sourcing pop music lyrics : love is a stranger

I’ve been listening to some 60′s torch singers lately, particularly Nancy Sinatra. There’s something going on in one particular song, written for the James Bond film of the same name. It has all the icy strings, the soaring vocals of that late 60′s early 70′s ‘Bond theme’ tunes.

You Only Live Twice

You Only Live Twice or so it seems,
One life for yourself and one for your dreams.
You drift through the years and life seems tame,
Till one dream appears and love is its name.

And love is a stranger who’ll beckon you on,
Don’t think of the danger or the stranger is gone.

This dream is for you, so pay the price.
Make one dream come true, you only live twice.

(repeat all once more)

This resonates with Eurythmics’ Love Is A Stranger , strung through with chilly strings as well …

Love is a stranger in an open car
To tempt you in and drive you far away

Love is a danger of a different kind
To take you away and leave you far behind

These songs tread the dark edge of romantic obsession. They also point to the beckoning other, the stranger who appears at the edge of the scene, the observer who sees something else, who transforms the situation entirely. Artists and other creative types dance this dance with the world, I think, transforming existence with the gaze. As one friend put it in a Facebook status post, “Being creative makes you a weird little beast because everything seems so bloody interesting for some strange reason.”

The ability to imagine some ordinary object becoming something else … that’s the “danger of a different kind” that “takes you away and leaves you far behind”. I think of Merle Oppenheim’s fur-lined teacup …

… or some of the Dada sculpture movement’s vintage ‘dangerous domestic objects’ like Man Ray’s “The Gift” (produced with assistance from Eric Satie of all people, in 1921) …

And love is a stranger who’ll beckon you on,
Don’t think of the danger or the stranger is gone.

The danger here? Change of any kind, the invitation to step out of routine or the ordinary and make change in one’s own life. Conventional romance is far more comprehensible than the initiation into creative life, or ‘choosing to follow the muse’.

Last night at an artist’s talk the sculptor present discussed giving up her successful career as a NYC architect to spend her days in the physical labor of welding her artwork. The illusion of career certainty swapped for aching body, torches, smoke, the certainty of black snot when she blows her nose. The centered joy of producing an object with her body, an object that has its own language, its own relationships with viewers. What is that? Usually the kind of decision that ‘normal people’ find incomprehensible.

You only live twice …

I’ve made the incomprehensible decision twice. First I chose classical music performance as a career. Second, when life informed me that it had other things in mind than me looking at the inside of a practice room in that conservatory of music, I chose to become an artist.

Its funny, one of the members of my MFA thesis committee wrote ambiguously of my work that it was “a labor of love”. On some level, it has to be. You have to be obsessed with these ideas that take you out of yourself, the “bloody interestingness” of everything. You have to be willing to go on these journeys after having exhausted yourself with customers, or office work, or teaching, or whatever else is paying your bills …

This stranger in an open car  hands me a pile of snapshots of our “snowpocalypse” and invites me to shape a 5 minute thriller-film where the people are just realizing that the sun will never come out again. This stranger points me to images of women in 3d world countries carrying water and invites me to dream for them a life spent less in service of necessity. This stranger whispers, write those ghost stories to repair our 20th century history written with shell casings . . .

This dream is for you, so pay the price.
Make one dream come true, you only live twice.