Or better still be my winding wheel

I love the lyric. I love the ballad. As a form of expression there are few things more pleasing to me in the rich firmament which is art than a fine narrative in a good song. It is my equivalent of a good cellar. It was a pleasure therefore to light eleven candles last night and sit with the artist on our bright red sofa and watch in the flickering light as a young American balladeer sitting in a line of five musicians went through his repertoire of love songs mostly. The televised concert was in an old church and the atmosphere there was attentive though faintly self-conscious. We on the other hand felt like we had travelled the entire way on the sofa, speeding across the river in it, taking sharp lefts and sharp rights, holding on to the arms in the process, until driving at speed down the aisle and parking in the middle at the front. Outside the church, we noticed, as the musicians tuned up, a tall tree, an ash perhaps, was sensitively lit, and through the ornate church window from the inside we could see the foliage blowing in the wind. Marred only by the occasional cut to some songless celebrity, we watched in communal awe as that rare sight these days - a romantic – took centre-stage. A romantic. Someone in other words who chooses what sometimes turns out to be the broken road of dashed hopes rather than becomes jaded. And yet there was a thankful lightness of touch to some of the songs, a fluffiness within the darker moments. There was one song about unrequited love. But he laughed at himself. One song had his life as a blue hotel. Another saw the singer marrying the wrong member of a family. Another, my favourite perhaps, had the singer with a broken arm just wanting to come home, wherever that was. I particularly remember the singer's pianist looking up like a shy and gifted pupil at a prize-giving ceremony. No, it was good to hear good words in song. Songs are inherently different to the visual arts and yet a good one will always paint its setting well and chart its journey with an expressionistic flourish. I don’t know if it is just me but I find a lot of the music today which masquerades itself as sensitive and poetic in fact fairly humdrum, as if the singer cannot have felt the depths of experience littered in the lyric. (There have been in the past other exceptions to the sofa singer: the man from Hibbing springs to mind.) And yet there we were, parked on our bright red sofa like we’re at some drive-in movie, listening to a young balladeer and believing every word.