The Day
To celebrate the relase of The Day (the single), I’ve translated a piece I’ve written about it to my song-blog, Dissonata. Portuguese-friendly readers may read the lengthier original there.
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Like most of my other songs, “The Day” is born out of a melodic pattern that comes to me in some sort of stimulated chance. I was walking down the streets of Porto Alegre, where I was spending a week covering a film festival last November, thinking about the recording I was planning to start once I got back home. As my obsession towards structure pushed me through a mental journey through all the songs that I had any desire to record at the time, I realized there were none that could properly open the album (an album that, eventually, shrank to be an ep). Almost immediately after such realization, I start imagining what would be a good way to start the record, and the song slowly starts to take shape in my head. I walk about 15 minutes to the hotel, and the song is finished by the time I get to my room. On the next day, I write the lyrics and do a first rough recording of the song – singing the words and the notes that’d go with them – so that it wouldn’t lose its way somewhere between Porto Alegre and Rio. I probably hadn’t written any song with such immediacy in at least five or six years.
All of that is the background story – the type of privileged information that can’t do more than confirm impressions that already existed well enough by themselves, and would be equally as powerful if remained unconfirmed. Melodically, “The Day” leads its way to the last line of the chorus of “Mr. Tamborine Man” (where there was the “jingle jangle morning”, now there’s “he’s been trying not to see her”). Such proximity made me take “The Day” to the extreme opposite of Bob Dylan’s song, replacing boredom with an ongoing daily excitation – which makes the song necessarily short, so that it fades while it’s still sparkling. To keep Dylan good company, I come up with the bass line borrowing off Bruce Springsteen’s horn section in “Old Dan Tucker”, and echo some of Tom Petty’s “free fallin’s”. Like documentary, pop songwriting is also fed by its relationship with its own tradition: three generations of singer/songwriters react to each other in one song.
But “The Day” is, also and mainly, a sequence of repetitions – a feeling brought with tongue in cheek to the song’s singular title. Said melodic repetitions – like one single chorus that comes and goes throughout the song – is what determines the lyrics to the music. The song theme is imposed by the melodic structure, where a guy that sees the same girl walking past him every day serves as a translation of how each unique verse inevitably ends up in the same chorus. That’s also what motivates the growing number of vocal tracks in the recording – at first, only two; but they multiply with each new verse, allowing wandering melodies to show up at certain parts (like the repetition of “he’s been trying not to see her” at 1:20), as if the act of thinking gave itself the right to leave its path and check out other possible deviations.
This structural arrangement is more spiral than circular: the narrative curve interferes in the meaning of each specific point of the song so that, every time we come back to a certain part, it’s only recognizable enough, but never the same. That’s the idea that imposes subtle melodic deformations to each repetition, and that’s expressed in the song’s motto: he’s been trying not to see her, so he can see her again (a sentence that also keeps changing along the way). One must try not to see one thing, so that he/she can experience it again as if for the first time; so that there’s still a chance to be stunned and amazed every day by the effects of the same object, the same path – which, in the end, is the path of amazement itself. The object that amazes is not as important here as amazement itself. This path – always the same (‘cause it takes you from A to B), but always different (‘cause you never know what you’ll find between A and B) is the actual theme of the song
Fábio Andrade
