Rollercoaster

For me, every EBTG album starting with Amplified Heart has been outstanding, and a welcome break with EBTG's earlier jazz-pop sound. This song is the first salvo, and an outstanding one it is, as is true of the opening tracks of Walking Wounded (Before Today) and Temperamental (Five Fathoms).

This is a simple but powerful song. In contrast to other songs about not being able to move on (Missing, Two Star, Am I Walking To You), 1) I think this one is about the period soon after the end of a relationship, and 2) it contains a ray of optimism (this is my road to my redemption).

However, one thing that's similar about these three songs is that they're from the perspective of the person who was more dependent on the friendship (Missing: the years have proved to offer nothing since you moved) or relationship (Rollercoaster: I'm not really in your head; Walking to you: I met your boyfriend...; Two Star: go on, stop listening to me).

I don't completely get the lyrics. "My life is just an image of a rollercoaster" seems to mean "I'm having ups and downs", but "anyway" suggests "that's always been true and this love then breakup are no different".

I love the lyric "falls to minus zero".

Between 'Worldwide' (1991) and 'Amplified Heart' (1994), Ben Watt suffered a life-threatening condition. Available public interviews have him explain something of the profound impact of this, and the effect of him feeling compelled to write music, or an album, that dealt not with routine forms and expressions that would have continued a natural path and philosophy of 'life' and 'work' such as we are fed and encouraged in by schools and culture at large; but with, fundamentally, the prospect of dying (which faces us all, by the way) and the metaphysical struggles and questions - or at least the salutations of an art - within it's implications.

The album plays, poetically, as a work that listens to it's audience; the purpose is not commercial, but humane. We are (or I feel) invited to share a simple human companionship; not politically - as a John Lennon, or Billy Bragg - but musically, through genuine appropriation of the sentiments and themes we are hearing as much as the comfort of a compassion as the distress of a complainant. Some songs were written by Tracey Thorn, and the feel throughout is that of a couple coming to terms with hardship, and looking, lovingly (or committedly), for a future, for themselves, that is emotionally/spiritually shared and humane; not dominated by outside pressures and demands, whether political and legal or vain and self-imposed and self-induced.

A rollercoaster, ultimately, is a ride that is full of drama and emotion, but is vain:- reality, in contrast (whether experienced as restful or mundane), is faced when we have gotten off. When one undergoes a significant (Christian or philosophical) change or transformation, the information (even claimed 'histories') given as our national and cultural identities (mostly before we were old enough to sift things with anything fitly called discernment), on the whole, becomes subject to this new consciousness - affected by some power of experience - that even preferred teachers (i.e. debate - and perhaps reason, or accustomed reasonings) cannot displace. Persons and practices all become less the fixtures that they were before, depending on how they adapt to (or can be persuaded of) the priority we give to our newly planted meditations and directions.

Believe it or not (and many will testify)… 'redemption' (or relief) is, or can be, found when we are slandered, sacked, robbed and beaten; or, by some course of wisdom, look for humanity in and from sensitive human souls instead of those we can buy or sell.