Two incredible songs: Elliot Smith’s “Everybody Cares, Everybody Understands” and Wolf Parade’s “I’ll Believe in Anything”, a song that resolves with the escalating refrain “nobody knows you, and nobody gives a damn either way.”
The former is profoundly depressing and the latter, probably one of the most uplifting songs I’ve ever heard.
A note on the ironic potential of music.
When writers use irony there’s only the words, the meaning, and the distance between the two. Musicians have a further option, to vary the inherent qualities of their medium to comment on the disjunction between word and meaning. Interpretation becomes a kind of artistic triangulation that evolves alongside the progress of a song or, better still, a coherent album.
There’s a lot of potential in a skilled musician with a finely tuned sense of irony.
