An unusual birthday present
Having briefly introduced her on a recent weekday rich in contrasts but short on time, this is about Angelique's music. It's not her real name, the one I log, since her story, her former jobs and a new life are such she wants to keep anonymous.
Angelique chosen by one of the most intriguing and open people ever to have said "Hi" in reply to anything I've logged, but she said far more than just "hello" in a tale she thought I'd be open to sharing, which I certainly am.
Instead of her real name, the nom de plume she used lets her "hide behind a 'popular heroine' too wilful, wild and sometimes too plain dumb to be true! What you may put on your log, if you're interested, is how I feel about what you've written.
"We feel the same way about making music and making love, but your way of putting it is just not quite how I heard it, as a woman. Your words make me want to write it down because they have evoked too many memories to keep to myself."
I am vaguely aware of the fantasy Angelique she means, often depicted with full, flowing locks the like of which are rarely seen in real life. Even my pigeons might make a nest in women who seem happy spending fortunes and hours when I come across them in mixed hair salons. They emerge from under those big globular things looking more unnatural than when they went in.
The real woman behind the words is very different and her letter sent early in the week -- a response to an appalling mess before it had a last thorough rewrite and wound up where it should be on the log, on its own and behind me -- beats anything I've been sent for a long time.
Angelique may know me less well than Cathy, friend and former wife who was my choice companion at Susheela's concert two days ago, but has far more in common with her than a similar head of short light-brown hair, brown eyes and a very attractive coming of age, made to last.
They both read me almost alarming well.
Cathy found me looking "drawn", she said, but the day had begun early, taken me far out of town to freeze in my smart suit, coming home to post a quickie here and want to clean up, only to find the water was then cut off.
It was perhaps unwise to venture a few words about the "birthday story" and the sigh of relief with which I saw it to bed, followed by an agreeable observation, for me anyway, that at concerts men are almost always a smallish minority in the audience.
Now anyone who cares knows I want the best of both worlds, I don't imagine Cathy's been alone in remarking that, through music, "you do seem to have rediscovered sex again with the enthusiasm of a ten year old!"
It's true enough, provided she doesn't know more about "ten year olds" than me. I know society isn't how it used to be and need no more experts telling me early in childhood our "sex lives" start, but still!
The pertinence -- or impertinence? -- of such banter to what Angelique asked me to post is in the nature of her own intimate story about what music does to people, for to be very enamoured by that again is where I like being and this time, for keeps.
Exactly what I love to hear
I found qualities in the style as well as the content of a very long letter out of the blue, half in French and half in English, which touched me so much I phoned Angelique for a chat today before writing this.
Angelique's 37 and she's gay. She long worked in various music industry jobs and even sent me a revealing photo of herself with a very dry humour which is not for sharing but maybe says more than I did about women who are or can become music.
The mail's a well-written weave of simple fact, both a career tale told and a story of successive love affairs, with an occasional poetry about places and people extremely evocative in someone uncertain of any gift for writing. As soon as I learned more, I could simply suggest, "Why don't you do write or make music again, your skill's too fine to keep in check when you express yourself so well."
Her letter contained an obvious unasked "Should I?" She wrote knowing she's reached a point where she could say, "Like you, I feel I've done my trashing, but of what's left I'm still unsure of what I have to share, the way you expressed it once you found that, for yourself, you knew."
Angelique's way of telling me more of what musicians have given us both, first in writing and then with humour on the phone, left us completely ear to ear about a thing or two.
She's an accomplished musician herself, but on the quiet, having once chosen instead to become a part of the "industry" wanting to help others, until she felt she'd had enough. She told me much I had yet to know of what it does at its worst and why she put that part of her life behind her, to feel only then she was on track for a fulfilment that long evaded her.
On reading my "birthday suit" -- a belated one for some, given the age that suddenly did come home to me, yet apparently ear-opening for others -- the tales of her heart met such an echo in my words, after a number of entries I've begun to discover who's reading, she found her own time's come to get it "out of my system, the better to move on" though she wants to tell people by way of this place.
Flattered by such an approach to my log, which is certainly here to be shared, I thought at first to co-operate simply by publishing text and translations, before Angelique agreed that perhaps she might do well to explore her own voice, when I offered instead to help her on way as best I can.
If she's got more to say here until she does, she knows she's welcome, particularly since she's the first former "insider" to tell me more of what it is that drives increasing numbers of musicians to seek direct outlets rather than the limitations they feel the industry and expectations it raises among music fans currently allows them.
