“It’s Been a Long Time Since I’ve Seen You Smile”: Beirut’s “Nantes” and the Happy-choly

I was oddly resistant to Beirut at first. Well, no. It wasn’t that I was actively resistant; it was just that there was something about Zach Condon’s voice that I couldn’t connect to. I find that funny now, since it’s his voice that makes up roughly 50% of why I love Beirut. I’m not sure what clicked into place for me, but Condon’s is a voice that makes me long for places I’ve never been simply because he evokes the images and feel of them in each note he sings.

The other 50% of my love for Beirut? Well, it’s because they sound like an old-timey, French circus. They have horns and accordions! If I were to recruit anyone to do the soundtrack to the film version of Erin Morgenstern’s The Night Circus, I’d beg Beirut. I’d beg shamelessly. I’d bed proudly. They’d be perfect. Dear god, please, Beirut, please do the soundtrack.

As ever, this is all a terrible, unfair, too-quick summary of what I like about them. But if my posts on pop phenomenology have taught us anything, I seem to do all right at focusing on the particulars of particulars. And I’m focusing on the particular that is “Nantes” from the album The Flying Club Cup.

I may be equally emotionally involved with both this song and “Elephant Gun,” but I find “Nantes” to be a bit more haunting. For whatever reason, I’m a girl who loves to be haunted by stuff. I like books to ruin my life for weeks after I’ve finished them, I want to have to think about a film for an indeterminate amount of time before I can really say anything about it, and I want the feeling of a song to hang around me for days. I want it to seep into my skin, make me feel off-center, disjointed, and off-kilter. I like when a song does that to me because then I know I have to spend more time with it. Some, I’m sure, wouldn’t like a song to do these things to them; why would a person want to listen to something that affects them like that? It’s not a bad kind of off-ness that I experience when I listen to “Nantes,” though; rather, it’s my being unsettled by beauty. Who doesn’t want to get knocked on their ass by the beautiful?

I said the song is haunting. It’s haunting because Condon’s voice, the circus-y feel of the music, and the lyrics make me feel like I’ve lost something. Or someone. You know when you go through a break-up and you need to wallow? You just put on the saddest music you can find, and you curl up inside it, and you just feel everything. One of my mainstays in the need-to-be-sad song category is Morrissey’s “Seasick, Yet Still Docked.” Good god, that song rips me apart. That song makes me feel loss like nobody’s business (I may have to devote a Pop Phenomenology post to that one). Like “Seasick,” “Nantes” is a song I need to curl up in, but it isn’t a soul-ripper. Instead, it’s a place I can go to absorb all the warm, mournful, caramel-y tones of loss without getting sad about it. The song makes me happy-choly instead of truly melancholy, if happy-choly is a thing, that is.

That’s what is so amazing about “Nantes.” It’s a sad little song that doesn’t make me sad at all. Yeah, it makes my heart hurt a little, but that hurting is the reminder that I’m good. I’m okay. Also, I’m going to make happy-choly a thing. Get ready for it.