I don’t intend to go through august line-by-line, sequentially, for a month. I spoke in my introduction about needing constraints to enable creativity, but I think that would be a step too far. However, for the first post, it feels fitting to open alongside the song, and wrtite about the introductory sound.
I’m not even sure, really, what the sound is. It’s a sort of shivering string pull, maybe from a violin or something similar (I hold my writing to a defiantly low standard, so I’m not looking it up). For some reason, it only plays in the right ear, which always makes me think my headphones are broken. But something about its sound makes it the perfect introduction to what might just be a perfect song. To me, it’s a beautiful and shockingly evocative note. I listen to a lot of Taylor Swift, and I love a lot of her songs, but none of them capture me from the first moment in the way that august does. The song contains a sort of magic and I think a large part of that magic comes from that one opening note. There’s nothing discordant or unsettling about it – it’s not weird, per se – but it’s unconventional, at least in the context of Taylor Swift, and it’s a point of difference which puts the song in a class of its own.
It has a resonance which imbues it with the sort of melancholy and nostalgia which, to me, characterises august above all else. It carries a sense of ambiguity and invites us on the journey, setting up the complexity of the narrator’s feelings. While august is a song about the month of August, I’ve always felt slightly unhappy with the notion of it being a summer song; after all, it’s a retrospective. It’s not in the Get Lucky category of summer songs, because it’s about the bittersweet memories of a summer passed, and the nostalgia for what could have been – the nostaligia for that hopeful feeling that a summer romance could have been something more. The shivering of that opening string pull also serves to introduce the feelings of uncertainy and anxiety which are inevitable at the start of a romantic entanglement.
august is, I think it’s fair to say, not an exercise in sonic minimalism – after all, the closing build brings in a full orchestral section – which makes it even more impressive to me that so much is captured by the single, sparse note with which the song opens. Obviously, I can only think about what it evokes with the full knowledge of the rest of the song, the lyrics, and the themes. Even acknowledging that, I genuinely believe that the opening note instantly establishes the feelings that will define the rest of the song.
Unlike that note, I’m not wholly convinced that this post has done justice to either the song, or to what I’ll be writing about the song. In fact, I hope that it hasn’t done justice to the blog series, because if it has, then I’ll have a fairly underwhelming set of 31 posts to show for my efforts. But, part of the purpose of this series is to practice writing about music: I care a lot about music, I listen to a lot, and I think about it constantly, but I’ve never managed to write anything particularly satisfactory about my relationship with it. Hopefully doing it repeatedly will get me closer; at the very least, it increases the probability that I’ll accidentally write something good. In any event, tomorrow I get to write about words, which is slightly more within my comfort zone. We’ll see how that goes.