Something Set Apart from Time

On John Grant's songs and multisensory nostalgia

I’ve been thinking about the way the past smells and wondering: does memory have a scent or is it more that certain scents can evoke memories?

It’s a common enough experience, I suppose, to encounter objects that, when we smell them, recall the passage of time or tell us something about neglect. We may notice it with spaces rather than individual things: the atmosphere of a room that hasn’t been entered for a while, a shop full of used clothes or books, a ruined building.

We use words like ‘musty’ to describe this sensation. More precise descriptions of smells like these—of any smell really—prove more elusive.

Just like the philosophical observation that one doesn’t need to analyse the individual sounds that make up the creaking door to know that one has heard someone opening or closing it, perhaps it isn’t necessary to muster a precise terminology of scent to know when we are smelling the passing of time.

I was thinking about this during the last week after pulling out a record I hadn’t played for a while. It was from the bottom shelf of my record storage, a mustier section due, perhaps, to being closer to the floor. I was hit by that familiar smell of paper and cardboard that signals a dampness too weak to warp or ripple but strong enough to tell of minor neglect.

The same week I had been into the attic to look through memory boxes, inspired by my recent post on people I may have been and the songs I might play for them. It was surprisingly undusty, yet retained the cold hardness of lesser-used and unheated spaces. The boxes contained objects going back decades. Some smelled of nothing while others had the familiar tang of age.

Both these experiences reminded me of a line that had been jumping out at me from John Grant’s album Boy from Michigan whenever I’ve played it over the last couple of years. The line, from ‘The Rusty Bull’, is ‘it smells like something set apart from time’.

Multisensory nostalgia

Memory and nostalgia have long been favoured topics for songwriters and singers. I can’t really imagine what popular music would be without them. But I’m not sure how many of those songwriters have lingered on the smell of memory or nostalgia. It’s exactly the kind of detail John Grant excels in. Here’s more of the chorus that contains that line that jumped out at me:

And the stairs still creak at the Five and Dime
And it smells like something set apart from time
And I see you smiling at the Tastee Freez
And the Sun's goin' down behind the Maple trees

There are other senses being evoked here too. We have references to sound (the creaking stairs) and to vision (‘I see you smiling’, the sunset and the maple trees). We could probably add touch too, given that stairs that creak often yield to or resist feet that step on them. Taste is also evoked, with the presence of the Tastee Freez.

I think of this chorus, and of Boy from Michigan more generally, in terms as multisensory nostalgia. The line about smell made me notice a line in the title track: ‘As the Winter came to a close and Spring was blossoming, the ground was comin’ alive and it smelled so clean’.

The other important part of the chorus from ‘The Rusty Bull’ is ‘set apart from time’. That out-of-timeness is crucial to memory and nostalgia and has been a recurring feature of Grant’s songs, whether via references to the 1980s in lyrics and music (especially ‘horror movie synth soundtracks’) or the uncanny pastness of his first solo album, Queen of Denmark, with its 1970s folk-rock tones courtesy of Midlake.

In an article I published ten years ago, about the role of nostalgia in the genre I call ‘holiday records’, I focussed on a gap that opens up in the nostalgic mode:

‘The history of nostalgia has seen the concept develop from a longing for home towards a more general longing for the past. Whether temporally or spatially focussed, nostalgia is fundamentally understood as resulting from a gap, a division between what is longed for and the moment of longing.

I went on to suggest that this gap is present not just when we are looking back to a distant past, but also in the present and our initial attempts to represent experience. In other words, we can be nostalgic for things even as we’re experiencing them the first time around.

That might not be how we tend to use the word ‘nostalgia’ in everyday discourse, but I believe that this ever-present representational or experiential gap is important to bear in mind when we talk about the remembered past.

Another distinction that comes out of scholarly work on nostalgia, especially as formulated by Svetlana Boym in her 2001 book The Future of Nostalgia, is that between restoration and reflection. Boym distinguishes these in relation to the origins of the word ‘nostalgia’ in nostos (return home) and algia (longing).

