The new Marillion album 'Somewhere Else' was released at the start of this month. It may sound rather odd, just some band and a new album, kind of exciting, but not earth-shattering.
Then again it is Marillion, and after thirteen years of following them around the world they have become a bit more to me than just a band, and the new album release more than just a good excuse to go down into town. (Not that you can really ever buy their album down at HMV, but you get the drift)
With sometimes years between albums, whenever one comes out it is rather momentous, as I know, that no matter what, it will inevitably become part of the fabric of the rest of my life, and I will never quite look at things the same way again.
I had expected the album to be different. Last year when I first left my husband Bryan, I had this whole massive 'hurrah I'm free look at the sparkly world' type high, and I knew that to some extent the lead singer h was going through a similar thing, I was really looking forward to the album sound-tracking my new life, in the same way all the other albums have.
The the day I got the album I had been at my sisters, and her friend who she lives with put it on my i-pod for me. My beautiful sister is very unhappy at the moment, for reasons I won't go into here, but I really understood how she felt to a large extent. It reminded me of things I try and forget about Bryan and all the very real love connected to him.
....anyway I listened to the album on the train, which was not the greatest place as there was alot of surrounding noise but my initial reaction was one of horror.
All the songs sounded really samey, alot of them were messy, the vocals were terrible and the lyrics repetitive and shit. I think my precise description at the time was 'It sounds like a bad Radiohead album, after the highs of Ok Computer when they just descended into whining over noise so over-experimental it couldn't be called music'
However I did not utterly despair, as I often hate the new Marillion album, and usually have to listen to it some number of times before I 'get it'. I don't know what that says about them as a band, that I have to 'brainwash' myself into loving something, or that their music is just complex and takes time to understand...being utterly biased I shall of course plumb for the latter explanation.
Determined to 'brainwash' myself, and give the album a fair chance I listened to it again later that night as I did my physio, on headphones in a quiet dark room - there are really two ideal places to hear Marillion, this being one, the other being in the front row of their gigs whilst jumping and singing my heart out!
As I sat there listening carefully to the words and all the many intricate layers of sound, along with all the memories of the day in my mind, along with all the other older memories I had thought of, along with on-running concerns I have about my head and heart and the way the work the whole point of the album hit me, and it was all I could do to not cry.
I try endlessly to explain Marillion and why I am so obsessive about them, and yet I constantly fail to articulate it all and just sound like a crazy loon!
This band is about more than music, it's about more than countless adventures around the world and all the friends from the front row so precious they are like family, this music sounds like how I feel, really deep down inside my heart, and inside my soul.
It manages to encompass so many tangled threads of memory and emotion, and draw them together into a single coherent whole, giving a richness and level of depth and colour that I just can't seem to come up with on my own in my head. It doesn't solve anything I suppose but just the recognition that it's there and that's how I feel somehow makes it all easier to deal with.
I shall deal with what I see to be the two threads of the album separately...
Firstly - We Should ALL be good and save the planet!
This is something I know the band, particularly h, are passionate about and was expecting some sort of statement about it all. The fact they are all pretty much in their fifties and looking at the legacy they are leaving to their children in terms of the planet must be something that is on their minds to some degree.
This also couples with the general media shift at the moment, I don't watch much TV or read the newspapers either, but yet I have noticed of late there has been a significant push to change the world and start making some actual changes to the way we do stuff, to make our societies more sustainable.
I am under few positive illusions as to why this is. It looks good for business and political parties and for the most part I have little hope that it will last or that the 'changes' being made are little more than lip-service to the true depth of the problem, however I would rather this than nothing.
The constant tangle of despair of what we have done to the world, and how we are going to fix it, and all the falseness surrounding the issue, is, I feel, captured. Marillion know they have a large and utterly adoring fan-base, I can very easily see how they feel it is important to use that power of voice to try and achieve something more constructive than getting their album in the top 10 and for that I have the deepest respect for them.
It may have all been said before, it may be cheesy, but SO what??!! Good on them for standing up and saying it anyway, because it needs to be said.
I think the best quote on the matter from the album would have to be 'Give me a smile, hold out your hand, I don't want your money, I don't want your land. I want you to wake up and do something strange, I want you to wake up and feel someone else's pain'
What an utterly fantastic an idea, should be the band aid theme-tune!!
Secondly - How the hell you get over a marriage and it's collapse.
It is important to note at the start the way the two themes intertwine, as they both involve a lot of looking at the world, and the state of it, in horror. Looking at the macro-cosom and the micro-cosom I guess.
I am probably being terribly naive, and doing the typical 'no one else could possibly be hurting as much as me' type reaction, but I do genuinely think that getting over a marriage is a very hard thing to do.
To a very large extent I'm fine, and that it is probably easier for me than for Bryan as I was the one who chose to leave. I don't want him back, and I'm not angry at him. I'm probably one of the most unusual ex-partners ever in that I still love him and care about him very much, and I want nothing more than for him to be utterly happy in everything he does, and would love to see him with some new girlie who made him really happy.
