Ketevan

Ketevan "Katie" Melua

I believe songs are places we temporarily inhabit. Places that a singer creates, for us to be transported into for the duration of a song. As ephemeral, brief-lasting as that but then so are our hopes, our loves, our lives.

And I believe the songs that haunt us are like the memories we have without knowing. The flashbacks that by some key, smell or sight or sound, take us back to a moment we felt more than we realized then. Since we recorded it so faithfully, as if we did not want to leave any detail out.

Music is a mystery, understand. Because not even a singer can tell us, whatever the chops, where a song comes from. Not the lyrics, the notes, their joining with emotion in a voice. And not the listener’s effect.

But I will venture this: that writing a song is like capturing a memory. Though it is art, even “Art”. So one makes choices, must bend or change or cut out this detail or that. Until the moment of singing the song when like the flashback of a memory, it must all emerge again in a flood.

Katie Melua, live acoustic set on Norwegian TV, Oct 5, 2005 [via VidStash]

One cannot speak of Katie Melua without noting that her best known songs were not written by her, but by the man who discovered her, mentored her, issued her CDs under own label: Mike Batt.

So it is with the two songs in this set, Nine Million Bicycles and The Closest Thing to Crazy, that book-end the one song written by her, Piece by Piece. Which is the song I want to speak to.

This Katie learnt from Eva Cassidy: to inhabit a song fully, be it her own or not. As the abdication of self, of any flash or indulgence that does not help the song. But even in the studio, there was chafing, “arguments” as she must confess. Katie wanting to be fully Katie, without the inevitable distortion from another human being’s shaping to own ideal. Why it is her song, with her own free shaping of it, I must pay my attention to.

First of all must go
Your scent upon my pillow
And then I’ll say goodbye to your whispers in my dreams

And then our lips will part
In my mind and in my heart
Cos your kiss went deeper than my skin

Piece by piece
Is how I let go of you
Kiss by kiss
Will leave my mind one at a time
One at a time

First of all must fly
My dreams of you and I
There’s no point in holding on to those

And then our ties will break
For your and my own sake
Just remember
This is what you chose

Piece by piece
Is how I let go of you
Kiss by kiss
Will leave my mind one at a time
One at a time

I’ll shed like skin
Our memories of lazy days
And fade away the shadow of your face

Piece by piece
Is how I let go of you
Kiss by kiss
Will leave my mind one at a time
One at a time
One at a time
One at a time

Katie guards her privacy, with a steadfast refusal to feed the scandal machine. But this song, comes out of a real breakup in her life, and still fresh at the time she put down this version. The emotion real as I must hear it: a truer Katie than in the book-end songs, why I must juxtapose them for a contrast. Because they are two beautiful, masterful songs. But they are about devotion and dependence, while Katie’s song is about a brave, painful independence. Piece by piece, because that is how freedom must come.

Katie Melua, What I Miss About You, live at BBC World Service 75th Anniversary, Dec 15, 2007 [via info150]

While Piece by Piece was the title track for her second CD, released September 2005, this song comes from her third CD, Pictures, released October 2007. Katie at 23 past even “feeling twenty-two/acting seventeen”. And, as one more note to sound, recording the last of her “trilogy” of albums with Mike Batt.

Missing the train every morning at 8:52,
Sipping coffee from the same cup as you.
The sharing of secrets we thought no one else knew,
That’s what I miss about you.

The new way that love had made me see,
Your bashful grin when you asked if I would like your key.
The knowing way you used to caress me,
That’s what I miss about you.

You stole in with your starry smile exciting me,
Driving with you in your new car, feeling free.
If it’s true that love is blind, then I was blind willingly,
You made me believe we had a future, that could be and would be.

The way you said I’d be no one on my own,
Your habit of soaking yourself in over-priced cologne.
The way you turned the light out when I knew you were home,
That’s what I don’t miss about you.

I bet you’re using your weary magic like it’s new,
Driving real fast with a new one beside you.
She’s foolishly believing she’s the last of the lucky few,
I wonder if she knows she’s being lied to like I do.

The way I only doubted myself when I was with you,
Like I was a fool for expecting something from life too.
Your skill of putting me down in front of everyone we knew,
That’s what I don’t miss about you.

Songs are places, I said. But they are paintings too, tableaux by words and the colors of real feeling in them. And, where Piece by Piece flowed in one inexorable direction like a receding tide, What I Miss About You is a turn of feeling and attitude, a storm of oppositions. A more complex song, but like the other must be heard for what it is: a declaration of fresh-gained freedom.

