Rising – Talbot, Lost Forever
Joby Talbot – Lost Forever
Sunrise, Wednesday May 6
Grab the coffee.
This one may call for it.
It’s not often we come across an author writing their own obituaries through poetry. Looking, not at what can be salvaged, but what cannot.
For if I’d lost you so
I might have found you
Writing about Loss can be cathartic. It can be an act of self-discovery. A confession. Ritual.
If it were only in a crowd I’d lost you:
Among the runners racing for a train
Joby Talbot translates (what we’ll call) “feelings” into simple musical constructs – a duet, a few dark harmonies, the shape of arpeggios – that magnify our realities. He did so in mystery and supplication during our first encounter with him, the monumental Path of Miracles; he does so in today’s Rising w/, Lost Forever, a brief, immensely thought-provoking work for trebles and piano. (Here, our rock and our foundation, John Grecia.)
We love to sing this because Joby has such a great understanding of “the way music works”: how tiny changes can effect enormous differences in our listening. A sustained, unison note suddenly fractures into two, and the World disappears behind a veil. A recurring pattern breaks and its Absence is Loss. A harmonic center drops in pitch and our Lives becomes overcast; shadows move haltingly in the distance, memories emerge with startling clarity.
You’re lost forever and the actors who will play us are not yet born.
Find a quiet place.
Listen with a friend…
in the banks of clouds which bring the rain.
- The Whole Team @ The Crossing
Lost Forever
music by Joby Talbot
words by Roddy Lumsden, from Roddy Lumsden is Dead
recorded live in concert at The Crossing @ Christmas
December 17, 2017 at The Presbyterian Church of Chestnut Hill
with John Grecia, piano
audio by Paul Vazquez of Digital Mission Audio Services
video art by Steven Bradshaw
* * *
If it were only in a crowd I’d lost you:
Among the runners racing for a train
or gangs of gleaners
cutting through the pasture at nightfall,
their wagons filled with corn.
If it were only in a crowd I’d lost you
Among the runners racing for a train.
Or in the swarms of suitors around you,
or in the banks of clouds which bring the rain
which falls in torrents rakes and swells river.
For if I’d lost you so
I might have found you
Instead of knowing this —
You’re lost forever and the actors who will play us are not yet born.