Monday, August 31, 2009

The bearable lightness of being



famouspeoplesearch.com
Have you ever heard the phrase “Thank You” in the most soothing and soulful way?

Most of us must have—if we have listened to one such phrase in Dido’s song years ago. With “Thank You” and her other anthems that hit the hearts and souls of listeners the world over [selling millions of copies of albums], Dido [Armstrong] has become the listener’s confidante, but only because she has become everyone’s spokesperson of their truths and lives. 

In her two albums “No Angel” [1999] and “Life for Rent” [2002], the thirty-something British artist—in collaboration with his brother Rollo—has created masterpieces for life that can inspire the soul to go on with life.

Leading the first collection released in 1999 and onwards [internationally], “Thank You” catapulted Dido to fame. Before Eminem even did a “Stan” cover for this cut, the ballad has virtually sunk in the sensibility of the modern man who is living in an anxious age, full of worries and concerns except the salvation of his own soul. “Thank You” also highlights how love can—in a fresh way—uplift the rather dissipating lives we live today—dragged in the hustle and bustle, or worries of the day. “Pushed the door I’m home at last, and I’m soaking through and through/ you handed me the towel, and all I see is you…” Love—the feeling of being someone special to a person can always strike a chord in the listener’s soul. “Even if the house falls down now, I wouldn’t have a clue—because you’re near me.”

A choice cut used for the Roswell [alien TV series] soundtrack, “Here with Me” may send you to sleep so you can dream of your lover beside you, breathing gently, like a beautiful creature, like an angel. The song starts out well slowly, drives into a surging melody then brings you to rapture back and forth—making you mourn or rejoice in the absence of a loved one. “I won’t sleep, I can’t breathe until you’re resting here with me” tells us that the persona might be very attached to their loved one. “Don’t wanna call my friends, for they might wake me from this dream.” The infatuated persona relishes, or takes delight in the presence—or “being there” of her lover or beloved. The song clarifies a very sensitive human attitude—love and affectation has never been so intimate and personal in this lonely world than in the world created by Dido.

Starting like a hum, as if the water flows over the land—on and on towards the house where you are lying after someone leaves you—”My Lover’s Gone” is a fishing-and-drowning theme. This elegiac piece sends you to grieve and cry over someone whose leaving does not bother you much except that it makes you think why they’re not coming back. The song makes you see yourself as the one who wronged the other—the lover who did not love, the self-centered beloved. “His boots’ no longer by my door, he left at dawn. No earthly ships can ever bring him home again.” Indeed how can the departed dead ever go back or return—except in memory.

“No Angel” reads like a misnomer or ironic for this album because its cuts contain messages and good news for the exhausted soul that wants release and refuge from the busy world with all its multifarious concerns.

An intimate follow-up to the first, “Life for Rent”contains an array of more soulful pieces that tug at the listener’s heart, makes him reminisce a wonderful past, and cradles him back to look at the present with cool, unruffled countenance, so he can look beyond with cooler anticipation.

In “Life for Rent,” an anthem that starts out slowly as waves splashing on the shore, the persona laments life’s transitory nature. “If my life is for rent, and I don’t learn to buy,” While she apologizes that she is not in love, she realizes that “I deserve nothing more than I get”—for nothing “I have is truly mine.” Life is said to have been borrowed, and the best thing to do is to invest with it. If anyone doesn’t take risks with what he’s been rented out, he has not at all deserved it in the first place. This cut calls to mind one poem titled “The Cynic”—which reads—“Don’t look, you might see, don’t run, you might stumble, don’t live, you might die.” Life is about taking risks—and to do so is to live to the fullest.

“Sand in My Shoes” chronicles the plight of the city dweller torn between her work and her longing to go to a rendezvous where she can unwind or un-mind the person whom she cares for. While the video shows irony in that the man and woman delight in each other’s company, the lyrics say otherwise—because it speaks of how relationships can be trivialized nowadays. The man must have left the woman that the singer says “I still got sand in my shoes, and I can’t shake the thought of you—I should go home forget you—I know we’ve said goodbye—I wanna see you again.”

Like most of Dido’s personae in other sensible pieces, the voice here sounds very dependent on the presence of a lover. There is much truth in this portrayed reality—because as they say, the lover and the beloved love differently—there is always someone who loves more, as in the case of this persona who always seems to value more the one whom he/she loves. The reality of love—and the failure one gets out of it—has never been so sweet, acceptable, and bearable—as in these love anthems by Dido. Her soulful voice chants away the auras of skewed relationships in all its dregs—as if it’s bearable, very light, very trivial.

In all these incantations of the heart, we cannot help but be reminded of the cliché adage that reads—”Faith makes all things possible/Love makes all things easy.” Of the two noble virtues, love proves more beneficial, more benevolent. Her music is wholesome, honest, and ethereal. It is wholesome because it cuts across social boundaries. It is honest because it chronicles the ways and lifestyles of the modern man. It is ethereal because it speaks of life’s frantic concerns and its little lessons.

 With these soulful renditions of one heart's tugging or being tugged, and with all these reflections and heartfelt introspection on life’s realities, all burdens and cares of the day and all it offers—become a bit bearable.

Dido's music—compiled in two album masterpieces—tells us she’s a messenger of our own truths, a herald of our own pains and successes and glories and achievements despite ourselves, despite ourselves.


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