A Walk Across the Rooftops

Am taking a break from failing to get anything written. Listening to The Blue Nile while watching the night turn gradually into the morning. Songs of bittersweet love amidst "The neon and the cigarettes/ Rented rooms and rented cars/ The crowded streets, the empty bars." Paul Buchanan is far from the best vocalist in the world, but his voice carries a certain weariness tempered by optimism that fits these songs and these words so perfectly. It is the voice of someone who has had the shit kicked out of him repeatedly by love and his smoke-choked, neon-lit city, but who will never stop wandering through and appreciating both. I listen, close my eyes and imagine Makati through a rain-speckled windshield, sidewalks and lampposts, people in late-night convenience stores, car headlights like fireflies. On certain nights, in certain states of mind, you are unbothered by the sleaze and the squalor, don't mind so much how so many things in the city and in your life are made of slapdash decisions and regrets and other junk. Your heart is heedless but not ignorant, it fills with an informed yet unflinching foolishness. A quiet happiness and a quiet sadness intermingle, as the strains of distant horns and a gentle mechanical heartbeat and Buchanan's wavering croon see you through the night.


PS. Happy discovery department: while looking for links to spruce up this blog entry with, learned that The Blue Nile are releasing their first new album in eight years. If they ever release it here, Kristine (tell me which label people to threaten with defenestration to ensure that they do), I call dibs on the review. :)