Fidelity

For me, the tone of this song comes across as oblique, implied, understated and this captures my imagination. It's like a puzzle for me. Earlier this evening, I was watching an old episode of Secret Diary of a Call Girl, and this song was sound-card to one of the key scenes of the show. I'd forgotten this tune, even though it's a bit of an earworm. Anyhow, youTube.. Songmeanings.. here goes..

Fidelity feels like an irony in how it's used as the title, as so often we are NOT faithful to our true nature, by-passing really showing up in life, NOT living in conscious awareness.

Getting lost in all the sounds and inner voices has an undertone, something like how, if rehearsed often enough, we begin to believe the folklore we script for ourselves. We drift so reflexively into unexamined held-beliefs, and by keeping our world small, its smallness might serve to make it all the more controllable, as in protecting her heart truly, rather than truly letting it beat to its own rhythm.

Hearing all these words and music in the mind - it doesn't sound like she's speaking about a felt sense of something lyrical or harmonious - rather, it feels to music what a life lived in the head, is to living.. it's imaginary life.

The conditional flavour of the song is amplified by her list of what-ifs which stand contrary to fact. She submits that suppose none of these things had happened.. but implicitly they seem to have taken place, in spite of her circumstances. At the same time, we don't really know if she's suffering from loss or heartache. She does seem to acknowledge the unpredictibility of loving; that the willingness to risk is more complex than any ability to engineer desired outcomes. We just can never know how things are going to turn out and sometimes it's easier not to find out due to fear. I garner this from the line, "Suppose I kept on singing love songs just to break my fall.."

The fact that her friends say that it's going to get better, again, it harkens to my impressions of the title, Fidelity, and its ironic usage; that we are often unfaithful to our true nature, abandonning our own wisdom, in favour of the voice of others.

The video for this song has a kind of literal quality, starts off all black and white, with an imaginary lover. Then through an apparent willingness to risk, he takes true form, and life suddenly gets very colourful as the couple are seen to opt to experience life freely, rather than simply think about it.

I enjoy the paint throwing scene in the vid. It reminds me of the Indian festival of Holi. Holi has a lighthearted quality to it, in the way that Valentines Day has in the West. Curiously it's further interesting and happenstantial that the Festival of Holi derives from the Legend of Prahlada and Holika. The moral-of-the-story to this legend is basically that he who torments the truly faithful, will be soundly defeated. Full circle.. Fidelity.