A fine ear for an 'industry' ends an inside career
Of her time in the business, she used both ways of telling: the blunt and the less so, saying in writing she
"rejoices to read words that aim to make bridges when other men make a marketplace, and some listen to nothing of the dreams they sell and care little for the fate of dreamers they have a power to destroy.
"I've seen how some steal joy, they take hope, they take so much from young flowers they claim to nourish. But they keep many a talent behind glass walls in hothouses fed with falsehoods. The farmers where I live today abuse fertiliser to force growth with no regard for the soil, so they are lost even when they have stayed, not abandoning their land long in the family. Our grandfathers cared for the land, out every day in any weather among the crops they grew and understood.
"In just decades, their business has become an industry; you fall into step with it or you do it your own way. So it often is with music, until I could tolerate no more of men whose pleasure is perverse: men who force the art in others until the roots are dried, the bloom is faded, dreams are dust, and hearts once full of hope can be so hardened by hurt there are no petals left for the streams of which you've begun to speak [...]
"If their puppet playthings dance no more to the dreams they first brought the industry I worked in, such men and equally women seek to shape them to the whims of others, so they please those who pull the strings and form fashion and taste, they find themselves discarded. I've known musicians sadder than any broken dolls since toys have no hearts to deceive.
"Strolling down to the shore, sometimes I think of those who were unable to withstand so fierce a Mistral as the sturdiest plants do here. Some become tall but twisted trees without sufficient succour, others are flattened reeds that can rise no more.
"I could pick up stones and cast them over the agitated sea where all rivers flow to watch how they sink and feel very sad for what I've seen and heard [...]."
My English reads poorly next to Angelique's native prose, but she was warned I can translate but lack that special talent of those who do it well with literature. Angelique acknowledges any bitterness expressed in those words as being only the worst of what she's known and balances it with much she finds good in an industry where little is as straightforward as it sounds.
But when she finally quit a last well-paid job abroad and returned to the far south of France and that Mistral wind Angelique's known since childhood, she didn't just "come home" because of this disillusionment with companies I won't name.
What one woman made of a 'big bang'
There was also a man and a sudden end to a deep love affair, the one she detailed the most. A man, yes, when I've told you Angelique is gay, but her story isn't mine.
Long "just a friend, a very good one," he somehow fell wildly in love with her about three years ago when she says she was getting pretty mixed-up in her private as well as professional life.
Most of her response to my own story, initially in writing with an acute insight and sensitivity regarding those concerned and the web they wove, is now hers to tell, not mine, along with other tales from a life full of passion but with a lucidity of insight born, as she had it today, mainly of hindsight.
Now she's got more to think about, given some ready encouragement. Does she really need to look back when she could put the gifts she's got and what's she's made of them into a promising future instead? What she found in me was a reflection of what's in her, even if it's mostly under her bridge as well.
Angelique, both on my log and in her new life, knows what music has given her with none of the long break I took from it when listening became hard, but the real story is what she did with music the day she experienced a life change as deep as any I've known, and shared it.
Music used as "therapy" is a banal enough subject and no big deal here, when I'd rather keep on looking and listening out beyond that; not least for the kind of woman I wrote about as a music I'd like back in a life fully to be shared once more.
In years past, I've touched on the ambiguity of blogging as sometimes a combination of "self-therapy" and sharing where it's hard, when you're at it, to be quite sure which you're doing, if not both! Indeed, there's a practising therapist on the revised blogroll, since I hold Kathryn Petro's 'Mindful Life' in high esteem.
Angelique, as Kathryn has, dug far below the surface, hence a rapid response to my disclosures about how and why I hear as inextricable the way the language of the very building blocks of any music is so closely mirrored in the language we "talk" when we make love.
The man Angelique describes developed "a complex of his own invention". She lives for music and poetic expression; he knew this, of course, but for all she aroused in him, he considered himself a "tone-deaf ignoramus, ever outdoors with a very physical job."
"B's no intellectual," she continues, "but he was often a fun, sporting and endearing companion. He's an attractive man, rarely talkative, but comfortable to be with though I couldn't meet all the need he said he felt for me. This mismatch, however, was slow to come as an obstacle between us, we didn't want to lose what we had [...]
"When the three of us [the other being Angelique's lover with whom things were no longer quite how they had been] went out one night and had some drinks, B. became very maudlin about music. He felt excluded by what P. and me were laughing about when we talked of the day we'd each just had [...]
"B. drank a lot that night and kept harking back to his ex-wife. Then he started touching me like he never did before and began to make a loud fool of himself in the bar. He knew how he was and went off to find a taxi, we'd never seen him that way. Then he staggered back inside and blew up, told us we 'wasted time talking stuff that makes no sense to me whether you're into music or not.'
