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Beautiful piece about a beautiful song; this guy gets it! 🙂
http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/music_blog/2011/02/one-song-lucinda-williams-copenhagen.html
One song: Lucinda Williams’ “Copenhagen”
February 23, 2011 | 9:42 amIt’s a song about wonder, about loss, about heartbreak — about a moment. But Lucinda Williams can tell the story of “Copenhagen,” a song from her return-to-form new album, “Blessed,” which comes out March 1 on Lost Highway, better than anyone, which she does in a series of perfectly crafted lines.
She hears bad news while standing outside in Copenhagen. It’s snowing hard, and the snowflakes seem to attack her, “covering my face in fine powdery mist and mixing in with my tears,” she sings in that heartbreakingly graceful voice, “and I’m 57 but I could be 7 years old ’cause I will never be able to comprehend the expansiveness of what I’ve just learned.”
It’s here that the chorus comes in, and the listener begins to understand: This is a death, and she’s just hearing of it, and attempting to capture one of those vivid moments that makes the world glow. Williams does her best to explain the expansiveness: “You have disappeared/You have been released/You are flecks of light/You are missed.” Or is it mist?
For Williams die-hards, “Copenhagen” is one of those gentle, mournful songs that the L.A.-based songwriter excels at, songs about lost souls living just outside the edges of redemption, struggling to live right but ultimately failing, as in “Little Angel, Little Brother” and “Drunken Angel.” On “Copenhagen,” as on much of “Blessed,” she connects words and ideas together delicately and with great precision, like she’s building a rose petal by petal, leaf by leaf. The album comes out March 1 on Lost Highway Records.
—Randall Roberts
Photo: Lucinda Williams performing at the Wiltern in 2008. Credit. Lawrence K. Ho / Los Angeles Times
Extremely well-crafted words about an extremely well-crafted song – one that is my favorite (so far!) from Blessed…
Thanks for sharing your find, WW…
Tom
by TOverby on Wed Feb 23, 2011 7:43 pm
The lyric that he wonders about is mist.
It’s brilliant, though, because either word fits. Do we have any English professors out there who can tell us if there is a name for this ingenious poetic device? 😉
songs about lost souls living just outside the edges of redemption, struggling to live right but ultimately failing
i really don’t get this feeling from copenhagen.
Well you’re right -that is rock critic speak for over analyzation. It’s a true story put beautifully in a song. Trying to put this the right way without sounding… well I don’t know what the word is -but I was there and i got the email from a friend at Lost Highway and delivered the news to her -much more could be said but 15 months later the way she pulled the details so accurately from what happened blows me away to this day. This was the first song that she wrote/ brought to me when the Kitchen Tapes started happening. Just incredible perception and masterful writing-all biases aside. It blew my mind the details she chose from that night.
And being there that night I have to say that mist is the perfect choice-but I undestand why the more literal might appeal. But it was in the mist, she chooses those words very carefully.tom, thanks for that insight, really. i like reading those.
and it’s just my opinion, but i don’t think copenhagen is centered on details, and there’re not many of them. the way she describes the city, the awful weather, does not go into detail. everybody can understand and expect such descriptions (the sky is gray, the snow is falling), but the way she melts herself into the snow, the sky, the lovely language, the handshakes, that builds up to amazing poetry, she seems like levitating through the streets, the voices, the people. so, thundering news stroke her and that’s it for the detailing, then she starts comparing the news to a snowball shattering her face, and the poetry kicks in. “you’re flecks of light/ you’re mist”, i think stuff like this is more powerful than carefully chosen details from that night, they’re reflections about that night. i love it that she pulled everything together, and if you say that the details are right 15 months later i’ll believe you, but those who weren’t there can just be grateful for such a rich song coming from so little (‘little’ as in modest and just a few, not as in opposed to ‘big’), the sky, the snow, the news. the chorus couldn’t be dreamier, the frailness of responding to an unexpected event is beautifully rendered esp. when lucinda confesses that she grasps mortality just as faintly as a 7-year-old. the nicest details of the song, for me, are the ones given to reverie.
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