Sunday Songbook: Impermanence

A collection of tunes about time and transformation

I was about thirteen. I remember sitting at the edge of my parents’ swimming pool, cupping my hands and throwing water into the air. By quickly pulling my hands back, I could see crystalline globes suspended in the air just before gravity reversed their upward course. “Remember this,” I told myself as I took a mental snapshot of the scene.

I figured through sheer force of attention, I could commit a mundane moment to memory for the rest of my life. It was an adolescent exercise in cheating time, by hanging onto something utterly prosaic and transient, yet visually compelling.

In a world of ceaseless change, so much of our lives are about a search for solidity and consistency, if not certainty - and for those of a scientific, artistic or mystic inclination, the universal, sublime or eternal.

Behind all our ultimately doomed efforts to bend, trick or stop time, lies the one great ontological fright. Death, of course: the scythe-wielding spectre that plays a part in spurring our culture heroes on to outstanding feats of creativity or discovery.

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David Bowie, Five Years

News guy wept and told us
Earth was really dying
Cried so much his face was wet
Then I knew he was not lying

Thanks to entropy and/or various cosmic catasrophes, even planets have best-before dates. The opening track from this game-changing 1972 album, Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars, concerns a predicted apocalypse that will wipe out Earth in five years. Luckily for humanity, a bisexual alien rock star named Ziggy - Bowie’s alter ego - intends to save it.

The despair of news watchers at word of humanity’s impending extinction is handled brilliantly in Bowie’s evocative lyrics.

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Porcupine Tree, Time Flies

A powerful meditation on time and transformation by the little-known but lysergically sensational prog-rock band, Porcupine Tree. This beautifully conceived video for “Time Flies” lifts this Floydian 2008 track into the stratosphere.

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Orchestral Manoeuvres in the Dark, History of Modern (Part 1)

Everything you see around you, all those you know, including yourself, will be gone in time. An insight both trite and profound at the same time - yet in this case the bitter pill is sugar-coated with a bouncy melody by Eighties synth-rock masters Andy McCluskey and Paul Humphreys.

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Republic Tigers, Buildings & Mountains

This initially struck me as being similar to OMD’s take on temporality, but relistening to the lyrics, in which buildings and mountains don’t crumble, but “arise,” I’m not so sure about this cryptic but catchy composition from 2008. But I’ve included it anyway!

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Bob Dylan, Everything is Broken

Dylan’s savage Reagan-era rant about a society losing its moral center, as summed up in a litany of broken objects, vows, treaties, etc.

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Cowboy Junkies, Flirted With You All My Life

It’s safe to say the Cowboy Junkies will never have any of their dark ballads covered by fellow Canadian and children’s entertainer Raffi. In this cover of a Vic Chestnut song, the Toronto-based musical miserablists take the ‘flirting with death’ trope to new places. From the band’s 2011 album, Demons.

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Paul McCartney, All Things Must Pass

“Sunrise doesn't last all morning / A cloudburst doesn't last all day.” On the first anniversary of his death in 2002, singer-songwriter George Harrison was honoured by fellow friends and musicians who gathered to perform his songs at Royal Albert Hall. A standout moment in the Concert for George was Paul McCartney’s rendition of the title track from Harrison’s majestic 1970 solo album, All Things Must Pass. (Musicologists tell me the album was inspired by Harrison’s readings of the Asian philosophy of change in Lao Tzu’s Tao Te Ching.)

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Carly Simon, Anticipation

“These are the good old days,” the singer-songwriter sings defiantly in this early seventies hit. That’s what many of us end up believing in retrospect, as we age...but we rarely think at the time!

(Great song, but Carly’s licensing of the tune to Heinz corporation still makes it impossible for me to hear it without thinking of a ketchup commercial that ran for years.)

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William Shatner, Has Been

One of many great tracks from the former Star Trek’s star excellent 2000 collaboration with pianist Ben Folds. And considering the arc of Shatner’s career, a prescient message.

Sleeping At Last, Saturn

From 2014. A stunningly beautiful song about last words is given a fittingly luminous rendering in the music video below.

BONUS VIDEO

Alan Watts, Self as Universe

The sharp Zen philosopher isn’t claiming here that you’re God. He’s pointing out that a widened definition of the ‘self’ allows an entirely different view of our place in the universe.