100 favourite songs: #72: "There Is An End" - The Greenhornes (featuring Holly Golightly)

It’s a great song in its own right, but I think that my response to “There Is An End” owes a lot to the setting in which I first heard it. I’m thinking that there are, in a sense, two aspects to that response, and the way they interrelate is probably quite reflective of their general relationship as far as their appearance/application in my own life goes. First, there was the emotional and quite instinctive response: “There Is An End” is the song that plays over the opening and closing credits of Broken Flowers, and it wound its way from the cinema speakers out to me at a Nova late show late last year, a sense of endings all around as the year, honours, and university all drew to a close (and, naturally, I was there alone). And the song, in its 60s-invoking garage rock n roll shimmy and sway, was, y’know, exactly right for my mood at the time — contemplative, dreamy, langorous, poetic and touched by a wistfulness and hinted-at sense of loss — and got me all set for the film to come.

Then, over the days and weeks which followed, a slightly more intellectual (but no less deeply-felt) response kicked in, as both song and film settled more and began to make more and more sense. The cryptic lyrics about words disappearing, thoughts rearranging, and all familiar now strange, take on a further resonance in light of the imaginative soul journey undertaken by Bill Murray’s character in the film, not to mention the opening sequence following the progress of the letter; all of this mixing up with and making sense of then-current Lacan (and, especially, “Purloined Poe”) reading and pre-existing thoughts about consciousness, language, and ‘world’ (and, of course, vice versa).

And then, too, there’s the sense that “There Is An End” is really a once-off, never to be repeated, with neither the individual work of the Greenhornes nor of Holly Golightly seeming really to approach the perfection of their collaboration here…

words disappear, words once so clear,
Only echoes passing through the night,
The lines on my face,
Your fingers once traced,
Fading reflection of what was …

Thoughts rearrange, familiar now strange,
All my skin drifting on the wind,
Spring brings the rain,
With winter comes pain,
Every season has an end …

I’ll try to see through the disguise,
But the clouds were there, blocking out the sun …

Thoughts rearrange, familiar now strange,
All my skin drifting on the wind,
Spring brings the rain,
With winter comes pain,
Every season has an end …

There’s an end …