Somapolis: The City Speaks - Episode 8
The eighth episode of the audio dramas we've created to accompany the songs on our last album, Somapolis; this one a portrait of the artist as a heartbroken young man.
Somapolis, Sweet Billy Pilgrim's sixth album, could be a musical map of an imagined city or an X-ray of the chambers and corridors of a human heart, or possibly both at the same time. As we finished making the record, we realised that we weren't ready to say goodbye to the inhabitants of Somapolis just yet, so I wrote some monologues that might gently unfold the inner lives of those criminals, lovers and avenging angels into a broader emotional map, revealing where their stories came from; how all those stories intersect, and the shapes into which the city bends them.
A mother imagines a still-born daughter's life in reverse; a man runs for his life, chased by armed gangsters; a priest remembers a love and mourns a faith, both lost to time; a woman plots the perfect revenge; a couple bicker in their car before one last drug deal; a jazz musician improvises a new shape for his own madness; with all of this bookended by the Observers - Somapolis' own guardian angels - as they record all that they've seen and heard over the course of one neon-bleached night.
These performances are probably best enjoyed with some knowledge of the songs from Somapolis, but hopefully they stand alone too. They might even lead you back to the album that inspired them: it's not for me to tell you how to listen.
We'll be releasing these recordings in order, once every couple of weeks. We can remind you of this if you'd like to sign up for our mailing list.
We hope you enjoy spending some extended time in Somapolis and we thank our talented friends for helping us become architects and town planners, as well as songwriters.
Episode 8: The Night Watch (what becomes of the broken hearted)
Directed by Barnaby Kay
Written by Tim Elsenburg
Music by Sweet Billy Pilgrim
Production and editing by Tim Elsenburg and Jana Carpenter
Reader: Justin Salinger
Dear you,
As I write this you’ll probably be climbing out of a taxi and wheeling your suitcase through the departures lounge, past that kiosk with the fresh pretzels and the little book exchange. I always liked that idea until I swapped my Brian Patten love poems for that Dan Brown book by mistake and experienced a whole new kind of heartbreak. My only comfort is the thought that someone else, waiting for a delayed flight, might have finished their Dan Brown book, wandered off for a pretzel, and is - as I write - weeping uncontrollably over some Brian Patten love poetry.
I hope it’s not raining like it is here. I hope you’re OK.
I read your letter, and I understand you wanting to leave; I’m not great boyfriend material: distant, then needy; lacking self-confidence, but weirdly condescending; unable to boil an egg but possessed of an encyclopaedic knowledge of punk rock drummers. It must drive you nuts. But I thought we’d moved through our tentative Clash-with-Terry-Chimes tryout period and on to our Melvins-with-two-drummers imperial phase. I’m (half) kidding.
I’ve sensed the drift over the last few weeks. Maybe since your architectural tour of Florence with your sister-in-law, last month. And your nose always seems to be buried in that ancient copy of Thoreau whenever I want to talk. You say that you don’t know where you belong anymore, but I have the feeling that running away won’t help you figure that out.
Stayed late at the studio today, prepping a canvas. Didn’t want to go back to an empty flat. On the way home, the lights blinked out in the carriage, leaving only the yellow-white brushstroke of passing street lights and a fizzing aspirin moon to pull faces out of the shadows. I framed the carriage, after Rembrandt, briefly forgetting that I wouldn’t be able to tell you about my clever game when I got home, so perhaps I’ll do it here.
Two figures stand in the aisle by a window, foregrounded by the light: a breathless forty-ish guy with torn, filthy joggers, an unkempt beard and a red stain like a bloody sash across his training top, eyes lost beneath a hood pulled up over his bowed head; and an African woman in an ivory boubou dress and matching headwrap, staring vacantly over high cheekbones, registering nothing beyond her own distraction.
My eyes are drawn further back, to a red-haired little girl on their right, prim and pale beneath an iPad halo, and the barest outline of an anxious terrier to their left, unable to settle on its haunches or stand on four skittering legs for fear of being trampled as my subjects shuffle into their final pose following the next station announcement. The man with the cowboy hat and the bongos on their far left looks straight at me, because of course he does.
Jesus, who else is going to put up with my bullshit !? Come back to me, baby. We can leave this place together. I can paint anywhere. We could find a tiny cottage in the country and get one of those wire-haired hunting dogs that could bring down a pony. Or move to Las Vegas, bribe an Elvis to marry us out-of-hours, and raise kids who can field-strip and reassemble an AR-15 in under three minutes. I’ll buy you that trumpet you’ve always wanted to learn. Whatever we do, let’s do it together.
I keep going back to that Rembrandt self-portrait from 1659; his fifty-three years, any number of peerless masterpieces, a steady stream of devoted students, three dead children, one dead wife, and a house lost to bankruptcy all held in those oils layered thick on the canvas. Along with the flesh tones there are unlikely greens and greys, stippled and rough as if applied over coarse sandpaper, and streaked with pure whites and blacks into a sickly paste around the nose and eyes. If it reminds me of anything he’s painted, it’s probably the ‘Slaughtered Ox’ from 1655. The brushstrokes feel reckless, tiny slashes across the canvas and I wonder if there was a moment of shock when he stood back and looked at the finished piece for the first time.
I looked at the face in the bathroom mirror this morning and saw the five year old boy terrified before his first day at school; the fourteen year old boy wincing at the brace that would rub the inside of his mouth raw after a drunken night of first kisses; the twenty one year old man tensing his jaw muscles before sneaking out of an unfamiliar bedroom in the early hours. Finally, I saw the eyes of the forty-two year old idiot who let you slip away.
I feel like all I’ve ever paid attention to are the details; that I’ve always been too scared to look at the whole canvas. But where do I stand to do that ? Six feet away ? Or sixty ? Without you, I’m sixty-two miles high, straight up; satellites are circling me and the air is boiling in my lungs. It’s my fault. I turned you into an anchor when you were the whole sea, and I’m sorry baby. I’m so sorry.
Here’s the original song from Somapolis:
Wow, so beautiful, but so sad...
“I turned you into an anchor when you were the whole sea”. Just beautiful. And guilty as charged.