Lyrical

I first heard James Blunt's “You're Beautiful” on an episode of Smallville, during the 4,737th soulful conversation in the barn between Tom Welling and Kristen Kreuk. Needless to say, the circumstances, combined with the falsetto repetitious chorus, did little to impress me. Yet two days ago, I defended the song to a friend based solely on lyrics. He scoffed, citing the example of Bob Dylan as a skilled lyricist and terrible singer. He argued that music should SOUND good, and the words shouldn't matter.

I think I've shared his philosophy at times. Plenty of times when feeling depressed or angry or unmotivated in my youth, bands like Nirvana, White Zombie and Korn offered a remedy. I liked the driving beat and heavily distorted electric guitar, and it wasn't all that important to know what the words were. When I was in a serious relationship, my tastes shifted and I found myself in love and loving everything from Jewel to Dave Matthews to Sarah McLachlan, with occasional dips into Chumbawamba. My ex-girlfriend can be credited(blamed?) for this shift in taste, as she'd often give me messages like my ”love [was] better than ice cream” in the form of mix tapes. And of course my favorite band Pearl Jam offered the perfect range of songs for any mood, whether I wanted driving, angry and incomprehensible, or bittersweet, haunting and beautiful.

Blunt's song comes on the radio often enough during my commute that I've started tuning in to his high pitched mournful cries and distinguishing what he's singing about. Once I had the story, a tale of a man who catches a fleeting glimpse of a woman on the subway and makes a brief connection before she leaves forever with another man, I was hooked. It's powerfully romantic, and I've always been drawn to songs of angst and longing. In college, I'd sometimes immerse myself in ”Something I can Never Have” by Nine Inch Nails whenever I caught a bad case of unrequited love. The man in “You're Beautiful” is so moved by this woman he only saw for a moment, will never forget, and will probably never see again, that he writes a song.

Of course, romance aside, there is the obvious issue of infatuation, and basing attraction solely on the physical. I've always struggled with this aspect myself, both in how I perceive women and how I perceive myself. For various reasons, mostly for the jokes, a lot of old photos of myself have surfaced from various college buddies this week. I was always shy and self-conscious about my appearance, and in college knew with certainty that at 165 pounds I was gross and overweight to the opposite sex. Looking at those photos now at a rounder 198 pounds a decade later, I'm dangerously close to the sin of egotism in thinking how GOOD I looked back then. Granted, I had reached 212 a month ago before I recognized that I had a problem and set about correcting it, but I still have a long way to go. I doubt I'll ever look as good as I did in college, and I didn't even know I looked good at the time. But therein lies the problem of “love at first sight” and basing attraction on appearance. We all get older, and there's only so much we can do to retain how we look. Physical change is inevitable, which means I should work harder to relax my own “standards”.

What is nice about the song beyond the romantic painting of a love that will never be, is the artistic aspect. In Elizabethtown, Orlando Bloom's character describes himself as a collector of “last looks”, the expressions people display when they believe they'll never see him again. Like the protagonist in Blunt's song, I've collected dozens of beautiful faces over the years. Memory is perhaps the greatest power we possess as human beings, and possibly the one justification for initial physical attraction. When we fall in love, marry, and grow old with someone, no matter what changes on the outside we'll always retain the mental picture of what we looked like when we first met, and that's truly beautiful.