‘Two kinds of nostalgia are not absolute types, but rather tendencies, ways of giving shape and meaning to longing. Restorative nostalgia puts emphasis on nostos and proposes to rebuild the lost home and patch up the memory gaps. Reflective nostalgia dwells in algia, in longing and loss, the imperfect process of remembrance. The first category of nostalgics do not think of themselves as nostalgic; they believe that their project is about truth … Restorative nostalgia manifests itself in total reconstructions of monuments of the past, while reflective nostalgia lingers on ruins, the patina of time and history, in the dreams of another place and another time.’¹

That reference to ‘the patina of time and history’ is crucial to the kind of nostalgia I hear in John Grant’s work. While some of his songs may seem at first to evoke a restorative nostalgia, there is nearly always something more reflective and critical, implicitly or explicitly underlying the evocation of the past.

What gets longed for in many John Grant songs is a future that could have unfolded into something more beautiful and caring but which instead followed an already established road to cruelty, rejection and pain.

Nostalgia for wonder

I’ve been fascinated by John Grant’s use of lists and objects in his songs since the release of Queen of Denmark. I’m particularly drawn to the songs that use lists of objects to access memories and the past.

It’s not so much that I want to know everything about John Grant’s past—though he frequently connects his songs to past experiences when doing interviews—but more that I’m drawn to the way he crafts narratives that allow listeners like me to access personal memories.

As I’ve written before, Grant manages this by choosing suitably evocative imagery that, while often very specific, remains relatable and transferable to other experiences and memories. Kitty Empire says something similar in a Guardian review of one of his concerts:

‘Grant's songs are generous with detail – who said what to who, where, how and why – giving texture to the ongoing, cataclysmic break-up between Grant and his ex. Specifics, though, when written well, become universals. These are no longer just the gory details of one failed relationship between two men. Grant is selling out major venues because his rage, humour and insight apply to anyone who has ever been dumped by anyone cute and emotionally unavailable.’

I agree that it’s often in the highly specific memories of others that we find ourselves connecting. I think this is because it’s the act of remembering that we connect with, and how often that act relies on unusual details.

In my earlier post on lists in music, I used Grant’s ‘Marz’ as an example. It remains one of my favourites and the one that got me thinking about this aspect of his songcraft with its lists of remembered confectionaries. But there are plenty more examples on his later albums.

‘County Fair’—the track that immediately precedes ‘The Rusty Bull’ on Boy from Michigan—uses similar tactics to ‘Marz’. There’s the listing of the remembered things and to similar ends: the recreation of a childhood world and a recollection of the wonder brought on by that world at that time. In this case it’s the memory of the enticing but forbidden rides at the county fair—the Zipper, the Tilt-A-Whirl, thе Matterhorn, the double Ferris-Wheel—and the ‘twist and swirl’ of cotton candy.

As with the sweet shop recalled in ‘Marz’, there’s a sense that these were fantastical or idealised spaces even in childhood and not just now as the foreign countries of the past remembered in the present. As the boy from Michigan says of his experience at the fair, ‘it's hard to believe that the things we are seeing are real’.

These songs hymn not just the difference between now and then but the wondrous difference of discovery, of new worlds in the process of opening.

This, as much as Grant’s more obviously critical takes on the past (recalled homophobia or fear of difference, for example) suggests a critical or reflective nostalgia. ‘I wanna go to Marz’ might seem to be restorative nostalgia, but only if understood as ‘I want to go there now to escape the present’. Another way to think about this would be to consider how places, spaces and events offered escapes and alternative presents and futures at the time that is being recalled rather than at the moment of recollection.

In such a reading, ‘County Fair’ and ‘Marz’ are not songs of nostalgia for actual county fairs or candy parlours, but songs of nostalgia for wonder.

Pain and other objects

Many of Grant’s memory songs are about painful experiences: rejection, homophobia, betrayal, misunderstanding, self-hatred, depression. Some are also about survival and few hymn it better than ‘Glacier’, the closing track of 2013’s Pale Green Ghosts.

The verses cover the experience of being shamed and having people ‘say things beyond belief that sting and leave you wincing’. The chorus, which claims its space as the heart of the song, offers a response.

This pain
It is a glacier moving through you
And carving out deep valleys
And creating spectacular landscapes
And nourishing the ground
With precious minerals
And other stuff
So don't you become paralyzed with fear
When things seem particularly rough

A song about pain becomes a song about how what pain leaves behind can be transfigured.

