How to save a life

It is perhaps less than impressive that I should be so enamored with The Fray's 'How to Save a Life'. It is, after all, a current big quasi-alternative hit, by a Coldplay clone; and Rolling Stone considered it yet another expression of rather self-indulgent teen angst (the truth is, I did hear it for the first time on Grey's Anatomy, which show I still mostly like, despite its increasingly sloppy soap opera plottiness – and how in hell do they get any surgery done in that atmosphere?). So: not really something a savvy musician should be impressed by.

(There is a very unpleasant new street lamp three feet from my front window, which is pouring bright light across the entire front room.)

But I like it. The video is exceptionally teen-angst-y – which makes more sense when you discover that the lead singer wrote it based on his experience of counselling teens at summer camp, which means that their deeply felt tragedies and instant heartbreaks are the whole point. And there's a version by the Piano Tribute people which, though mostly rather pedestrian, has a very nice middle section where V is held through all the chords – a nice dissonance that recalls all that rich post-Copland American Romantic music, with its big, complex but not subtle, feelings. And the lyrics – again, very Coldplay-clone – partly clear, partly mysterious, all very feeling-oriented and yet intellectually metaphorical.

 (The sheer annoyance, the glaring unpleasantness, of the street lamp and its actinic glare: like an East LA boulevard, the lights like those in a prison, meant to keep the crime down. A nasty, heartless quality imposed on this formerly pleasant neighborhood.)

As it happens, I had the same listen-to-it-over-and-over response to Vertical Horizon's 'Everything You Want', which involves a fairly similar broad-spectrum controlled anger in response to an inability to understand or manage personal relationships. These are therefore, perhaps, nerd's songs, expressing the frustration of a thinking type faced by the complexities and changes of a dense emotional situation (not only central to much contemporary 'alternative' music, but also to the entire rise of the prestige of the thinking-oriented introvert, especially after twenty-five years of home computers). Perhaps not surprising, then, that I should like songs that express this kind of frustration, this resentment that things haven't gone my way. It's also a bit like Moomintroll, in Jansson's Moominland Midwinter, when he sings his enraged song against winter: a bit childish, but a way of expressing anger, resentment, frustration, that has been held in for too long....

 (That damned street lamp: if I spent more time on it, perhaps it could be the basis for a pastiche of the first pages of Nabokov's Pale Fire, where the disturbed and unreliable narrator is gradually revealed to us through unexpected interpolations in his scholarly treatise: 'There is a very loud amusement park right in front of my present lodgings'....)