Just three tracks into Tindersticks’ second album, and there’s already more emotion than an ocean can hold. Having traveled from the opening unease of El Diablo en el Ojo, to the weathered rear-view mirror ennui of A Night In, the listener’s soul is already too weary to go on. Especially when, like Kurt, the listener has come with baggage of his or her own.

Kurt’s heart was broken, and he found himself in the depths. But although up close it swells and contracts wildly, life’s emotional tide looks flat when seen from afar. “My Sister” offered Kurt a considered, wide-angle view of the panoramic tragicomedy that life amounts to. So many stories told, so many storytellers. If only we listen hard enough.

Do you remember my sister? How many mistakes did she make with those never-blinking eyes? I couldn’t work it out. I swear she could read your mind, your life, the depths of soul at one glance. Maybe she was stripping herslf away, saying:

Here I am, this is me. I am yours and everything about me, everything you see…
If only you look hard enough.

I never could.

Historians, banking on the “hindsight is 20/20″ axiom, hope that by heeding the past, one need not repeat it. Yet clarity is as elusive in the long view as it is in the moment. For every genius claiming the Dark Ages were dark, four other dunces focus on the light therein. Still, broadening the perspective can help the individual to gain emotional distance and peace. We may not figure it all out, but at least we can spread it out and see it on one single page. Starting with childhood, then:

Our life was a pillow-fight. We’d stand there on the quilt, our hands clenched ready. Her with her milky teeth, so late for her age, and a Stanley knife in her hand. She sliced the tyres on my bike and I couldn’t forgive her.

She went blind at the age of five. We’d stand at the bedroom window and she’d get me to tell her what I saw. I’d describe the houses opposite, the little patch of grass next to the path, the gate with its rotten hinges forever wedged open that Dad was always going to fix. She’d stand there quiet for a moment. I thought she was trying to develop the images in her own head. Then she’d say:

I can see little twinkly stars, like Christmas tree lights in faraway windows.
Rings of brightly coloured rocks floating around orange and mustard planets.
I can see huge tiger striped fishes chasing tiny blue and yellow dashes, all tails and fins and bubbles.

I’d look at the grey house opposite, and close the curtains.

And there, glowing and pulsing, is the other main thread running through “My Sister.” The imaginative view, the dream, based on nothing other than an inborn hope and belief in color. Our lives are never as we dream them. Our surroundings never live up to the life we could imagine for ourselves. Even the most peaceful of us can admit without hesitation that in this world, something is wrong. Does this mean we repudiate “real stuff,” or can we live amongst it?

At the very least, we can choose at each moment to live with valor and class in the midst of it. Kurt remembers the first time he saw Tindersticks in concert:

I went to go see them at The Double Door when we were living in Glen Ellyn. It was standing room only, but before the show, I had  somehow snagged a stool and placed it up against stage right. So I got to sit the  entire time, just being poured over by the music…

The music opened for “My Sister,” and Stuart Staples began speaking the words in his rumbled voice. I think it was my favorite at the time, because the story was so tragicomic [editor's note: Kurt and I both came upon this word independently, I swear it!], and the form unconventional on top of the brilliance of the music and the cello-like tone of Staples’ voice.

Somewhere in the first quarter of “My Sister,” the band misstepped and  the song petered to a halt. Staples turned around, without any off expression to the audience, exchanged a few calm words with the band, “Let’s take it from ‘I can see little twinkly stars…” BAM!  Back into it. It was the smoothest transition from disarray to resume I had ever witnessed.

That night, they were decked out in their tailored suits. I remember it in black and white, not color. It remains as one of the classiest shows I’ve ever seen.

The breakdown on stage and the ensuing recovery make a neat metaphor for what goes on in the song itself. The sister’s tragic life continues:

She burned down the house when she was ten. I was away camping with the scouts. The fireman said she’d been smoking in bed – the old story, I thought. The cat and our mum died in the flames, so Dad took us to stay with our aunt in the country. He went back to London to find us a new house. We never saw him again.

On her thirteenth birthday she fell down the well in our aunt’s garden and broke her head. She’d been drinking heavily. On her recovery her sight returned, a fluke of nature everyone said. That’s when she said she’d never blink again. I would tell her when she stared at me, with her eyes wide and watery, that they reminded me of the well she fell into. She liked this, it made her laugh.

With eyesight returned, the grey and the real are inescapable. Past tragedy is shown in hard light. But the sister embraces it, finds beauty of her own. Maybe hjer imagination still works behind the scenes? What a vivid parallel with the beginning of the narrative, with the sister’s never-blinking eyes, and how the narrator related them to the depth of the well, and the “depths of your soul.”

She moved in with a gym teacher when she was fifteen, all muscles he was. He lost his job when it all came out, and couldn’t get another one. Not in that kind of small town. Everybody knew everyone else’s business. My sister would hold her head high, though. She said she was in love. They were together for five years until one day he lost his temper. He hit over the back of the neck with his bullworker. She lost the use of the right side of her body. He got three years and was out in fifteen months. We saw him a while later, he was coaching a non-league football team in a Cornwall seaside town. I don’t think he recognized her. My sister had put on a lot of weight from being in a chair all the time. She’d get me to stick pins and stub out cigarettes in her right hand. She’d laugh like mad because it didn’t hurt. Her left hand was pretty good though. We’d have arm wrestling matches, I’d have to use both arms and she’d still beat me.

We buried her when she was 32. Me and my aunt, the vicar, and the man who dug the hole. She said she didn’t want to be cremated and wanted a cheap coffin so the worms could get to her quickly. She said she liked the idea of it, though I thought it was because of what happened to the cat, and our mum.

The full arc of the sister’s live is told, then, against a maudlin yet emotionless soundtrack, with jokey trombones and swirly saws. The melodies pile on each other, repeated themes moving harmlessly, linearly, through the grand, elusive epic. What did/does it all mean? The sister chooses to go out on her own terms, in a cheap coffin. She saw in color to the last, haunted perhaps by the fires of the past, maybe even unable to see them clearly, but still laughing like mad.

Kurt looked at his own broken heart and realized it wasn’t even half over, not yet.

Tindersticks: My Sister