By The Landlord
“If I cease searching, then I am lost. That is how I look at it – keep going, keep going come what may.” – Vincent van Gogh, The Letters
“Quest is at the heart of what I do – the holy grail, and the terror that you'll never find it, seemed a perfect metaphor for life.” – Jeanette Winterson
“The songs I write are about searching, and they're ambiguous – always to be understood in different ways.” – Donovan
“People who fit don’t seek. The seekers are those that don’t fit.”– Shannon L. Alder
“Scientists derive satisfaction from figuring out the puzzle. It's about the quest, not the grail.” – Isaac Asimov
“A study of history shows that civilisations that abandon the quest for knowledge are doomed to disintegration.” – Sir Bernard Lovell
“Searching is half the fun: life is much more manageable when thought of as a scavenger hunt as opposed to a surprise party.” – Jimmy Buffett
“There's an effort to reclaim the unmentionable, the unsayable, the unspeakable, all those things come into being a composer, into writing music, into searching for notes and pieces of musical information that don't exist.” – David Bowie
Alongside communication via story-telling, it’s arguably what human brains are best at and most designed for. From seeking out the essentials of food, sex, and shelter, to the more profound levels of love, identity, and meaning, it’s just what we’ve always done. The human body is meant for foraging, from fruitful finds on vines to vinyl, but ‘search’ has gradually found a new screen meaning, one dependent solely on the eye and dexterous swiping of thumb. So where does it lead, and what will this week’s our lyrical theme discover on this quest? As well as what, it’s just as much about the act and motivation of seeking, from quick searches to mighty quests, something that structures and shapes, in a nicely circular way, in turn the act of telling stories.
So where do we go first for ideas and inspiration? Books, films, art, songs? So many are about, or formed by some kind of quest. We’ve got a crowded Bar this week filled with guests telling us how. “I think it is a quest of literature throughout the ages to describe the human condition,” comes the distinctive voice of the great director Werner Herzog.
Here are two more from the world of film. “I'm not searching for the meaning of life, but I'm looking for a meaning within my life,” says David Lowery.
“I want to know why I'm alive. I want to understand. It's like exploration; it's like someone being interested in a place and its history, digging into the earth and looking for it, searching - it's a passion,” says actress Juliette Binoche.
“All my characters are searching for their souls, because they are my mirrors. I'm someone who is constantly trying to understand my place in the world, and literature is the best way that I found in order to see myself,” says the writer Paulo Coelho.
“I don't plot my books rigidly, or follow a preconceived structure. A novel mustn't be a closed system - it's a quest,” adds Kurt Vonnegut.
And more specifically, where do we go, and what are we looking for? “What we seek is some kind of compensation for what we put up with,” writes Haruki Murakami, in Dance Dance Dance. “We spend our time searching for security and hate it when we get it,” adds John Steinbeck. What about travelling? The Nigerian writer Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie says: “I think you travel to search and you come back home to find yourself there.”
Above all, songs about quests might likely be about looking for love, love of all kinds. Perhaps that’s what motivates the songwriter and performer most of all. Here’s Janis Joplin: “I've been looking around, and I noticed something: how much you really need to be loved. Ambition isn't just a desperate quest for positions or money. It's just love – lots of love.”
“The eternal quest of the individual human being is to shatter his loneliness,” says the American journalist Norman Cousins.
“But as long as we are looking for love, we will live in fear of losing it,” writes Joseph Rain in The Unfinished Book About Who We Are. As ever Oscar Wilde is here to invert things. From The Picture of Dorian Gray he reads: “I have never searched for happiness. Who wants happiness? I have searched for pleasure.”
Looking for love is a primal urge, but another gay icon, Quentin Crisp is also here to modify that. “The consuming desire of most human beings is deliberately to plant their whole life in the hands of some other person. I would describe this method of searching for happiness as immature. Development of character consists solely in moving toward self-sufficiency.”
But how do we find love? It used to be in a purely analogue way, in pubs and clubs, at work or via friends. But so many now do this online. But perhaps some of the song suggestions this week might come from your classic Lonely Hearts ads, each a nutshell of story and setting. Here’s a witty selection picked from London Review of Books, two of which come with an apt musical theme:
• ARE YOU Kate Bush? Write to obsessive man (36). Note, people who aren’t Kate Bush need not respond.
• TODAY we are kittens, but tomorrow we are tigers. Confused zoologist (F. 34)
• FROM now on I’m only going to reply to my own ads. That’s because I’m funnier and better looking than any of you. Publicist. F. 29.
• SO MANY men to choose from, so few vitamin supplements. Arthritic F. 73
• LIST your ten favourite albums. I don’t want to compare notes. I just want to know if there’s anything worth keeping when we finally break up. Practical, forward-thinking man. 35
Another old-school form of search via small ads has helped create many bands. In 1974 Bruce Springsteen put an ad in The Village Voice looking for a drummer and found E Street cornerstone Max Weinberg. Guns N’ Roses guitarist Slash and Steven Adler posted in LA’s The Recycler and found bassist Duff McKagan, the same method used by Metallica’s Lars Ulrich to find guitar James Hetfield. And apparently Kim Deal was the only person to answer Black Francis’ ad seeking a bassist for Pixies, and she didn’t even have a bass, but borrowed her sister Kelley’s. The rest is history but some ads are less conventional:
Where the ‘arm in this? Def Leppard drummer sought in tribute to the real Rick Allen
So let’s hear from a few musicians on the art, act and motivation of searching and quests. For Sparks’ Russell Mael, this is what leads to so many musical styles. “You're always searching for that new thing you can impose on the givens of pop music - that's when the change becomes something exciting, and not just because we want to say we're chameleons all the time.”
In a great contrast of style, Estonian composer Arvo Pärt leads us down a more sonic path. “Tintinnabulation is an area I sometimes wander into when I am searching for answers – in my life, my music, my work. In my dark hours, I have the certain feeling that everything outside this one thing has no meaning.
Tintinnabulation, as he refers, means bell-like sound, like wind chimes blowing in the breeze or church bells, out of which Arvo manages to find abstract meaning and melody. That’s an unusual search method.
The Slits’ Viv Albertine is a different kind of obsessive seeker. “I've burned all my bridges for the sake of getting as near as I can to the truth. And after years of searching for the truth, you find that that's all you can bear. The truth and nothing but the truth.”
Another intense artist, Nick Cave, takes a different line in his quest. “Despite what people might think, I'm not interested in being dark all the time. I'm actually searching for some kind of light, and I'm always very happy when I can achieve that.”
From light to enlightenment now, and Mary J Blige seeks full-on spiritual redemption. “I've been praying to God to show me how to forgive myself. Because... maybe... that's the thing I've been searching for.”
So many things to search for, and ways to do it. So what is the metaphorical, or indeed actual holy grail and where might we find it? Is spiritual or material satisfaction hidden and waiting for us underground, with many other treasures, courtesy of the characters of the wonderful TV series The Detectorists?
Or are life’s answers found by crossing a bridge by addressing some fundamental questions. Of course, there’s only one way to find out, and that’s via Monty Python:
So where do we start. With a song? That’s not always possible, as this lost clip shows us:
So then, where does your musical quest lead? Leading us on a potentially epic journey, external and internal, I’m delighted to welcome back on the trail our intrepid guest guru ajostu! Please place your searching and quest songs in comments below for deadline at 11pm (UK time) on Monday for playlists published next week.
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