League of Inveterate Poets

By Mark Traphagen on March 2, 2009

I’m blogging through the series of videos made to accompany the album Flying Club Cup by Beirut (aka Zach Condon and band). Song #5 is Cliquot.

I think this may be my favorite song on the album. There is both resignation and hope. We lose people we deeply love, but life continues.

A plague in the workhouse, a plague on the poor
Now I’ll beat on my drum ’til I’m dead
Yesterday, a fever, tomorrow, St. Peter
I’ll beat on my drum until then.

Music provides a soothing balm to the pain, but is it enough?

But what melody will lead my lover from his bed?
What melody will see him in my arms again?

But the melody does go on, haunting and charming all at the same time, until it fades as it must. Think about how many of the popular songs you know are about lost or unrequited love. Isn’t it interesting that when we humans are in pain, we so often choose to sing about it? Does music help us to believe in hope beyond tragedy? Or does it just soften the bow?

I can’t do better at describing the visual impact of this video than Ryan Catbird on the album site:

Ed Droste of Grizzly Bear joins his Beirut friends for this performance of “Cliquot,” and Droste’s dulcet voice (coupled with his striking but melancholy visage) makes for a soulful and moving version of this song.

We’ve taken “Cliquot” to be about the desperate sorrow of the young widow Clicquot, who lost her beloved Francois to sudden fever in 1805. It is a profound sort of grief that no one should have to experience, losing one’s love, but the band manages to turn this tale away from the path toward funereal dirge and instead tranforms “Cliquot” into a hauntingly beautiful hymn.

In this video, the camera wanders down a corridor and seemingly, unexpectedly just happens upon this lovely performance. It seems such an unlikely occurrence; like something that would never really happen… but I’m reminded of a time when I didn’t live in a tiny, cramped flat in Manhattan; when I lived in a spacious loft in the Midwest, with high ceilings, and beautiful wood floors, and windows as tall as trees. And I was putting this band up at my apartment for a few days. And one afternoon, I came home for my lunch break, and as I stepped out of the carpark, I heard the most magnificent music in the air. The band was playing, all windows of the loft fully open, and from the third floor of that old building, the band was raining their sublime sounds down upon the unassuming city.

So you see, it’s not so strange, this video, this occurrence, this camera just happening upon this lovely, unexpected performance… I’ve been down that corridor too.

by Ryan Catbird – Catbirseat.org