waterbaby // Beck n Call

I have been very interested recently in memory – its tricks, obfuscations, and peculiarities. And nostalgia. How quickly people and things from the past become symbols. Unburdened of the complexity and static of the present, nostalgia files memory down to something far less confusing. But when you begin to poke at that nostalgia, peel back even a layer or two of its orderly sheen, you find again the uncontainable chaos and contradiction of reality.

There’s a line in the chorus of this song that I love, which goes “who knows where I’d be / if I was never reminded of you.” The song, off waterbaby’s new album, Memory Be a Blade, seems to me to speak not only of the influence people have over us when we know them, but of the influence of their memory, and the act of remembering them, which morphs over time and has an entirely different set of qualities and consequences than knowing someone in the present tense.

It also reminded me of a passage from a Nabokov story that I read recently: “You often feel that you remember someone so vividly and in detail, then you check the matter and it all turns out to be so inane, so meager, so shallow – a deceptive facade, a bogus enterprise on the part of your memory.”

It captures so perfectly the slipperiness of remembering a foundational person, how it always seems to be happening out of the corner of your eye, or as a heavy, inexpressible ache. So many of the people I remember exist as a mass, a completely solid object, in my memory. It is nearly impossible to pull apart individual pieces from their place in my mind, to examine them as discreet parts of a whole. The minute you try, you see immediately how flimsy and incorrect each detail appears in relation to the person they belong to. These memories do not exist except as a whole, and yet the whole is indescribable without having access to all the tiny, inane moments which contribute to its density. That is the contradiction of memory that we are always attempting to solve – attempts which result sometimes in nostalgia, sometimes in poetry, sometimes in colors on a canvas, sometimes only in a vague ache in some unexplored region of the chest.

Anyway. This song flits and flashes, like a splash of sun caught in a drop of water. Like the featherlight turn of a wing. Like a blade, or a memory.

waterbaby’s album, Memory Be a Blade, is out today via Sub Pop. Buy it here.