Watership Down
Pingvinovo Potpalubje - Varadzin
I’m glad we’ve reached a point that I know that you’re on board this weirdly shaped jaunty little train, and so I can play you something like the song below and you’ll trust me even though I can’t pronounce the band’s name and couldn’t tell you much about them and I’m fairly certain 99% of you reading this couldn’t either. It’s from one of those late night stumbles down into the endless warren of rabbits past and gone, and I’ve been saving it for an occasion like today, which is a Friday in Spring, in a bizarre, constantly morphing blob of a year.
The live version here is more interesting than the studio version, which is a slower tempo, and feels overloaded and uncertain, like they were overcompensating the limitless width of possibility the studio provides. It’s a shame they didn’t keep it spare like this live version, with it’s much better, more prominent bass line. Here, they show their command; they are urgent yet controlled. The song’s lyrics are a love letter to the Croatian city, Varadzin, which according to the city tourism board’s website is “the city of baroque, young people, music, flowers and bicycles”, but even without that context, the romance of nostalgia is apparent.
SERMONS! is often about nostalgia, although I’ve never intended it to be. Nostalgia walks with solitude, and I can’t deny that these days they often rest together at my door.
I was recently reading a book about the making of Dazed and Confused * and in it, director Linklater laments that many viewers misread the film, which wasn’t necessarily in service to some blind nostalgia for halcyon days; because whatever you’re pining for was never what really was. I wish there existed a better singular word in the English language to stuff all the complex emotions of nostalgia within.
The Portuguese suadade as I understand it feels closer to what SERMONS! often seems to me to be, particularly here in this song: the melancholy (though not always) nostalgia for moments that may never have actually existed. With the bass line during the chorus, I swoon for loves I’ve never had: for people, for places, for moments that in my heart feel so right and warm, and leave me so lonely.
*Maerz, Melissa, Alright Alight Alright: The Oral History of Richard Linklater’s Dazed and Confused, Harper, 2020.
Like what what’s going on here? Let’s talk!
Not into this song? Stick around for the next one, it may be what you didn’t know you needed! Remember, there are only two genres of music here at SERMONS!: good and bad, and I have too much to do to waste time on bad music.