Modern Lepers & Transcendent Tunes

Every year I'm lucky to find one or two songs that move me well beyond that of the usual ear candy. Songs that feel like they've pulled me into a different place emotionally, or located me in the distant and removed corner of my emotional being. Sometimes it feels like I found the song, but sometimes it feels like the song found me.

In 2008, that song was "The '59 Sound" by The Gaslight Anthem, a song that continues to tug on my emotions when I hear it. If I had to name a list of the most emotionally powerful songs of my decade, this might well earn the top spot. To be young, to know someone young who dies, to be connected to them when they go and to feel that surge of life's limited and vital electricity surging through you in a kind of overload at the same time your knees buckle from grief. All of those emotions get wrapped in this gift of a song, a gift that manages to feel wrapped up and shiny every time I go to open it.

I'll prolly never write a single song. But if I do, if I could write a song, and it had the kind of power to run through someone's mind like "The '59 Sound" runs through mine, like Prefontaine on speed, then maybe that one song would be enough.

Besides, if it's good enough for Bruce, it's gotta be good enough for all of us, right?



At the end of 2009, I discovered a new song to add to that list. "The Modern Leper" by the Scottish band Frightened Rabbit also came out in 2008, and it explores my own little topic of fascination for the 21st Century: the painfully fallible human who knows he's got more than he deserves and can't quite seem to figure out why or how.

While it can't compete with The Gaslight Anthem's raw verve, Frightened Rabbit's song manages the similar task of straddling two emotional worlds: despair and giddiness. It's almost as if the singer is certain he's getting away with something and learning to accept that fate isn't going to punish him like he deserves. It's a song about having your hand in the cookie jar, waiting and waiting for some evil monster inside that jar to bite it off, and then staring in disbelief as your hand emerges, unscathed, with that precious cookie in tow.

The Modern Leper - Frightened Rabbit (mp3)

A cripple walks amongst you
All you tired human beings
He's got all the things a cripple has not
Working arms and legs
And vital parts fall from his system
And dissolve in Scottish rain
Vitally he doesn't miss them
He's too fucked up to care
Is that you in front of me?
Coming back for even more of exactly the same
You must be a masochist to love a modern leper
On his last leg
On his last leg
Well, I crippled your heart a hundred times
And still can't work out why
You see, I've got this disease I can't shake
And I'm just rattling through life
Well, this is how we do things now
Yeah, this is how the modern stay scared
So I cut out all the good stuff
Yeah, I cut off my foot to spite my leg
Is that you in front of me?
Coming back for even more of exactly the same
You must be a masochist to love a modern leper
On his last leg
I am ill
But I'm not dead
And I don't know which of those I prefer
Because that limb which I have lost
It was the only thing holding me up
Holding me up
Well, I'm lying on the ground now
Walking through the only door
Well, I have lost my eyesight
Like I said I would
But I still know
That that is you in front of me
And you are back for even more of exactly the same
Well, are you a masochist to love a modern leper
On his last leg?
And you are not ill
And I'm not dead
Doesn't that make us the perfect pair?
Just you and me
We'll start again
And you can tell me all about what you did today
What you did today

Some people call this song an "indie rock anthem." I don't really know what that means. Maybe it means the singer couldn't get past the first stage of American Idol. Maybe it means they couldn't crack the Billboard Top 10. All I know is it feels mighty damn anthemic to me. I bought "The Modern Leper" on December 28 and have since listened to it on my home computer 17 times. No telling how many times it's played on my iPod, but I've savored it so much that I bought the whole album on January 1 and keep playing it. "Head Rolls Off" and "Good Arms vs. Bad Arms" and "Keep Yourself Warm" are particularly scrumptious.

In "Keep Yourself Warm," he proclaims It takes more than fucking someone to keep yourself warm. HA! People, when you can write those words and mix it with music that makes people listening want to sing those words to the sky and feel some kind of sweet release from the gravitational pull of the planet, then you've done something. Especially if it's not even the most amazing song on the album.