“Stories of Songs of Stories”, written on Friday, October 11, 2024

There’s this thing I sometimes catch myself wondering, often right after a serendipitous happening of, say running into someone while outside.

“For each coincidence that happened, how many almost happened but didn’t?”

For each event that did happen, one could argue both that – less could’ve almost happened since those that got close to happening, did so anyway; a kind of, round-up thing… while being equally potent when put the other way round, too.

How many songs did I play through before having shuffled it for another, while having missed something immense in its entirety?

Being an emphatic Pink Floyd fan, I recall finding vocals too divergent from the original track to warrant the track a full listening. That was it. A few seconds in, I recall skipping it for another. This was back in late 2018.

Years passed… before, in a certain balcony somewhere in 2020, I visually and explicitly recall passed over that track to choose another track from the same band – A cover of “Redbone”… and it (“Redbone”) set the tone for the music that evening. I sometimes wonder what would have come through had we played something else, instead… … … anyway:

Years passed later still… Briefly so – I once “(re)gained consciousness” one late evening, found myself in my bed atop a bunch of stuff while with headphones on…. and waking up an unfamiliar track playing. Finding a lost cover of an earlier track which I had overlooked years earlier, I left the headphones on, and this time… sat through the vocals… To be honest – more like I passed out (again) midway through them, however:

(At 3:28, ) I recall being roused into consciousness by the lull of that now-familiar deep-sounding, solid-body Gibson, quickly noticing the traditional Gibson-Sg (made famous by ACDC, ofcourse, atleast for me), now spinning clearly Jazz slices through shifty drums at about 5:01.

I recall sitting up and wondering how this was “overseen” by others (millions of views – this time, it was the other way round: I had missed what most others hadn’t), exactly then – the music kicked into that Pink Floydian, psychedelic blues, in a heavy blues underpinning as spelt out by that guitar. Partly due to being “in the state”, I recall welling up a bit at what I had looked over for years and years as each stanza saw the soloist hitting listeners with false-endings, closings – all the while raising tension, forcing to kneels, I’m sure, every last listening – to their most deeply-felt terrifying memory, fear, moment of cowardice, perhaps, or for others, the having-to feeling of knowing that they having nothing else to, well, simply have to, at times, let go and “have a cigar” knowing full well that nothing’s changed.

There, right there… on my cognitive perch, witnessing the before and after – I saw myself realize a new interpretation of that one Pink Floyd track that I couldn’t relate to as much as the others – Pink Floyd’s interpretation was (I’ll let their lyrics tell their story) “Sit down, boy, you’re going to be rich, <you have no idea what’s in store for that life of your’s, though>,”Have A Cigar” – that song, gave the prologue to a life’s story with – “Have a cigar for what you’re going to see!” – something like the anthem played to a standing army on its way to war. The “Have your cigar” that the Main Squeeze brought to me, with a Jazzy intro, signifying (to me), that cut-and-doge or every little to last thing that we all, I guess, try to slip from what’s thrown onto us. It honestly gets difficult to hum through it, yet, we force ourselves to strike melodies through a shifting background – don’t tell anyone, but I think that’s what Jazz literally is by the way: A bunch of people learning to appreciating someone who’s never learnt how to walk but mastered how to keeping falling in style. That’s jazz, right around which… it turned into that bluish black. This… this was the aftermath. The somber anthem playing as people shudder to guns firing as planes soar overhead, long after the glories of wars have sung and calms are now in haunt – it’s got this juxtaposed sense of piercing that leaves you realizing that everyone’s had that – “(Let me) Have a Cigar”. It’s lovely how, a cover, brought me think through so much of the aboves – especially how it brough a new interpretation to an old song with the opposite of an addendum (which is how, I guess, most other songs found new meanings with, for me). Every rise and fall of strings, especially towards the end, saw vengefully-fought climbs and unwilling descents… until what sounded like a well-fought forced resignation; a job well done.

Not in any direct or relevant way, but in terms of a butterfly effect or such, I mean it when I say that it’s nothing but a footnote for writer’s amusement, but I wonder how things would’ve turned out had I started out playing this track instead of Redbone’s, which, brilliant still… I don’t know, I digress – It’s going to be 10 years this 26th. That’s what keeps playing… I can’t help miss players who swore who’d have been with me, clearly seeing my hand in all of it, except for the last, in all its irony, still, it’s… I wonder where… everyone, are… and maybe I’m having trouble saying it – but, I know he’s still there somewhere, and that it all counts, counted and will count.