Saudade Through Song

The kids and I drove down to Canberra for a holiday. Well, to Murrumbateman, which is near Yass, but we did go into Canberra several times to catch up with friends. We take the M7/Pacific Highway/whatever it is called these days down towards Yass and Gundagai and then turn off onto the Barton Highway. I love going that way, with the wind farm towering over us on the hills beside the road. Great sculptural things of beauty, with cows grazing around them and the land otherwise undisturbed.

It started out bright, with my son complaining of the sunshine through the window (they're tinted so he got told to settle down). But the further south we went the darker it got. Great clouds massing on the horizon, grey then blue black. Finally the only sunlight we saw was the shafts angling down through the clouds in the distance.

This is actually a photo of Blayney Wind Farm by Dave Bassett; his Flickr name, tassie303. But it is so beautiful, and similar to the Birrema Wind Farm near Yass that we pass. I am always busy driving, so I don't have any photos of it.

We always have music on in the car. On short trips the children can take it in turns to choose, only rule being that it is suitable/not annoying for everyone. On long trips, however, I have full control, albeit with the same rules (it will be many years before my son hears a whole album by The Men That Will Not be Blamed for Nothing, or Abney Park's gorgeous cover of Creep). I decided this trip that it was time they both heard some Ultravox. So I put on Vienna, their first album with Midge Ure.

Listening to it was a little weird. It had been a long time and I had forgotten why I don't listen to it often. The Steamgoth's response on the first track was "can you put this on my ipod?" My girl has good taste. I found I could remember most of the words, although a lot of Mr. X still eludes me. And just as the weather closed in we got to the title track, Vienna. I love that song. I loved it the moment I heard it, as so many others did.

There had already been a time-warp effect. The music had made me feel twelve years old and in Year 7 again, with all the good and bad that was the early 80s.

When we are in primary school, whatever is happening in our families is usually just accepted. It is the way life is. Sure, we've visited other homes and seen other families in action, but somehow it doesn't sink in that the dynamic is different. Or if it does, we don't quite understand how, and it feels like the world is the way our life is. And then we get to highschool, or turn twelve, or whatever it is that happens that makes us see other people's realities, and makes us see our own realities more clearly.

My home was not a happy place growing up. And when I got to twelve, or highschool, or whatever it was, I was very struck by the fact that our home was unusually unhappy, and I started to really grasp why that was. I also accepted that I was weird, always had been, always would be, and decided that I was going to stop trying to fit in, which I had been doing until that point (trying, that is, not managing). No more pretending to like Abba (which had been difficult at the best of times), no more pretending to be ordinary and unimaginative. It took me a very long time to fully achieve that stop (although the Abba bit was easy), way past the end of my highschool days, but I got there in the end.

So there I was, deciding I didn't have to be like the people I had grown up around or the society I didn't feel a part of, starting to understand that violence and unhappiness weren't normal and, while beyond my control, were not my fault. And then Vienna appeared.

Minor keys have always been my thing. I loved the hymns like "Oh come Oh Come Emmanuel" or songs like "Summertime". A lot of pop music to that time hadn't had minor keys (well, alright, Friday on My Mind, House of the Rising Sun, Nights in White Satin, all songs I liked, by the way, and actually, they are much older), but most were happy boppy things, or meaningless pap, or pub rock, or Abba. And here was Vienna, with young men well groomed with interesting hair and sharp clothes, no flannel, (although I preferred the way Duran Duran dressed), interesting words and haunting music.

Everytime I listened to it I was transported, taken somewhere else, away from what was happening. It was the first time I thought that getting out could be an option, and that there was somewhere worth going to. Although I didn't go, not for a long time.

So there we were, driving down the highway, the windfarm above us, the rain pelting down. The sky was a mass of roiling black thunderheads. I turned the stereo up so we could hear over the rain smashing against the windscreen. And then Vienna came on and I remembered why I don't listen to it very often. My heart and head were in turmoil, all those mixed emotions crashing around inside. The pain and anger that had been part of life, the feeling of finding something that gave me some idea of myself. The idea that escape was possible. Emotions that, it seems, had never really left, just been packed away.

I know now what it was that was evoked, and is still evoked. Saudade. It's a Portuguese word but it doesn't have an easy translation. A melancholy sort of nostalgic longing is how Nick Cave describes it. And that is what I felt when I first heard Vienna. Not for the life I had, but for a life I wanted, or for the life I lived in my head. Can you feel nostalgia for something you haven't known? Maybe I was nostalgic for what I could imagine. And Vienna still does that to me. It still fills me with Saudade, although possibly just through habit now. A melancholy nostalgic longing. Saudade.

And my daughter is addicted to Vienna, the way I was at her age, although not for the same reasons. She loves it because it is beautiful, she loves it for what it is, a great song. And I think that just might make it more bearable for me.