Katie Melua, Yellow Leaves, live at BBC World Service 75th Anniversary, Dec 15, 2007 [via info150]

It is a paradox of freedom that one must simultaneously reach for root. But to one’s own rooting, individual sapling that one is. Which for Katie is problematic, uprooted twice as she was. From her native Georgia, first to Belfast, age eight, then to London at thirteen. The immigrant experience which is to say one’s acceptance of an utter new, as stark separation from what and who one knew; the unavoidable aloneness one knows off that.

Katie is a child of globalization, of the opening of countries and boundaries. From carrying buckets of water up several stairs for her grandmother, to the effervescent modernity of a Catholic academy for bright girls, to the large wide open of the Brit School, to touring the world continuously since 2004. Her biography is more or less an incredible one. And one must assume she’s been brave through each radical change in her life, since she has remained recognizably herself, and without veneer or gloss past her natural good manners.

So it is a paradox that Katie reach back to this Georgian song. Which was composed by Gia Kancheli, himself an expatriate Georgian, for the Georgian film Mimino by Georgi Daneliya. Released seven years before Katie’s birth, the film tells the story (as comedy) of a Georgian pilot who dreams of flying around the world, so goes to Moscow where his open, amicable manner gains him friends, adventures and ultimately his dream, as he becomes a supersonic aircraft pilot. None of which can assuage how alone he feels, nor that melancholy tug for home that this song voices. Until he must relinquish what he has gained, return.

Brave is the word I reach for, watching her sing this song. For inhabiting it, that “space of absence”, as one writer aptly described Kancheli’s music. When in truth, for Katie there is no return.

Katie Melua, In My Secret Life, live at Montreal Jazz Festival, Jun 26, 2008 [via ark80]

Like all Leonard Cohen’s songs, this one is smooth over rough. Wise and sly, yet with that undertow of sad. And whatever an instant critic’s carping, Katie knows to voice both the loft of the song, its weariness below. She honors the song, is a way to put it.

I saw you this morning,
You were moving so fast.
Can’t seem to loosen my grip,
On the past.
And I miss you so much,
There’s no one in sight.
And we’re still making love,
In my secret life.
In my secret life.

I smile when I’m angry.
I cheat and I lie.
I do what I have to do,
To get by.
And I know what is wrong,
And I know what is right.
And I’d die for the truth,
In my secret life.
In my secret life.

Hold on, hold on, my brother,
My sister, hold on tight.
I finally got my orders,
I’ll be marching through the morning.
Marching through the night,
Moving ‘cross the borders,
Of my secret life.

I looked through the paper,
Makes you want to cry.
Nobody cares if the people,
Live or die.
And the dealer wants you thinking,
That it’s either black or white.
Well thank God it’s not that simple,
In my secret life.

I bite my lip.
I buy what I’m told.
From the latest hit,
To the wisdom of old.
And I’m always alone,
And my heart is like ice.
And it’s crowded and it’s cold,
In my secret life.

In my secret life.
In my secret life.
In my secret life.

It is Katie’s youth that is strangely thrown back at her by some critics. When she wears it so unaffectedly, so lacking in self-irony. Perhaps, because of that, I must suspect.

While Katie herself, by not being an ‘instant success’, learnt “detachment” from the narrow ways of fame; her choices have become her own, piece by piece. That, I suspect, being one more thing those critics fear. Katie, young as she is, and with the energy of her youth, being free of them.

Katie Melua, On the Road Again, live at Palais des Congres, Paris, Apr 4, 2008 [via LaurentBayon]

A closing song for Katie’s show, so may as well be mine too.

You know the first time I travelled
Out in the rain and snow –
Out in the rain and snow,
You know the first time I travelled
Out in the rain and snow –
Out in the rain and snow,
No I didn’t have no payroll,
Not even no place to go.

Yeah my dear mother left me
When I was quite young –
When I was quite young.
Yeah my dear mother left me
When I was quite young –
When I was quite young.
She said “Lord, have mercy
On my wicked one.”

Well now take it from me, mama,
Please don’t you cry no more –
Don’t you cry no more.
Take a hint from me, mama,
Please don’t you cry no more –
Don’t you cry no more.
‘Cause it’s soon one morning
Down the road I’ll go.

No I ain’t going down
That long old lonesome road
All by myself –
All by myself.
No I ain’t going down
That long old lonesome road
All by myself –
All by myself.
If you ain’t coming with me
Gonna take somebody else.

Well, I’m so tired of crying,
But I’m out on the road again.
I ain’t got nobody
Just to call my special friend.
I ain’t got nobody
Just to call my special friend.
I ain’t got nobody
Just to call my special friend.

Taking on In My Secret Life, as opposed to Suzanne, is one thing. But everyone has heard the original of this song. Which is why I must show Katie making it her own, let hear the sound of that crowd.

Declarations of freedom, I’ve called her songs. And real freedom so not without loss. Because little Ketevan, small and beautiful as she is, is also brave enough to want to be free.