I cried listening to Etta James and Dr. John sing “I’d Rather Go Blind." It was
the middle of the night, and I was watching a dvd from a Time/Life collection
called The Midnight Special—I guess I was on theme (the version I was watching is not available online). When James sang, suffered
really, the lines “When I looked down in the glass I held to my lips and I saw
the reflection of the tears falling down my face that’s when I knew I loved
you, couldn’t do without you, and I’d rather be a blind girl,” I lost it. She
sang with such emotion, voicing the hopelessness of the feeling, the indignity
of that kind of love. That phrase culminated the dialogue between her and Dr.
John, in which a lot was communicated between the heaviness in her voice and
the gravel in his. But it was more than the emotion, it was also the art. The rising
and quieting of the music—moving between the bedroom, the bar, and church—is
the foundation of the experience. The performance was at once an intimate
conversation, an embarrassing revelation, a renunciation, an example of musical
improvisation, an exploration of the relationship between word and sound in
music, and an artistic experience of the highest quality. It felt real and
true (so does the version I link to above, I think).
Ed Sheeran seems to be going for something similar. The
musical sensibility is certainly close: this song aims at the same slow
burning, soulful quality. He also wants to bare it all, to hold his heart in
his hand for you to see and weep with him. But I’m not feeling it. When he says
“Darling, I will be loving you ‘til we’re 70/And, baby, my heart could still
fall as hard as 23/And I’m thinking ‘bout how people fall in love in mysterious
ways/Maybe just a touch of the hand”; I don’t really believe him. It sounds
insincere to me. It sounds like what you say to someone because you know they
want to hear it. It sounds more like flattery or bullshit than truth. It means
to sound real and vulnerable but it just sounds like a song.
But who is the bigger liar here? Is it the performer who
sounds like he is catering to his audience by expressing pretty insincerities?
Or is it the performers who sing as if they are feeling the very sentiments
they are singing about? Isn’t Ed Sheeran being more honest by performing an
untruth, untruthfully? I know these aren’t very penetrating questions. But they
do bring up something interesting about art, I hope. Etta James and Dr. John
do not love each other. They have never been in a relationship. I’m pretty sure
neither of them would choose to be blind over having a broken heart. Everything
they portray and sing about in that performance is an untruth. The truth of
their performance, that is, what appears so real about it is directly related
to their ability to convince us of the artifice. Ed Sheeran seems less truthful
than Etta James and Dr. John because, unlike them, he is not a convincing liar.