Pain is presented in the song as an object, the glacier of the title. Glaciers are things we might once have thought of as being set apart from time, objects moving to their own temporal logic, things in extended process. They demonstrated a temporality that we might find difficult to measure in human terms.

That idea seems less feasible now, given the state of the climate, but I’ll stick with the idea of the glacial as something slow and drawn out, because I believe that’s the metaphor that Grant is evoking.

The glacier is a metaphor for pain, but also for song. I’m hardly the first person to point out that what Grant has the glacier do for the routes that pain takes in a body and the traces it leaves in a psyche can also stand in for what a singer-songwriter can do by turning pain into the beautiful landscapes of songs.

That doesn’t mean that we have to buy into the romantic mythology that claims art must come from pain. That isn’t true. Art comes from experience, inspiration and craft in combination with other factors and in ways that can rarely be pinned down completely (which is s good thing). But ugly things can be turned into beautiful things through art.

There’s a lot of metaphorical work being done by the glacier, then. But there’s also what Grant as singer and Grant and Biggi Veira as producers do with the words ‘pain’ and ‘through you’ in the mix, drawing them out and layering them as if dragging them through the landscape of the song. In the first chorus, they emphasise echo:

Later, while keeping elements of echo and reverb, there’s a clearer distinction between the layered vocals but less distinction between some of the words, giving more of a choral effect. The words ‘through you’ blend to become one long sound:

Grant has sung ‘Glacier’ in duet with artists including Conor O’Brien and Rufus Wainwright. A duet with Sinéad O’Connor—who provided backing vocals to Pale Green Ghosts and is credited affectionately as ‘Mrs John Grant’ in the album’s liner notes—appeared on the five-track EP John Grant Gets Schooled. Essentially, it’s the same recording as the album version but with O’Connor taking a lead vocal in the second half and featuring prominently in the chorus:

Here, the vocal layering is even more evident, with a sense of many parts blending and moving apart.²

I find the chorus of ‘Glacier’ enjoyable to sing as well, whether unaccompanied or singing along to the various available recordings. I love finding resonance with that long drawn-out ‘pain’ and then moving through the contours of the melody, feeling the pain/glacier as something moving through my own chest and throat. I imagine—because I haven’t sung it with anyone else—a head voice taking a harmony above me, adding more layers as O’Connor’s voice and the producers’ treatments do in the recordings.

I also remember something I thought while watching John Grant perform at the Sage Gateshead in January 2019. The lighting of the show that night created all kinds of object illusions on stage. During ‘Glacier’, the focus was on Chris Pemberton stage left on keyboards, taking the seat Grant had been using for other ballads, while Grant sang in a shaft of light from above.

He seemed contained, trapped within the light. Sometimes his arm would reach outside the shaft, which only enhanced the illusion that the rest of him was encased. I couldn’t help but think of this solid-looking light structure as an iceberg within which the singer was housed, seeking some kind of comfort or home within the pain outlined in the song.

Another moment from the John Grant concert at Sage Gateshead in 2019. The shaft of light used during ‘Glacier’ caused starker contrasts on stage, but I have no picture of that.

A glacier is something that receives deposits and is a massing of many other objects, from which parts will break off to form icebergs. It is both the accumulation of countless layers over time and the thing that leaves traces in others and creates the contours of a world.

Just like a spectacular landscape, what gets left behind is also what’s out there to discover, to explore, to revisit. That seems to be what Grant is doing with so many of his songs. From Queen of Denmark to Boy from Michigan, and doubtless beyond, he uses the foreign yet familiar territory of his past to sculpt new shapes and to reflect on the patina of time and history.

Songs are things that set us apart from time. They also connect us to time. They are a bridge between, now, then and the future. My John Grant records smell fine for now. I will try to remember to not leave them on those lower shelves for long.

1. Svetlana Boym, The Future of Nostalgia (New York: Basic Books, 2001), 41.

2. I’ve edited the Grant/O’Connor duet above to emphasise the chorus, but of course it needs to be heard in the wonderful context of the full version:

Here are the two of them singing it live in 2013:

Grant with Conor O’Brien:

And with Rufus Wainwright:

Amanda Palmer has also recorded ‘Glacier’ as a duet with her father Jack and performed it live with him. By my calculations, the Palmers make the ‘pain’ last even longer (by about a second) than Grant’s versions, though Amanda clips the word in the live version below.