Daughter, "Shallows" & "Be On Your Way"

Stop being so smart.
You can say most anything
with short words
and no degree.

-- from Kyla Houbolt's "Facets"

I'm getting back into Daughter, a shoegaze trio from London.

The last time I listened to them incessantly was 2016. I loved their haunting, bittersweet, melodramatic vibe. I felt like I was dealing with loss, and truth be told, I was dealing with something like that at the time. I wasn't sure if I'd finish my PhD; my health was in terrible shape. I had eczema that was out of control and my face always looked like it was punched. I was going to doctors but nothing really helped. Daughter at the time toured, came to Deep Ellum, and I regret not getting tickets. I'm not sure they'll be touring soon.

The song that wouldn't leave me was "Shallows:"

You can say that "Shallows" is too much. Epic, anthemic sounds may "bluster," in the words of one reviewer, when matched with lyrics such as these about heartbreak:

And let it all rain down
From the blood stained clouds
Oh, come out, come out, to the sea, my love, and just
Drown with me

I was 36 and teaching when I was into this song. I can't tell you that these lines in particular resonated with me, because they didn't. I wasn't thinking about "blood stained clouds" despite having little control over my health or appearance. There was melancholy over rejection, sure, but that didn't translate directly into "Drown with me." My moping had a different character.

I did take the time to think through "Drown with me" in a more removed way. Why do certain failures push even the least dramatic to think about death? Why is rejection so tough for many of us? I stumbled upon the idea that what's weird is how an extremely personal rejection–I mean, you might feel you're not welcome in someone's life because you're you–also happens to be as impersonal as it gets. There can be a lot of truth to "it's not you, it's me" when no one knows what they want, only what they fear.

What also fascinated me was how a vague notion of someone can hover around our lives, and it isn't clear who is the ghost:

If you leave
When I go
Find me
In the shallows

The ambiguity is the draw. I want to leave, I don't want to think about them, I don't want them back, but the pain demands... well, something. Restitution? Reunion? The person you thought you loved finding the person they thought they loved?

Needs don't leave us alone. They pool, they become shallows, and we float in the most unrelaxed, anxious way. We become ghosts ourselves, requiring an anchor we barely recognize to engage reality. I've been thinking about that theme more recently. It isn't confined to relationships or grief. The question I have nowadays: why do neglect and bullying leave marks that last decades?

Granted, Daughter's "Be On Your Way" is about a strained relationship. But the lyrics concern genuinely wishing someone well despite all that's happened. Wishing someone well entails being open to changes that pull them away and could pull them back. If you're trying to process any sort of injury, neither is ideal.

"Be On Your Way" begins:

I won't hold you back
Time throws us along

Letting go is terribly confusing. "I won't hold you back," I imagine myself saying with a gulp. I know some things have to be right though they don't feel right. I don't feel grounded, though; it's like a spirit is speaking. That spirit is a mystery unto itself. In addition to it, citing obligations to each other doesn't remotely begin to describe what emotional intimacy actually involves. I've got to wonder how many ghosts one deals with at a given time.

But this needs to be said! And it is true we meet those we love through forces larger than ourselves: "Time throws us along."

In a way, we're talking about bullying and neglect through their opposites. We know what scars they leave because we've glimpsed an ideal where tough feelings refuse to disappear.

Not much later, the song chants "Be on your way." And I wish I could say this and mean it and not have the smallest atom of anxiety. Not a smidgen of disrespect, not a thought about abandonment. I have to admit I might have no idea what it means to wish someone well. It almost requires a different type of being, one that doesn't deal in relativity, where pain and love are not so much on a sliding scale, but require each other to exist.

Towards the end, we reach where I am now: "I will meet you on another planet if the plans change / I have a feeling that we'll repeat this evening." As noted by the same reviewer, this isn't meant in a cynical, cruel way. There's a tenderness in an uncontrollable distance. Uncontrollable isn't the same as unresolvable. There are, in the cosmic sense, endless second chances. The catch is that we may not even be there for some of them.

Still, what stands out for me is that if love is this tough, how much tougher is it to deal with people who refuse to apologize? With necessary relations that seem to only strain?