By The Landlord
“‘Music’, said Arkady, ‘is a memory bank for finding one’s way about the world.’” – Bruce Chatwin, The Songlines
“We're all like detectives in life. There's something at the end of the trail that we're all looking for.” - David Lynch
“I will not follow where the path may lead, but I will go where there is no path, and I will leave a trail.” – Muriel Strode
“Above all, do not lose your desire to walk: every day I walk myself into a state of well-being and walk away from every illness; I have walked myself into my best thoughts … if one just keeps on walking, everything will be all right.” – Søren Kierkegaard, letter to Jette (1847)
“Walk on a rainbow trail; walk on a trail of song, and all about you will be beauty. There is a way out of every dark mist, over a rainbow trail.” – Robert Motherwell
So where might this week’s topic lead? There’s something that runs parallel in the experience and structure of a song or piece of music and a pathway, trail or road. It usually has a sense of going somewhere, even if that ends up in a loop. Perhaps it’s no coincidence that they can all be a track.
Some go in straighter, more predictable lines where the direction, and destination, a is little more visible and tangible. Others may wind in odd, unpredictable ways, but retains some constant, recognisable, steady features, such as a regular rhythm or undercurrent bass line of gravel, stone, paving or tarmac, some regular riffing instrumental landmarks like lampposts or trees. But there are also also less predictable, irregular sights and sounds, narrative twists, changes of pace and or the sudden melody or vocal that make you wonder where this leads.
A track has its own contours of craggy lines and smooth lines across the map of our aural memory. And as a visual example, while the songs of Joy Division’s Unknown Pleasures follow other themes, while Peter Saville’s cover artwork design was inspired by a data plot of signals from a radio pulsar, I’ve always also associated it as some mental musical map of mountainous walking trails.
Unknown Pleasures cover art by Peter Saville. Pulsar inspired, but also paths and trails of the imagination …
Paths, trails and roads can also be associated with other fundamental emotions and experiences that also carry songs - a sense of repetition, but also escape, of the unknown and the elsewhere, of fear, freedom, danger, surprise, romance – a roadmap of life’s great adventure.
So then, this is a lyric-based topic, and should contain a vast musical mileage even without even needing to stray into metaphor. “Streets”, and as well as “walking/running” are topics that have come up a long time down the road of online time, but certainly, as was with the former, this topic is less about what’s at those physical locations, more about passing through, going somewhere, even if that destination may end up being an existential nowhere. It’s the romance of the road, the tantalising tread of the trail, the perception of the path.
Last week came the passing of the great David Lynch – pioneering film director, writer and music maker of the disturbing, the oddly otherworld and the darkly comic. He pushed his genre into trailblazing new territory. For all his many known styles and traits, one enduring theme and fascinating is with the open road, the unknown destination, recurring in many of his works, from Twin Peaks, as referenced above and in pretty much all of his films. From among the darkest and perhaps strangest, Lost Highway (1997) which begins with a classic, dark open road of the imagination, to his seemingly most conventional, The Straight Story (1999) a touching tale of an old man, Alvin, who travels 350 miles on a lawnmower to visit his long-lost brother. Rest in Peace, Mr Lynch.
Lost Highway …
Songs perhaps will be full of description and stories alongside emotions. Perhaps it’s dusty, dirty, fast or slow, scary, serene, beautiful or boring, challenging, colourful or capturing changing societies. Paths and trails are the stories of civilisations moving and developing, from our ancestors moving of Africa to spread across the globe, east and west, north and south, through the Middle East, Persia and Egypt, to East Asia and Australia, to Europe’s warm south to north steppes mountains and islands and south, and of course across America.
On that route note, perhaps your suggestions might take in the ancient song lines of the oldest and most enduring creativity of human sapiens, the Aboriginal Australian cultures of songlines or “dreaming” tracks, marking routes of "creator-beings", geographical landscapes and trails across a vast continent, mirrored in the sky, and brought to a far wider western audience by Bruce Chatwin’s book.
