Swell Season “Low Rising”

I got tickets months ago to see The Swell Season, and booked a babysitter long in advance so I could go to the Berklee Performance Center with my wife, on an actual date. We’d seen the movie “Once” featuring Swell Season principles, Glen Hansard and Marketa Irglova, on one of the few dates we’d had she’d become pregnant, now over 2 years ago.

The best laid plans . . . my wife came down with a cold, and just could not rally to get to the show. My Mother-In-Law was willing to play babysitter to both my daughter AND my wife, so I was given the pass to go to the show anyway. But it was the day of the show, and finding a friend to accompany me proved to be impossible.

So I went by myself.

Sitting there in the low light of the venue, waiting for the show to begin, I wondered a bit about what the dynamic of the night might bring.

Glen Hansard and Marketa Irglova had been a couple, but during the recording of their most recent record, “Strict Joy,” they broke up. They decided to keep the band together, finish the record, tour, and move forward. Hansard’s songs are typically about girls and breakups and sadness, and he’s pretty direct about his feelings. There was no doubt that there would be new songs, directly about their break-up.

What must that be like? To be sitting on stage as your ex- stands center-stage and sings about the intimate details of your personal life? And you have to literally play along?

How do you come to a functional truce, so you can continue to work together? Where you have stripped away one element of your relationship (romantic love) but tried to keep the friendship, the partnership, the working relationship, in tact?

Sitting there in the low light of the venue, waiting for the show to begin, I watched a young-ish, twenty-something couple 2 rows in front of me, and wondered where they were in their relationship.

I couldn’t see his face; he seemed to be looking straight ahead, almost motionless, but he must have been talking, because his date was looking at him and smiling. She was in profile from my vantage-point, and her smile rose and relaxed, rose and relaxed, but never disappeared. He must have been telling some kind of funny story, because she wasn’t saying much, but occasionally broke into laughter.

The look on her face wasn’t one of infatuation. And it didn’t have that nervous energy of someone on a date. It was more comfortable. Her body language, and her smile, were relaxed.

So they weren’t on a first, or fifth date. Something more established than that. And they weren’t like that couple in their fifties that had just wandered in. That couple had clearly been married for years and years. They didn’t speak, and they moved as one---he letting her into the aisle in gentlemanly fashion, she helping him with his jacket. But there was no smiling or joke-telling. Not even any talking. They weren’t even really conscious of each other. They just were.

Sitting there in the dark light of the venue, with an empty seat next to me, I watched the body language of Glen and Marketa. He took center stage. She sat at the piano, three-quarter-turned away from the audience. When they switched positions, he touched her, but it wasn’t a familiar, comfortable exchange. More business-like.

He introduced “Low Rising” as a song about sitting down with your partner, knowing things are hard, but that everything is going to be alright.

That, and the whole show really, made me very emotional. I missed my wife.

We’re partners and parents and friends. We love each other deeply. But we’re in a place where the chance for us to sit in the low light of a venue, telling funny stories, sharing a relaxed smile, doesn’t come up as often as we need it. Instead, our world need us. Our mortgage, our girl, our basement refinishing project, leaves in the yard---all those things strip away romantic-love-aspect of a relationship, or at least crowd it out.

I missed her so much, throughout that show, that I even got up in the middle and walked out to the lobby to check my messages, partly hoping that she needed me to come home.

But I stayed, and I’m glad I stayed. I needed to see that show, and feel those songs. To think not about the couple on the stage, but the couple in front of me. And rest my hand in the empty seat next to me, knowing that I still, consciously and deeply, wanted that seat to be filled by love, by romance, by my wife.



See the amazing music video for “Low Rising,” directed by Sam Beam of Iron & Wine.

See some fan footage of the first song of the Berklee show, which shows Glen and Marketa more intimate than they would be at any point in the show.

I don’t know if You Tube really captures it, but one of the emotional highlights of the evening, was Glen’s powerful, solo cover of Van Morrison’s “Astral Weeks.”

Buy “Strict Joy,” and if you haven’t see the movie “Once,” get it on DVD.