Five chords. Longing and despair.
A piano, in an echo chamber, perhaps reverberating in a hospital or otherworldly realm. I like to imagine where a song takes place, but I can never put my finger on it here – somewhere in the land between dusk and dawn, a space I have only been in dreams. Though there is one thing that is certain. Heartbreak floods every beat.
I first hear this song on a mixtape given to me by a teenage love. A slightly older boy with dreams of fronting a rock band he will never form. He delivers the burned CDs secretly in the night after I have crawled out my bedroom window, and we kiss on the foreshore with a headphone in each ear listening to his curations. He is a wannabe artist who has the world wrapped around his floppy Hugh Grant hair, and I am wrapped around his finger.
We will be together forever, I think.
A few weeks later, after I have worn the CDs out listening to them over and over on my Discman, he breaks up with me, leaving me for his best friend who he introduced me to the day before. I crash and all I do is listen to these mixtapes, imagining them now kissing where I once stood, studying his handwriting on the track listing as though some clue to our failed, short-lived, star-crossed romance will be revealed in the jumble of spelling mistakes and bad penmanship.
This is my first heartbreak. The first of many, and not the last time someone will leave me for a better option. Whenever heartbreak is at my door, this song wraps its arms around me, holding me as I cry big lonesome tears.
The song is written in New York by Daniel Johnston during a difficult recording period. Johnston was experiencing a worsening of his mental health, and the album, 1990, that the track comes from, was only able to be finished using a series of live and home recordings because Johnston was in and out of hospital during the recording process, and was even arrested for disruptive behaviour.
He was a cult figure of the 90s who became only marginally more popular after Kurt Cobain wore a T-shirt on MTV featuring the artwork from Johnston’s 1983 album Hi, How Are You? (given to him by legendary music journalist Everett True).
Johnston made 18 studio albums, and all of them about one theme, “true love” – whatever that is. This song perhaps best encapsulates love because in order for love to have existed, even fleetingly, there will inevitably, eventually, be a sense of great loss.
This song has been admired by many. There are covers by: Beach House, Sharon Van Etten, even Lana Del Rey. But none compare to the emotional fragility and emptiness of the original.
Sounds haunt the recording: an out-of-tune guitar, children, or gremlins, laughing, and a voice that is genderless in its delivery, at once a devil and an angel.
I have tried to write a song this beautiful, but it seems impossible. A tapestry made of moments salvaged from a broken mirror. These simple words already say so much.
How could one ever need to say more?
Your picture is still on my wall …
I think about you often
I won’t forget the things we did
Some things last a long time …
Some things last a lifetime
Every year I bury the song deeper in my chest, a shield and talisman I keep on my eternal quest for true love. Because, as Daniel Johnston said, “true love will find you in the end”.
Jack Colwell is performing on the lawns of Mona in Hobart on 25 February. His debut album, Swandream, is out now
