I was just putting together a mix CD for a friend, and I included Tom Verlaine's "The Scientist Writes a Letter" (from Flash Light). It's probably a key insight to my mode of critically approaching music that I keep thinking I should like this song a whole lot less than I do. At one level, the lyric piles cliches upon cliches: emotionally distant scientist, winter/coldness as metaphor for that emotional distance...even the punning content of the scientist's fields of study (magnetic fields, electricity), all seem, at some levels, a bit too obvious. But that's only when I think about it - and only when I don't think very hard.
For one thing, when I don't think about it, the song's just plain beautiful, the glassy synth sound limning a near-classical chordal architecture. Usually, in fact, lyrics are the last thing to penetrate my skull - and if I like a song's musical components, the lyrics can get away with a lot. In fact, though, when I think harder about the lyrics, they work better than their cliched content might suggest. First, that this is something the scientist can say only in a letter, not in person, is a more subtle reinforcement of the general theme. And "I look through my glass" (microscope? or the bottom of a long, stiff drink?), along with the scientist's awareness of his "sense of failure," tells us it's not that the scientist is unable to feel, he's unable to express. A man incapable of feeling emotion should arouse pity, but often inspires derision, since he seems less than human. A man who feels but can't show that emotion...well, haven't we all been there? The scientist stutters, "we men of science...you know" - and we do, but recognize it's not a condition particular to scientists. And I think if we're honest, we'll admit that it's a hell of a lot easier to stick to "patterns oh so well defined" than to risk chaos and uncertainty.
Then there's the bridge: the line about the "tree so white, I can hardly look at it" is mysterious to me. I'm not sure exactly what that means, why (beyond the snow of course) the tree should be white...but perhaps for those very reasons, the line's extraordinary affecting.
Finally: after admitting he "has no other lines," the scientist signs off, recognizing the inadequacy of his language to his emotions - and, as a scientist, relies instead upon his instruments to express them. And it is here, in Verlaine's guitar solo, that the heart of the song, and our scientist, lies. What words cannot express, what Verlaine as vocalist of limited scope cannot give voice to, his guitar expresses with spine-shivering clarity and intensity. If the whole of the lyric, and the rest of the musical arrangement (almost entirely synthetic, with Verlaine's guitar heard not at all until the bridge, after the line "suddenly it's so cold"), exist only to justify this solo, I could forgive nearly any cliche.
In fact, cliches are often powerful truths, crusted and frozen over with familiarity. Fired with intensity as in this song, and they can speak again with all their original force intact.
