical, from a movie' because he prefers to write songs about things no one else is writing about. He also says he thinks of his songs as 'aural films' (a beautiful expression,) which is what I always thought them to be because the lyrics are so visually evocative in a way few musicians are able to achieve in pop culture. His one recent LP that does this more effectively than any other is A Beach Full Of Shells, something that has begun to dawn on me so much more recently. 

When I first heard the songs on A Beach Full Of Shells I felt a number of them, though substantial, had been left dangling and unfinished intentionally or otherwise. There are still a couple of songs that seem that way. It was only after quite a few hearings that "Mona Lisa Talking" began to impress; and today, I regard the song as one of Al's very best in the tradition of very few of his great songs in my estimation - it stands alongside "Flying Sorcery" (on Year Of The Cat, 1976) and even beside his magnum opus, "Roads to Moscow" (on Past, Present and Future, 1974.) It also begins to rival my favourites considerably - "Merlin's Time" (24 Carrots, 1980,) "Lindy Comes To Town" and "Night Train to Munich" (Between The Wars). It certainly is the best song (by a long way) of his post - Between The Wars LPs.

Al confesses that he likes the opening chord sequences (just as I always suspected) and I love them too. The chords give the song a plaintive, emotional, loaded tone, full of the weariness of a love not found, decisively vital to its premise. Laurence Juber's guitar solo at the end of the song is very lyrical and expressive, as always, but it makes the song seem even more poignant than it actually is.

*************************************************************

This is the Mona Lisa talking
Out on the street where love goes walking
Into the shadows that can't hide you
Here is a voice that speaks inside you

Go home, pretty baby, go on home, pretty baby
You will go home to the one who is waiting for you
Anything that you want, anything that you do
You will go home to the one who is waiting alone for you

This is the Mona Lisa calling
Out of a patch of oil and water
Over the street lamps and the river
Out of a smile that lasts forever

Go home, pretty baby, go on home, pretty baby
You will go home to the one who is waiting for you
Anything that you want, anything that you do
You will go home to the one who is waiting alone for you

O I know you think you're part of a tragic song
You can show reasons it's over, but I know you're wrong

These Renaissance girls know what they're saying
There are whispers at night in the halls of paintings
You think you're the first one to come untethered
But we've been watching you forever

Go home, pretty baby, go on home, pretty baby
You will go home to the one who is waiting for you
Anything that you want, anything that you do
You will go home to the one who is waiting alone for you

This is the Mona Lisa talking
This is the Mona Lisa talking