"It's My Life" by Mark Hollis (Talk Talk)

Singalong 016: One half won't do

“Funny how I find myself in love with you / If I could buy my reasoning I'd pay to lose / One half won't do”

I got "introduced" to Talk Talk at different moments by different friends who confided, "I can't stop listening to Spirit of Eden."

It was always Spirit of Eden.

I was too young to properly experience the singles when they were big, so I didn’t get subjected to any of the “new romantic” English radio pop hype like some slightly older kids were. But this song here, "It's My Life" comes from that breakout time. A big old pop chestnut.

I listen to Talk Talk and I remember what is important about music. I know you probably hear people say this too much, but in Talk Talk’s case you really do have to listen to the albums. The singles matter, but those albums are the place you want to be: a fluid musical environment where your tender parts get to breathe. A place where your humanity and your spirit self will see each other.

Mark Hollis. He played the game and then he didn't. He famously chose to leave the music biz in order to stay present for his family. He took the (modest) money and ran, never touring again.

One shouldn't have to "famously" choose to do anything, but that's the lot of any musician who finds themself adored by audience and market. A deviation from the archetype of performative indulgence and self-destruction will be deemed famous. Radical. Especially if said deviation is simply choosing a life with a modicum of dignity or privacy.

Mark just kind of walked away.

“I've asked myself, how much do you commit yourself / It's my life / Don't you forget”

It's easy for me to get into a funk about how disparate people's experiences are, inside and outside of music. There's so much dysfunction surrounding the playing, the creation, the development, the performances and especially the transactions. With my favorite artists, I don’t want see them confined to live in the greasy gears of the entertainment complex. I want to see them transcend.

Mark Hollis transcended, and his music still reminds us what that means. (Do yourself a favor and check out those albums!)

“Funny how I blind myself, I never knew”

He was not a polished musician in the school sense. He came from punk and worked his way into the sublime, like a rock in a tumbler.

This was not the way I came into music: I had cello lessons as a kid, and I took entirely too long to free myself from the music school construct. The whole time, I thought I was trying to "work" my "way in" to something resembling a musical vocation. I practiced scales and sonatas, attended orchestra rehearsals, slogged through Bruckner.

The light at the end of this tunnel was faint, and then it faded. I was beating my musical spirit half to death. I dropped out three separate times, then left for good. I did my best to forget that I’d ever liked music until I was 30. I was cooked.

I know others have had better conservatory experiences, but I'll contend that for a lot of us, music "school" is a truly wasteful form of education.

Music is life itself. Music “school”? Not so much

“If I was sometimes played upon, afraid to lose”

For me, the conservatory was a set of very valuable lessons in how not to live, and thankfully my life led me to some much more joyful and energetic places once I got out. But at the time, my musical sprite-self had to crawl away, temporarily defeated by music school.

I promised myself never to chase that dream again, and it took my getting run over by a truck ten years later to shock me back into worldly musical pursuits. That’s a story for a different day. But in between trying and failing to meet the requirements of my “sanctioned” musical education, I was kept alive by records and by the friends who shared them with me.

Records like Talk Talk’s.

“It's my life / Don't you forget / Caught in the crowd / It never ends”

It doesn't matter how you come into contact with Talk Talk, the music lives entirely in its own space.

One that never ends. Here’s me singing it: