I drove up to my Mum’s house on Friday night. I didn’t leave Melbourne until 7.15 and the trip can’t be done in much under four hours with no stop at all. And I’m a stopper when it comes to driving so I thought four and a half was about right.
So I stopped once at the Mokoan truck stop. I like to stop in the gardens in Benalla but they did not appeal at nine o’clock at night, so stayed on the highway and pulled over at Mokoan. After I’d eaten my ciabatta with hommus and salad and had two cups of tea and a Monte Carlo or two I was on my way again by ten. I was very tired and I told myself “in Wodonga by eleven, at Mum’s before twelve.”
Indeed it was eleven when I pulled over in the main street of Wodonga. I had listened to Mumford & Sons since Mokoan, the whole disc plus the first three tracks again, and now I took that CD out and put on Post and it was playing as I pulled out and got going again. I had chosen it because I can sing along to every line and I thought that would be good for keeping me awake. And this proved to be the case and the album is the perfect length of course, so that I sang the last line of Little Decisions ten seconds before pulling up at Mum’s front gate.
I love singing along to Post and I noticed last night, for the first time, that there are gentle harmonies on Little Decisions and they are very subtle and very beautiful and I must have heard that album a thousand times and I’ve never noticed them before. And if I sing along to the whole album, in a full-throated fashion, when I get to Little Decisions my voice is sometimes loose enough to reach the high notes on “...big resolutio-o-o-on...” which is incredibly gratifying. It’s the highest note on the album and the one I’ve always struggled with and I noticed a year or so ago as I washed up and sang along that my voice was soaring and I not only held the note but I soared up and down on it just as Kelly does and I felt like the king of the world.
And thinking about those previously un-noticed harmonies I thought of all the great and beautiful things that are done and which go un-remarked by most people. And a few devotees might pick them up and comment as the art becomes known and studied but then again they might not. And it’s quite possible that the singers of these harmonies and the people who thought to arrange them have never, ever, been thanked for the beauty they brought to the world.
So I say to Michael Barclay and Toni Allaylis who seem to have done these harmonies, “Thank you. Thankyou for laying down your tracks for me to discover after listening to your song for the one thousandth time, for making so sweet the last few miles to my Mum’s house late on a moonlit Friday night. And thank you to the geniuses who put this record together.”
When we were children Dad read to us once or twice selected verses from Gray’s Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard. He was most fond of the lines:
Full many a flower is born to blush unseen
And waste its sweetness on the desert air.
And if he were still alive I would make a point of seating him on the sweet spot on the couch where the CD can be heard perfectly and getting him to hear these harmonies and say to him “Dad I never noticed these harmonies for twenty five years and this is my favourite record of all time. Do you think Gray might have appreciated this moment of my discovery?”
I think he might.
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