Ain't no love that's guiding me.

Categories: uncategorized

Date: 06 January 2006 10:08:17

I've been listening a lot to my new christmas CDs - The Magic Numbers, David Gray's Life in Slow Motion and The Shins.

I'm particularly taken by "Ain't no love" on David Gray's album - as much of a paean to atheism as I've ever heard. It's probably the most hymny song I've heard on a pop album - bells, angel choirs, the lot. And overlaid on all that just the bleakest lyrics about the mundanity of everyday life if you don't believe in anything.

"Maybe that it would do me good
If I believed there were a God
Out in the starry firmament
As it is that's just a lie
And I'm here eating up the boredom
On an island of cement
Give me your ecstasy I'll feel it
Open window and I'll steal it
Baby like it's heaven sent

This ain't no love that's guiding me

Some days i'm bursting at the seams
With all my half remembered dreams
And then it shoots me down again
I feel the dampness as it creeps
I hear you coughing in your sleep
Beneath a broken window pane
Tomorrow girl I'll buy you chips
A lollipop to stain your lips
And it'll all be right as rain

This ain't no love that's guiding me."

I'm sure David Gray didn't intend that to get me thinking about how I live like that sometimes, even though I should believe the absolute opposite. And about how I shouldn't. But it did.
It's funny how the songs that help me worship God most are very very seldom the churchy ones. This is one, and Gracie, by Ben Folds is another (about his relationship with his baby daughter, which helped me understand more about the fatherhood of god that any chorus ever could). And then there's the sublime Hallelujah, originally by Leonard Cohen, which contains the words I would want most as my epitaph (hey, morbid aren't I?)

"And even though it all went wrong
I'll stand before my Lord of song
With nothing on my lips but Hallelujah"

Beat that, Shine Jesus Shine.