Where Spring Is Sprung

This song has already featured at a couple of blogs linked to this one and been posted on social media by friends but, at the risk of repetition, I'm posting it here today as well. 'Cello Song has long been one of my favourite Nick Drake songs- the finger picked folk guitar, the gorgeous, weightless, melancholy of the cello, the busy, subtle hand drums and Nick's voice, as if recorded not long after waking up. Back in November, in the lead up to the first anniversary of Isaac's death, I was struck by the lyrics which seemed so apt and took on new meaning for me. 

'Strange face, with your eyes
So pale and sincere
Underneath you know well
You have nothing to fear
For the dreams that came to you when so young
Told of a life
Where spring is sprung

You would seem so frail
In the cold of the night
When the armies of emotion
Go out to fight
But while the earth sinks to its grave
You sail to the sky
On the crest of a wave

So forget this cruel world
Where I belong
I'll just sit and wait
And sing my song
And if one day you should see me in the crowd
Lend a hand and lift me
To your place in the cloud'

Fontaines DC have covered 'Cello Song for a forthcoming album of covers, The Endless Coloured Ways, along with twenty- nine other artists. Fontaines DC grab hold of the song and don't let go, stamping their own identity on it while retaining the spirit and essence of Nick's original. In their hands, with twin clanging guitars and layers of feedback, rat- a- tat- tat drumming, thumping bass and Grian Chatten's unmistakeable Dublin vocals, 'Cello Song switches effortlessly from melancholic late 60s English folk to gritty back street 21st century indie- punk rock. The sweeping cellos are still there, the bridge between the two. It's rewritten the song for me (and they've rewritten the lyrics partly too, cutting pasting parts of the second and third verses into one), rewired it into something new, still emotionally charged but with a different, more insistent, more menacing edge. It's a wonderful reinterpretation, exactly how a cover version should be done. 

Things feel hard again. Grief comes and goes in unpredictable arcs and waves. I know it isn't very long at all since Isaac died- a little over fifteen months- but there's been yet another shift in things recently, with the old one step forwards, two steps back as standard. The acceptance that things have changed forever is one I'm trying to get to grips with. With it comes the realisation that it's not just that there's no going back to the world as it was before he died, it's also that there's no going back to the person I was before he died. This has changed me/ us forever. The person I am now has this ball of grief and loss built in. Some days it's a dull aching sadness. Some days it's a knot of anxiety in the stomach and chest. Some days it's a weight, a heaviness I'm lugging around with me. Some days it's raw and painful again. Some days it erupts unexpectedly, a burst of frustration or anger (or the opposite, a resigned shrug and a fuck it to a situation I maybe should care more about). It may change as the months and years go by, the grief and loss becoming more bearable- not lessening, just more liveable with- but it's there for good. That's a big thing to take on board I think- I am not who I was.