Recently I wrote briefly about my love for Belle & Sebastian's most recent album, Fold Your Hands Child, You Walk Like A Peasant. As Belle & Sebastian are one of the bands I love but don't listen to terribly often, this sparked a mini-renaissence in my Belle & Sebastian listening. That, combined with the albility of my Minidisc player to put all three of the EPs in the Lazy Line Painter Jane box set into one group*, had me listening to this song again recently.
If I love Belle & Sebastian, then why do I listen to them so rarely? The question could be applied, quite frankly, to vast tracts of my record collection; but the answer would only rarely be the same for different bands. In Belle & Sebastian's case, and this might be one of the more common explanations, I forget the way they make me feel. Some bands just feel right to some people, and Belle & Sebastian became one of those for me right after I heard 'Lazy Line Painter Jane' the first time. There's never that many of them, New Order being the only one that springs to mind right now, and they are precious.
The song itself, of course, is marvelous. It is long, almost six minutes, certainly one of the longer songs in the Belle & Sebastian discography**, but it is one of those rare and precious songs that ends too quickly for me, even with an extended instrumental coda.
'This Is Just A Modern Rock Song' is perhaps a good song to compare 'Lazy Line Painter Jane' to. The former is, even at its height, still melancholy, and it seems to me that its length is to give the song time to stretch out and take flight. 'Lazy Line Painter Jane', on the other hand, is flying from the beginning, and stretches out of pure joy over the pleasure of the song. The lyrics aren't that happy (although Being a rebel's fine/But you go all the way to being brutal is still one of my favorite couplets), but there is confidence in the chorus, and Stuart Murdoch and Monica Queen both infuse You will have a boy tonight/Or you will have a girl tonight with a kind of heedless glee; the possibility that she won't just doesn't occur. And that organ! It hovers and flits in the background behind the band's sixties groove, and finally breaks free at the end, during the instrumental coda, and then the whole song just lifts. There is perhaps no other stretch of music that gives me the same feeling of pure joy as the end section of 'Lazy Line Painter Jane', from Lazy Jane/All the time/Painting lines/You are sleeping at bus stops/Wondering how you got your name/And what you're going to do about it to the end.
Queen deserves at least some of the credit here. Murdoch is the nominal frontman of Belle & Sebastian, but Queen is a bit of an enigma. Her voice is amazing; powerful, throaty and full. I've never heard her anywhere else, and don't really expect to, although I'd love to. Sure, I could Google her, but there's a certain appeal in having that voice remain mysterious.
Any time I put something together where I've decided to try to restrain each band to one song (and Wednesday's Emotional Setup is one of those things, although how will be explained in the future), some bands always frustrate me. Ultimately the song I choose for them will be a stand in for other songs of theirs. On another project I'm working on Belle & Sebastian's stand in is 'This Is Just A Modern Rock Song', but here it's 'Lazy Line Painter Jane'. It is, like some of my other favorite Belle & Sebastian songs, strangely cinematic, both of its time and also timeless, and full of joy. Not the empty, hollow sort of joy that accompanies most 'uplifting' songs (and, sadly, most Christian music; Low is a notable exception), but one that fully recognizes what we often have to fight through to find happiness.
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*Living in Canada, my first exposure to those EPs was as a set, and so I persist in thinking of them as such, as almost another album. I did, however, omit 'A Century Of Elvis' from the minidisc version.
**If my memory serves me, only 'The Rollercoaster Ride' and 'This Is Just A Modern Rock Song' are longer.