"I couldn't understand why he was so aggressive and upset, we'd changed the subject, I've no idea to this day exactly what was going through his mind, but he kept repeating music's nothing to get engrossed in, we just got a private kick out of it, he didn't and 'So what's all the fuss about?' [...]"
Anyway, the women decided he was best not left alone that night and took B. back to their apartment, where he fell on to the sofa to sleep it off. Angelique and P. went to bed themselves. P. was the only one who had to work the next morning and B. was still asleep when she left.
What happened then Angelique says she's long since given up trying to figure out, having already given me her twist in the tale that consists in mutual discoveries. The letter's entertaining evidence of my assertion that when women set about describing sex, in almost any circumstances, there are few men who get it so funny and also so right.
Angelique doesn't have a view on that, she simply told it how it was and there's no need to follow her far into the physical side, but it could make for a good song! When she asked where I am with a "tough love" iMix I've occasionally mentioned, I admitted it's now about 25 songs long already. Someone at Amazon in the States, moreover, took a similar thought I came across last week, but I. M. Sanchez Prado is a "Professional broken-hearted" and into "music as therapy for heartbreak".
There you have his, Spiderman included! To each their own; when it comes to Angelique's physique and what she did with that and music, she wrote of her considerable surprise at herself that morning she roused B. with a cup of coffee and a loose night-gown.
"Are you sure you really want the world to know you found yourself so 'wet for it'?"
"Today, you could even tell the world I was hot and dripping for it, Nick! I wanted to give him the shock of his life, I scarcely knew myself, I'd never felt that way about a man before. Just don't ask me why."
Why isn't of much interest anyway since this is a story not about lust and our motives but of music, expressed any way we can when the urge takes us in its hold. Emotions are complicated enough as it is.
Angelique's feelings got on top of her and she found herself all over B., who may have known the kind of wrangle and tangle I can well understand in a man confronted with feelings he can neither suppress nor hope to resolve when someone who doesn't feel the same becomes the object of them.
That's old history now, just as for Angelique her sexual preferences are no longer as firmly fixed as she had felt before the shock they shared in love because "something just drove me!"
But once the tensions eased and lust was sated, they were both relaxed, she seized none too gently on a chance to show him his "lack of an ear for music had nothing to do with being tone-deaf". He wasn't. What B. had needed was a right way to find out.
Angelique gave me this story on reading my own since it seems to her that memorable day was one where she knew what I felt has fully retured as a part of me; but for her it was simply the other way round and in sex, she opened B. to music.
'Would you count the grains of sand...?'Now she's got a life in southern France and a still new and deepening relationship with a woman where a love of very many things is shared, she reckon what happened inside B. saw his whole view of life not just given a bit of therapy but radically changed by music.
They've stayed long-distance friends, often call each other, now "he's the music-mad one" and no longer somebody "so anti-intellectual and hostile to arty-farty people he was deaf to the language he speaks with his own body in his work and in bed."
This was a response beyond anything I expected, from somebody I didn't know. What Angelique's mail addresses at length -- she says it took hours to write while I've also spent time meditating on it between opening Tuesday's mail and phoning her today -- is her sense of that harmony we each hear beyond both sex and music.
"Pour moi, la musique est devenue l'expression parfaite d'une réalité toute autre que nous ne comprennons pas... ['For me music has become the perfect expression of quite another reality we don't understand] ... except as a profound knowledge of a truth we can't grasp though we can approach it with the senses and know it to be the nourishment of our souls," she wrote.
"Musicians who apply reason to this reality begin to lose their ears and make noise, no longer music, as with those of us who bring excess logic to bear on our understanding, when such a truth becomes no more than shattered shards of glass, a broken prism.
"Would you number the grains of sand on the beach when you might just lie on their warmth, perhaps as naked as you'd like to swim or dance in rain, and hear instead the countless voices of the sea even as it laps over your feet?
I'm delighted you have met the Seraphim, as you sometimes call her, for she's among my memories of these days I've recounted, with others who have heard these voices. Water is another way of hearing music, is it not?
I'm finding my own way here, close by the sea and at the feet of so many mountains, the spine of the land that is my home. Soon I shall decide which peak to climb next. My answers lie in music and the arms of the woman with whom I'm sharing my life."
This story I found about as musical as anyone can get, and with heartfelt thanks to a first "guest contributor" in a long time, since writing about music is just one way of talking about harmony if once you heard it so deeply you want to become just a part of it.
Teasing remarks thrown my way since I took days to express things as they've come together for me aren't taken very seriously. The way I said it will strike some as a little senseless, but I shan't pretend to have "grown out" of anything!
I merely feel disinclined in future to illustrate my conclusions on deep and like needs common to many of us with the juvenile enthusiasm that went into that entry. Angelique's own remarks about my musical-looking young women were those just of a very funny woman.
She'd so like this story shared I postpone Susheela Raman's changes since I've told you how good the concert was. The new album we didn't get very much of on the night is a great listen straight off, but there's such a mix in what she, her husband and friends have achieved, I've yet to take it all in.
Should that partner I'd like to meet, now I no longer feel it right to go on living with less than music in human shape very close at hand and heart, prove to be someone happy to explore soundscapes with me, then I'd be delighted, but that's more than I'd dream of asking.
To someone who may read this before I finish answering the mails, I'd just say I'm no longer deaf to offers of help when freely given. Losing the habit of saying "No thanks" will take a little longer to come easy. Like Angelique, I'm kind of listening out for the right "peak to climb", knowing nothing yet of her own hills and valleys, the flows of her body. Should I one day hear a chance like that during a concert, it might be the least surprising thing about her!
An invitation leads to another
Angelique is also the first to play a game I've invited of anyone and has put up a good pretence of not knowing the answer. I tease, but so did she. Requests, I have said are welcome, hence her two-fold one.
A song she said once haunted her happens to be one I listened to again just a few days before she wrote. It haunts me too when I'm in that kind of mood. The singer's Johnette Napolitano, and lyrics Angelique quoted very nearly right are part of something sad and mysterious by Andy Prieboy:
"It is complete now - two ends of time
Are neatly tied
A one-way street, she’s walking to the
End of the line
And there she meets the faces she sees in
Her heart and mind
They say -- goodbye -- tomorrow Wendy’s
Going to die"
(from 'Tomorrow, Wendy' thanks to Lyrics Freak).
What's so haunting in the band Concrete Blonde's "cover", meaning simply their version of somebody else's music and words marked by almost cinematic flashbacks, is how we're not told why Wendy's doomed, but we can hear it in the scary boom of guitar echoes that punctuate the song like death knells.
It works very well on 'Recollection' (2004).
Johnette Napolitano, band frontwoman with a spellbinding voice, was "known to introduce 'Tomorrow Wendy' as a song 'about a woman with AIDS'," the Wikipedia says.
Some day, now in mind, is a piece about women and bands who make music as a modern incarnation of centuries of folk narratives to sing brief but full life stories on an album as varied in mood and content as 'Recollection'.
Very much ado about nothing
Angelique closed her mail with the kind of request I'm delighted to receive, as long as I'm careful. If I've already got the music or it's on my someday list -- one you're welcome to extend -- I'll get to what you want. As of yesterday, the latest Fiona Apple is for soon, and you'll get a write-up of 'Witching Hour' by Ladytron, eventually 'The Beekeeper' by Tori Amos, and even indeed 'Peddling Dreams' from Maria McKee.
Patience, though, because some of these I'm discovering for the first time myself, inspired by tip-offs, and obviously I won't rush people who come new to my own ears any more.
If people think I made more fuss than needed about the business of being one side of 50 and then the other, well ... so do I now. I'm looking forward to the unfolding of the rest of my life and still feel the gratitude I've expressed to your varied responses.
When another next decade's through, who knows where any of us will be, but for me, that one will be an affair to celebrate less openly. I'll still be writing about music, that's for sure, ever closer to those who make it, and boring women with reminders zeroes are nothing to fear.
Angelique is one of several, including some men, whose way with water flows far too deep for thought; she's a surprise indeed, but I hope that in taking up such an opportunity to share what she's come to know about when to let go and grow, I've managed to convey something of the easy calm she's found in so doing.
While grubby fingernails are not a good idea, scribbling notes in the dark as again I did at Thursday's concert can get dirty too if your pen's leaking, but at least they made sense when I tried to read them afterwards! I'm bidding again to say something here I don't think I can.
But enough of looking back.
The laughter and poise in Angeligue's voice linger with me tonight: she's clearly through with seeking answers we shan't find in languages that aren't shaped for them when we have others that are.
"Music," she says, "has always been my way of hearing all the rest.
"It's no recipe for youth, it's always landed me back on my feet. You can't feel old when you're anywhere near it, was that what you were saying?"
Perhaps it mostly was.
If you've any hope of me showing her picture, forget it; some jokes are best kept to ourselves.
I do gabble on, but my liking for people with Angelique's kind of clarity who enjoy different ways of getting through to the rest of us grows deeper every day.
4:34:51 AM 
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