Understated Beauty

The September issue of The Believer arrived yesterday, which now puts me two issues in arrears. So I pulled the July issue off the nightstand for an emergency session of commute reading. I finished off a fascinating article by Matthew Power about a group in remote eastern India that may or may not be one of the lost tribes of Israel, but then, rather than delving into a new article, I couldn't help re-reading an interview with John Darnielle of the Mountain Goats. All of his thoughts are interesting, as always, but this one in particular struck me.

I always preferred album titles that weren't named after a song on the album. I would sit there and wonder wny the album is called Dub Housing. There might be a track on that album called "Dub Housing," so that might not be a good example. Why is the album called Get Lost? That's a great example, because it's The Magnetic Fields Get Lost--it's a sentence. But divorce it from the band name, and it's an imperative: get lost. When I was a kid, when I was developing my record-collector disease, those are the types of records I liked best because when I exhausted the songs and the lyrics I could still think about that aspect and I wanted albums to have as many points of scrutiny as they could. From the time I started writing songs, I thought it'd be better if the song title had to be in some way connected to the song. Then I got perverse about it and thought if I titled them in ways that no one could possibly make the connection I've made, they'd be even more interesting because anybody who's like me and wants to make the connection would have to fabricate their own or conclude that it can't be done. If you're a record collector, you won't conclude that it can't be done. You just go ahead and do it.

Darnielle's thoughts on titles of albums and songs is analagous to his songwriting itself. For me, the best songwriting (Darnielle is one of the very best songwriters around) and literature is subtle, lean and understated, and provides just enough vivid imagery and ideas to provoke the imagination of the listener or reader. In other words, the best writers are those who don't bludgeon you in driving home their point, but leave just enough unsaid to let you draw your own conclusions.