One Week // One Band

“Biomusicology” – Ted Leo and the Pharmacists
(Words/music: Ted Leo, available on The Tyranny of Distance, Lookout! Records 2001)

The cover of The Tyranny of Distance features a large section of ocean with a solitary whale, and the relative size of the whale only makes the ocean seem much larger. It’s an appropriate cover, as the sea, water, and swimming make numerous appearances in the album’s lyrics. These appear throughout “Biomusicology” as well, most significantly in the single line in German, a quote from Wagner’s opera Tristan und Isolde (or T.S. Eliot’s “The Waste Land,” which quotes this same line) that translates to “wide and empty – the sea.” This, along with the other images in the opening verse –the “vastness of pavement” and “barrenness of waves” make me think back to the wide and empty sea on the album’s cover.

Of course, the song doesn’t end alone and empty in the middle of the ocean. It offers two strategies for confronting the void. The first, as it is in many of Ted Leo’s songs, is to continue on in the face of a large obstacle. Like Sisyphus and his boulder, when faced with a meaningless task, one must derive meaning from the act itself. “In the midst of all of the action / maybe only there found satisfaction,” Leo sings at the end of the song’s main verse. It fits in with the different locations and scenarios listed before it, perhaps some of the different sights and stops on a touring band’s itinerary.

The other refuge in this desolate sea is music. Right after the Wagner quote (itself from a “song,” I suppose), its songs that “down there have a purpose” beneath this empty sea. It fits into the touring band narrative implied above, but more importantly it fits the way that we consume music as fans. During hard times, I turn to my favorite records whether for inspiration or just to turn my brain down to low for a little while. Songs have a way of feeling like something to cling onto in the gigantic ocean of life, even if just for a few minutes, and in the song’s final lines Ted Leo equates singing and swimming in consecutive lines.

Many of the songs on The Tyranny of Distance relate to the portmanteau in this song’s title – of music feeling like a part of our DNA. But it’s this final verse of “Biomusicology,” as the cymbal crashes and echoed guitar almost sound like a sea raging against one’s boat, that Leo delivers this message best, in a voice with an uplifting timbre and full of confidence.

All in all,
we cannot stop singing.
We cannot start sinking.
We swim until it ends.
They may kill
and we may be parted.
but we will ne’er be broken-hearted.

More on Ted Leo and the Pharmacists: Allmusic | Amazon MP3 | Emusic | Last.fm