Song 5: Race Horses – Voyage To St Louiscious
So astonishing is the confessional that makes up the second half of Voyage to St Louiscious that it could be set to the tune of the Birdie Song and still have you on your knees. In fact, it nearly is – a five-note ascending scale sung 32 times in succession has no right to be arresting, but in Meilyr Jones’ shivering hands it is, his delivery and lyrics combining to make the most unexpectedly piercing song of 2010.
The unexpectedness lies in the scene setting: Louiscious’s opening section is a spritely mariachi stomp whose tempo never permits a sense of introspection or lament, despite the themes of lost love. While the lyrical clues are there early – “The night we spent listening to Clifford T Ward, we found it quite funny but it’s you that I adored” is laced perfectly with regret – the mood and vocal delivery is all show-must-go-on resilience rather than anything more profound; indeed, the follow-up line, “those days are dead, look at us now, lost and alone!” is sung with almost a music-hall flippancy, despite its bleakness.
But then the song slackens, discards its flamboyance and begins the most eloquent treatise on heartbreak you’ll hear all year. Jones talks of his brain “rife with memories” – a horribly evocative image. He poses three consecutive questions with the ever-increasing panic of an exasperated man scrabbling to make sense of the unfamiliar – “Do you cry for me? Or have you moved along? Why must we move along? We are not in a queue!” It’s slightly manic, slightly nonsensical, and so believable. And all that’s before Jones suggests becoming a loved one’s tear in order to spend a night on their pillow, a concept almost Hemmingway-esque in how many gorgeously heartbroken ideas are bound up in one concise expression.
As he finishes his monologue, the band strike up once more and the stoicism and stiff upper lip seems to return. But in those two minutes of blood-letting – eloquent, articulate and admirably blunt – sadness and loneliness has seldom sounded so stunning.