However all that said there is a part of me that will always feel sad about the fact it didn't work out. Though I'm happier now, though I know that it was not going to work and that we were just destroying each other, there was ALOT of love there. I did NOT take my marriage vows lightly, and I broke them even less lightly. I swore to something, and I bound my entire being to that with white gold and love, and yet when it came to it I couldn't hold to it. Forever I will be disappointed in myself for that utter failure of myself.
Not long after I left Bryan I wrote him a letter. I wrote it with the intent that I would keep in a box for a month, and then if I still felt the same I would send it to him. I never actually did as it seemed like a bad idea as it would probably have just upset him, and it seemed like something that would ease my own conscious more than it would do anything for him. But in there I said that I doubted I would ever love anyone again, or words to that effect.
I often do this, I write things, and then it's only in retrospect I realise quite how true they actually are.
A big part of being able to leave Bryan, and get over it all hinged on me being a single entity and the strength I found in being on my own. I didn't actually want a boyfriend, in alot of ways I am still not convinced I'm at the point where I do want one, despite actually having one, and not wanting to be without him, if that makes any sense at all!
It is very difficult.
I'm not a pretentious person who likes to have barriers and walls and not get over things, or not let people in. I am hopelessly naive and childish and I believe in poetic love, and think that people should love, and that you should never deny that.
I firmly believe you should retain innocence and not get jaded by the bad things that happen, and that you should still uphold the original pure ideal you had when you were little, long before you hit the real world.
But now I'm here, now I'm living it, it is harder said than done, and that letter comes back to haunt me.
I cannot describe how it felt to marry another person adequately enough to then cover what it means to have broken that. I stood in that room and I swore it, I have never meant anything more in my whole life, and if for some obscure reason I had to do it all again tomorrow in order to make the fact I took the original vow valid I would without hesitation.
I really meant it, I wanted that life with Bryan, in sickness, health, poorness, wealth, till death do us part. To this day I just find it so heart-breakingly sad that neither of us could be enough to each other to hold to such a high ideal. I have moved on now, I live in a different world in a different life, but it doesn't detract in anyway that not very long at all ago I swore my soul to something else entirely.
So inevitably as a result I find it quite hard to believe in love now irrelevant of how real and how deep it feels, because part of me always says 'well yes but you said that last time Toria'. It all jars rather unpleasantly with my ideals.
I don't like the way I doubt myself, and the way I feel about Luke, it makes me feel very sad and horribly guilty. I know it is terribly silly, I love Luke, I love him in an utterly different way to Bryan. I know how special Luke is, and in many ways I feel closer to him, and more like a wife to him than I ever did to Bryan.
Luke and I are meant to be together, we have been before in another time and space before the world began, it may sound silly, and it may well be my over active imagination but I honestly believe that is the case and that for whatever reason I have found him again. When we first started seeing each other I cried so much with the immense relief that I had found him again. Like my little soul had been missing him for all the wide eons of time since I last was with him.
It is the reason I refuse to let Luke go, despite the fact that I'm probably not quite ready for him. I refuse to let what has happened to get in the way of my life now, I don't pretend it doesn't affect it, but I will not let it change the way I behave and over-rule what I want in the here and now.
I want Luke more than anything I love him more than I can express and he makes me incredibly happy and gives me more support and love than I think anyone ever has before in my life.
But forever?
I have come to the conclusion that until I can be more sensible I shall live with the attitude that forever is as long as this life lasts. It isn't perfect, I wish I had more faith in myself and love, but I realise it is not something I can force, and that it is something that will come back to me in time because I'm the sort of person that believes in it enough to make it happen.
....so circling to the point... this is what Somewhere Else sounds like, this hopeless tangled mess of love and guilt and disappointment and lost faith that you are trying to regain, this is what this album FEELS like.
To me the questionable chords and vocals, repetitive lyrics and themes echo it all, that is just what it is like inside my head, and inside my heart. I want it to be something better, I want it all to be neater, but that just isn't how it is, this is the core-truth of it all, and for that sole reason this album has become one of my very favourites.
It is very easy for me to over-identify with the protagonist of the album, and assume it is all h and the rest of the band just saying what they feel about themselves and their lives poetically, and to a large extent I think what makes Marillion so fantastic is that there isn't really a protagonist at all.
It is just honest, they serve up 'this is my life, this is how it feels' and all around the world a big nutty bunch of us have gone 'yeah holy-crap I feel just like that too!' and despite sounding very little like any other of their albums, once again the fantastic thing that makes Marillion what they are has shone through.
An ending... I need to come up with one of those before you die of horrid boredom, if you haven't already...I shall do the cheesy thing, and do the Somewhere Else ending.. you want my album review in short, this is it in a single quote...
'What I have here in my hand
Is like knowing but deeper
It’s why I am here
It’s why I am here'
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