Too Many Waltzes Have Ended
Willie Nelson's “Sad Songs and Waltzes” is one of my favorite country songs. It begins like this:
I'm writing a song all about you
A true song as real as my tears
But you've no need to fear it
‘Cause no one will hear it
‘Cause sad songs and waltzes
Aren't selling this year
I'm particularly interested in the way this song conjures two truth claims, the first being the supposed accuracy of a hypothetical song-in-progress—a song that, according to the singer, is as “real as [his] tears”—and the second being the reality of the marketplace in which the song is said to exist, which is to say the notion that such a song, however true or real it may or may not be, is not likely to be heard, much less turn a profit. The formal devices that the singer thinks necessary for the communication of his grief's particulars (that is, the tone of sadness and the musical form of the waltz) are not what's “selling this year”; consequently, no one—not even someone who is listening to “Sad Songs and Waltzes”—will hear those particulars. To be sure, “Sad Songs and Waltzes” is both sad and a waltz, but the words that emerge from the singer's mouth suggest that the song he's singing isn't quite the one he has on his mind . Even as he adheres to the purportedly bankrupt form and tone about which—and in which —he sings, the singer makes reference to some other unheard song, the lyrics to which we must imagine in order to have. What's more, this imaginative act (should we choose to participate in it) will relegate us to the fringes of the market economy assumed by the song.
“I'll tell all about how you cheated,” the song continues, “I'd like for the whole world to hear.” If we try to summon the song that would detail the singer's broken world, we become a subculture within the context of the “whole world” that the singer wishes could hear it. In other words, we become the odd people out who proceed to aid the singer as he tries “to get even,” however doomed that project may be. The song's bridge offers the following bitter comfort to the singer's exiting beloved:
It's a good thing that I'm not a star
You don't know how lucky you are
Though my record may say it
No one will play it
Cause sad songs and waltzes
Aren't selling this year
The cliché of thanking one's “lucky stars” is turned inside out here, as the singer's lack of stardom proves to be his former lover's good and unknown fortune. (For had the singer the power to make the sound of his pain popular, his beloved might well have done harm to herself—or at least reconsidered her abandoning of the singer.) Nelson's hypothetical record doesn't say it; rather, it may say it—which of course implies that it very well may not —but what does it matter? No one will hear it save those who care to invent it and say it for themselves. “Sad Songs and Waltzes,” then, does not chronicle the demise of a romantic relationship so much as it allows its listeners to exist in an alternative economy, one in which they make up break-ups.If we take the idea of a song “as real” as tears to be a kind of musical best-case scenario, we must then recognize the difficulty (which is perhaps to say the inability—and the at-once impotent and powerful generosity) to which Nelson's singer resigns himself. Although they are signs of sadness—call them sadness's vague traces—tears themselves are not sadness; Nelson's imagined song, then, is only as real as the physical manifestation of his pain, not as real as the pain itself, which of course can't be seen or touched or tasted. If his “true” song is as real as his tears, it is also as removed from its origins, for while the eyes and the mind are close to one another, the tears that leave his eyes are not the pain that has entered his mind (to say nothing of the fact that one's heart is hardly one's “heart”). The more “real” song, then, is perhaps the one we compose as we sing and think alongside “Sad Songs and Waltzes”: the song that is not a marketable product, but rather a charitable and evitable process; the song that makes us make—and give away.
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