Seven Sisters Songline by Josephine Mick, Ninuku Arts
There’s something as profound and meaningful about taking ancient paths, trails, tracks or roads on which hundreds of thousands of feet have trodden, just as much as somewhere almost no one has ever been. The once muddy, dangerous, uneven and exposed may evolve into the smooth, paved and sleek, fast and modern, but there’s still a universal sense of connection, momentum and direction across those ancient ways.
So perhaps your ideas might capture some of the most ancient routes that link us to the modern world, mapped by the brutal but brilliantly innovative technology of the Ancient Roman empire, bringing not just roads, but also aqueducts and drainage systems.
Viae Romanae remain in evidence in vast areas of Europe and beyond, and then echoed even in the grid systems of many American cities. Stone-paved and metalled, cambered for drainage, and often flanked by footpaths, bridleways and drainage ditches, they are preserved in in such routes as the Appian Way in modern-day Italy, but also as described in the Itinerary of Antoninus, emperor from AD 138 to 161. As described in his itinerarium:
“With the exception of some outlying portions, such as Britain north of the Wall, Dacia, and certain provinces east of the Euphrates, the whole Empire was penetrated by these itinera (plural of iter). There is hardly a district to which we might expect a Roman official to be sent, on service either civil or military, where we do not find roads. They reach the Wall in Britain; run along the Rhine, the Danube, and the Euphrates; and cover, as with a network, the interior provinces of the Empire.”
The Ancient Roman Appian Way
But you songs might also tread anywhere in the world, on famous or lesser-known trails, from Nepal’s dramatic Annapurna Circuit to the lowly but no less rewarding Peak District beginning Pennine Way, all the way to Scotland’s many gorgeous heather-rich Highlands routes.
Perhaps you’ll musically traverse the Seven Summits of Kilimanjaro, from Uhuru Peak route through lowland rainforest inhabited by colobus and blue monkeys, scrubby montane moorland of the Shira Plateau, or the unearthly moonscape in the shadow of the toothy mountain of Mawenzi.
Perhaps you’ll take the musically surreal, beautiful and historic trail up Mount Sinai, to the echoing sound of the Muslim call to prayer. Or the equally craggy and beautiful but also contrastingly religious site of Croagh Patrick in County Mayo in Ireland, or equally that Emerald Isle’s wind-pummeled Beara Way.
Maybe we could bring to the table the 500 million-year-old massif of Table Mountain in South Africa, with panoramic vistas of the pointed peaks of the Twelve Apostles, the azure water of Camps Bay, knobby Lion’s Head, and Cape Town.
Or the more bizarre, otherworld of Iceland’s landscapes, across the Laugavegur Trail, a place beloved of Björk.
Laugavegur Trail, Iceland
Appalachian Way
Fancy the challenging drama of Ecuador’s Avenue of Volcanoes - the Cotopaxi? Or the trio of granite pillars of Torres del Paine in Chile? Or the better known and most photographed Four Pass Loop of Colorado? Or indeed that American classic of 2000 miles over the Appalachian Trail, bringer of so many great stories in song and soundtrack?
Yosemite Grand Traverse
There are so many more, from Alpine heights of Mont Blanc and around to New Zealand’s Te Araroa to Hawaii’s lush coastline Kalalau Trail.
Kalalau Trail, Hawaii
But let’s close with another that sparks the imagination, and with another film, Werner Herzog's 1972, Aguirre, the Wrath of God, starring the inimitably crazy Klaus Kinski as Lope de Aguirre, who leads a group of conquistadores down the Amazon River in South America in an ill-fated search of the legendary city of gold, El Dorado. The egotistical Kinski wanted the opening to be a close-up of his face. Instead, Herzog rightly created an astonishing opening showing the treacherously dangerous trail filmed on location in the Peruvian rainforest, Machu Picchu and the stone steps of Huayna Picchu, as profound a path as any in the world:
So then, it’s time to blaze your own musical one, and leading the way through the routes of time and memory is the returning pathfinding pioneer Shiv Sidecar! Trail your ideas with links in the comments below for deadline destination at 11pm UK time on Monday. May your routes be noteworthy, and your paths be plentiful.
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