originally posted with commentary here
www.aheartisaspade.com/2013/10/22/a-heart-is-a-spade-exclusive-a-place-both-wonderful-and-strange-england-the-national-cover/
While in London this past May (for my first time ever) to perform shows with my previous band, Silent Drape Runners, my life was falling apart. Essentially our final shows (though we’d really told no one), these gigs dismantled at the seams for a myriad of reasons. Lost, lonely, and completely shattered, I’d wander Shoreditch daily pondering ways in which I could end my life. For the entirety of the week’s stay there, I wanted nothing more than to cease being, to stop, to not take another breath. I have never, in my entire life, thought more about suicide.
The National’s Trouble Will Find Me leaked the morning after our failed Twin Peaks show, what was to be the triumphant moment before the entire Jenga tower of the band collapsed into nothing that just… well… collapsed into nothing. I found a strange antique garden near the apartment we were staying in, and wandered it for the hour it took to fall into the record. Lovely though it was, I kept coming back to “England”, from High Violet. I’m not sure the sentiments Matt Berninger conveys through his interpretation of the song (though I can guess), but I know mine, and I clenched to that even more upon returning to New York. “How was tour? How was London?” I’d be asked, knowing that societal convention prohibited me from saying “I wanted to die, I wanted to slit my wrists and hang from rafters every second of every day. Everything was a lie and my life has broken into shards.”
I’d gone through three break-ups, technically, by my birthday. I’d left my job, left my girlfriend, and now my band, the one thing thing I had left, was leaving me.
When I decided to keep going, to start a place both wonderful and strange, I knew the first few recorded musical moments were going to be highly personal. Though “DNT CM” resulted from fucking around on the plane back to America, the first song that I sat out and plotted to be for and about me was this cover of “England”. Because this is where it all started. This is the first song on the Play It As It Lays record, coming out when it comes out. I guess for me this song is about being thousands of miles away from anything resembling home and accidentally choosing to live instead of stop.
It all comes out in the wash, they say. Start here and move forward, they say. You’ll figure it all out eventually.
“Put an ocean and a river between everybody else. Between everything, yourself and home.”
This song is dedicated to everyone who kept me going. I thank you from the bottom of my stupid heart.
released October 22, 2013
originally written and performed by American Goth-Dad band The National. Additional vocals performed by Ghost Cop.
Art by Deanna Paquette/sheisdp