Lyrics and Life

By Caitlin Ward

Nights in White Satin
The Moody Blues

Nights in white satin, never reaching the end,
Letters I’ve written, never meaning to send.
Beauty I’d always missed with these eyes before.
Just what the truth is, I can’t say anymore.

CHORUS
’Cos I love you, yes I love you, oh how I love you.

Gazing at people, some hand in hand,
Just what I’m going through they can’t understand.
Some try to tell me, thoughts they cannot defend,
Just what you want to be, you will be in the end.

CHORUS

Nights in white satin, never reaching the end,
Letters I’ve written, never meaning to send.
Beauty I’ve always missed, with these eyes before.
Just what the truth is, I can’t say anymore.

CHORUS (x2)

(spoken)
Breathe deep, the gathering gloom
Watch lights fade from every room
Bedsitter people look back and lament
Another day’s useless energy spent

Impassioned lovers wrestle as one
Lonely man cries for love and has none
New mother picks up and suckles her son
Senior citizens wish they were young

Cold-hearted orb that rules the night
Removes the colours from our sight
Red is grey and yellow, white
But we decide which is right
And which is an Illusion

It strikes me that in a family of relatively intelligent people, it’s a bit silly that it took so long before we all looked at each other and thought, “audiobooks!”

You might need a bit of context. My mother had always been an avid fiction reader, but since she had a hemorrhagic stroke in 2008, she’s found it very difficult to do so. At first, we dealt with this by tracking down television miniseries based on books, then finding good films. Inevitably, this got very old, and she got sick of watching so much TV. Sometimes, we read aloud to her from magazines and books, but that depended on someone being there and having the time to read to her. With my sister in another country and me working full time, that time came less often than we’d have liked. For ages we were at a loss and then, all at once, the entire family rose up together in a singular cry of, “books on tape!”

It’s a bit embarrassing how long it took us to work out that that might be a good idea. The result of this eventual realization, though, is that most gift-giving occasions these days somehow involve audiobooks. My sister and her boyfriend got my mom the unabridged Lord of the Rings for Christmas this year, and for her birthday this year, I got her a subscription to Audible, an online audiobook company.

The upshot of this is that I spend a fair amount of time on my mother’s computer, helping her download audiobooks by the likes of John Le Carre, George Eliot and Elizabeth Gaskell. A few days ago, fairly late at night, this somehow devolved (or evolved) while we waited for Alexandre Dumas’ The Count of Monte Cristo to download. My father came in to my mom’s studio to find us up out of our seats dancing to The Moody Blues. He looked at us with a vaguely bemused smile on his face for a minute or so before returning to work in his office.

Now, I have been told I have a fairly eclectic taste in music, and I think the seeds of that are found in my parents’ more-than-eclectic (dare I say, schizophrenic) record collection. Most people know The Moody Blues from their one song that became popular in spite of the gong, the doggerel and the flute intro, Nights in White Satin. The band faded back into the semi-obscurity of progressive rock after the one hit, with albums that charted well but singles that almost never made the Top 20.

I discovered the band at the age of eight or nine, first finding the Best of The Moody Blues among my parents’ CDs, and then raiding their record collection to find that between the two of them, my parents owned every album the band had put out between 1967 and 1985. There’s something otherworldly about their music; it’s hard to suppress the thought you’re in the middle of an epic film when you listen to their songs. Each member played about a dozen instruments and used each of them to great (or bizarre) effect. At the age of nine, and apparently now, as well, it’s easy to get caught up in the dramatic lyrics and the larger-than-life sound.

Progressive rock has not aged well in the public consciousness. It was dealt a fatal blow in the late 1970s with the advent of punk. Many music aficionados who once loved The Moody Blues, Yes, King Crimson, Emerson Lake & Palmer, or Jethro Tull now sheepishly say they were taken in by the music’s drama but ultimately it was all a bit silly. The music took itself too seriously, and now it sounds dated and self-indulgent.

Well, fie on them, says I. It’s true that the music verges on melodrama, the lyrics are odd if not nonsensical, the practitioners of the genre wore plus fours as if that made perfect sense, and the album covers were more often than not covered in photorealistic drawings of naked elf children. Yes, that’s all a bit silly. But isn’t it equally silly to form a band and get on stage without knowing how to play your instruments, or spiking your hair a foot high and wearing bondage trousers that prevent you from walking straight (punk)? And isn’t it also a bit silly to wear massive puffy jackets and pants that are five sizes too big and think talking over a snippet of someone else’s song counts as musicianship (rap)? And isn’t also a little insane to prance around in your underpants on stage while lip-syncing to a song you didn’t write (pop)? And when you reduce each musical genre to its essentials, don’t they all come off as incredibly stupid?

And when it comes down to it, who actually cares? Isn’t the point of music that it makes you dance in your mother’s studio at 10 o’clock at night?

Ward is a freelance writer and aspiring documentary filmmaker based in Saskatoon. You can find her short bursts of insight and frustration at http://www.twitter.com/newsetofstrings