Tetragrammaton is among my top three favorite podcasts. Though Rick Rubin famously deals in music (producing hits from legends like Adele, Johnny Cash, Lady Gaga and Eminem), he loves creativity in general, and he has been remarkably encouraging to me along this weird road/mountain/sheer cliff face that is the process of finding my own elusive voice. He published a book recently called The Creative Act: A Way of Being that I have not read. It’s currently in my Amazon cart, and I expect I haven’t taken the plunge for some sort of psychological reasons. I honestly think there’s a breakthrough for me in that book, and, oddly enough, that sounds a little frightening. Break throughs can ask a lot of you.
Even if I wasn’t interested in Rubin’s world-famous guests or his own wonderful insight into the creative process, I would love the podcast for its ads, which are modeled after old 50s advertisements. Rubin himself has admitted that this is his favorite part of his podcast, and I agree. You listen to an ad for macadamia nuts and it feels like someone is selling you this cutting-edge thing called an ice box. The advertiser, in his vintage, East Coast accent uses modern words like “GMO” and yet in the background violins are plucking it out, and somehow it all works so wonderfully.
But the first time I heard Tetragrammaton, I was drawn in not so much by the ads but by the theme song, a sampling from an old instrumental called “Love is Blue,” made famous by bandleader Paul Mauriat.
That it is a song from my childhood, but I also I am a millennial. I feel compelled to say that because I am a tad bit insecure about my age. Please forgive. When I’m 80 I’m sure I’ll offer up my right titanium hip to be the age I am now.
“Love is Blue” and so many other easy listening, department store songs remind me of my grandfather, who would watch Lawrence Welk regularly, and when that one particular blonde woman who played the piano would enter the scene, he’d silence the room with a, “here she goes!,” and wag a bony finger at the floor model tv. “Love is Blue” reminds me of all that.
But when I heard the song in Rubin’s podcast about six months ago, it occurred to me that that was the first time I had heard it in years and couldn’t remember the title. I played the opening notes of Rubin’s podcast for my mother over the phone, and unexpectedly it was my dad that chimed in from the background with the title.
“Love is Blue.”
Now comes my best attempt at music interpretation, which I can hardly wrap my mind around. Over the summer I read Roger Scruton’s Parsifal in an attempt to learn how one makes meaning out of music, partly for myself and partly for my handful of students who come along and really want to write about the music they love. Teaching high schoolers is often marked by the struggle of getting young people to talk about more than just their tastes, and I sort of hoped Scruton’s book would give me some insight into all that.
Well, gosh, it’s Roger Scruton. How could he do any sort of writing badly? But Parsifal deals largely with the lyrics of an opera, and here I am trying to speculate on the feelings of easy listening music. But if I’ve learned anything from my talented songwriter friends it’s that music can say plenty without words.
“Love is Blue” was written for the 1967 Eurovision Song Contest and originally did have lyrics, but Paul Mauriat made the instrumental version famous. Like its title, the music itself seems to suggest a duality. Here it’s cheerful and there it’s a downer, and it averages out to be a song of experience. The tune, were it a soundtrack, would be appropriate for the moment a character learns he has found a love worth suffering for. Or perhaps the love has ended but it was all worth it. It’s not unhappy but it’s also not blindly optimistic.
And I think I like the song also because of that connection with my parents. We revisited the song together and discovered the mystery of its title together, and then after listening to it a few times it made sense to me that it was a good song for our relationship. As I’m sure many grown children have discovered, one’s relationship with aging parents is a tune that moves between major and minor keys. Making it to old age is a good thing. Getting old is sad. Long-lived transgressions can either fester or wither out, and I’m not sure which ones do which. “Love is Blue” feels like a song that documents all of that, from the song’s slow awakening to its hopeful bridge, to an end that winds down like an aluminum toy. I have a feeling that when my parents are gone I will hear the song and be flooded with a mix of both pain and hope. It will play for me both the good and the not-so-good of our relationship. Of course, one can never know entirely what one will feel at that time.
“Love is Blue” is our song and my parents don’t know it. I don’t think I’ll tell them, either. Mother would perhaps request a more cheerful song, say, from Glenn Miller’s collection, and while that music will also remind me of her, “Love is Blue” seems to be a lovely reflection in part because it deals with all sides of the love my parents and I have for each other, the front and the back, the inside and out.
I’m trying out the training wheels of writing here by loosely following the skeleton of an essay that impressed me, in this case being George Saunders’ Substack post, “Best Christmas Carol Ever”?
Also, do check out Rick Rubin’s podcast if you like that sort of thing: Tetragrammaton
And finally, his book that I am afraid to buy: The Creative Act: A Way of Being
I think I first encountered this song as piano sheet music and loved it immediately. I have grown fond of the original recording (performed by Vicky Leandros), though if, like my wife, you can't endure pitchy 1960s pop singing, you should probably stick with Mauriat.