A song is a key for locked memory boxes. A song can transport you back through time, giving you a chance to relive moments and ideas that occurred back when you first heard that song. A song is not just a song; it is also a story.
Scott Walker – “On Your Own Again”
It’s around 2am sometime in the winter of 1998. I had just bought the Radiohead documentary Meeting People Is Easy earlier in the day at Echoes, the local record store in Williamsburg, VA. It seemed to be where I spent all of my lawn mowing money as a kid.
I wait until everyone is asleep and the house is silent. I quietly put the VHS cassette into the VCR and collapse into the couch for the next two hours to watch what would be a defining film for me growing up. But around thirty minutes in a moment reveals itself that I wasn’t expecting. The film cuts to Thom Yorke in a hotel room somewhere in Europe. The shot is in reverse as Thom ambles around the room, unpacking and arranging his things.
It’s in this scene that something happens that has nothing to do with Radiohead. A classical guitar begins and is suddenly joined by this otherworldly baritone voice drenched in reverb. Soon it becomes engulfed by the most beautiful string arrangements I’ve ever heard, drenched in melancholy and sadness. I am stunned and lost. I rewind the video and watch the scene one more time. Then I do it again.
I finish the film and make my way to bed, my head and heart swimming. Who is this? Who writes songs like this?
This was in the days before Google, before iTunes and it would be another seven years before I would finally realize who the man was behind that song. Scott Walker.
In 2005, I had been living in New Orleans, but after Katrina I moved back to Virginia to figure out what I would do next. After a difficult time in New Orleans trying to get a band going, I returned home defeated and in search of something new to do. I setup a studio in my old bedroom and decided to work on a few songs while I was mulling over my options. It was during this time that I had finally made the connection between that song I first heard years earlier and the man, Scott Walker. I immediately bought a copy of Boy Child and listened to it over and over religiously, each song taking me further and further into another world. It became the soundtrack to the songs I was working on that would later become my first record, Colonies.
Reverb is a haunting thing, and if Scott Walker knows anything well its reverb. It’s literally the ghost of sound. Listening to Scott Walker, it’s almost like he himself is haunting his own songs. Like he’s listening through the walls, having never fully left them. He was the first person to put a sound to the aching felt in the melodramatic heart of a quiet melancholic kid. It would be years before I would be able to fully immerse myself in his body of work from the 60s to his more recent pieces like The Drift, but I carried the feeling I felt with me the whole time.
As you get older, the moments that occur when you discover a new band or artist that rearranges your brain seem to happen less and less often. It was Scott Walker that reopened my head in a way that I didn’t think was still possible. And it all began that late night many years ago as “On Your Own Again” quietly crept into my subconscious and has stayed with me ever since.
- Daniel James of Canon Blue
