Tindersticks: emotional connect the dots
“El diablo en el ojo” convulses to its end, the strings like caged sirens, the confusion palpable. It screeches out a last whimper, just contained, just able to bring it down to nothing, and then:
Clarity. A bass line. A more focused, but weathered character, relating to us how he got here:
I had shoes full of holes when you first took me in
It’s the second song on the second album by the Tindersticks, and it’s called “A Night In.” Kurt hadn’t heard anything like it before. Even though the experiences differed from his own, “it was emotional connect the dots; I could feel this character.”
This is the song that first introduces, through the bass croon of Stuart Staples, the persona of Tindersticks II. A man of the world, rough and classy, full of the scars of risk. “I had calluses, not sores,” he claims. He wears as a badge of honor his ability to “walk right through” unscathed. He’s kidding himself, of course.
Kurt had always inspired others, entertained others, sustained others. How would he, now, be sustained? Tindersticks was a new type of entertainment for him, for Kurt was living through that pain of a lost love. He had loved a woman, and she had loved him, and then she left. The scars of risk, seen everywhere all the time. Look on the street now and you’ll see it.
The narrator of “A Night In” gets far too close to it for his liking. Who can blame him for “running from the feeling of waking?” How far can we actually allow ourselves to become immersed in suffering? And what do we do when the wave breaks on us?