Salim Nourallah: A Nuclear Approach Pt 2 – The Album

By Liz Berry

“Words are all used up, they are hard to say, they have all been wasted…

… on the shampoo commercials and the ads and the flavorings.

Hollow, beautiful words.

How can you love a floor wax?

How can you love a diaper?

How can I use the same word about you that is used about a stuffing?”

That quote is from the Steve Martin movie, “Roxanne.” The supreme irony is Roxanne itself is a retelling of Cyrano De Bergerac. Nothing new under the sun.

I think of this quote when I think about critiquing things. I’ve done movie reviews before, but only when I truly feel the call to sway. When it comes to music, the only way I can think if it is: it’s not my place. People already get paid to tell other people what to think about music: that it’s great, groovy, it’s got a good beat, it’s easy to dance to. Why in the world would my opinion matter?

Because it’s art. And art needs to be experienced. Without the lens through which an audience views art, songs are closed-room therapy, diary entries only the writer will read.

A Nuclear… approach.

Step one: wear head phones. This album is mixed a certain way and if you listen to it without headphones, you lose out on some of what the listening experience was meant to entail. Just a friendly suggestion.

Track One: Hazy Morning Glow

This song is already a memory in my head.

I try to document what I can when in Salim’s vicinity. He doesn’t do song intros so much as tell stories or drop clues. If I put my camera down between songs, I try to grab the clues as they go by.

If it’s a song like the ubiquitous “1978,” for example, I know that the world won’t suffer if there’s one more copy missing in the digital world.

It was the last show on the February 2020 tour – 02/09/20 at the Black Cat in Washington, DC.

I was already in a low mood knowing our adventure was coming to an end. It was a delight when Salim threw out some Marty Willson-Piper clues and we were treated to this gem.

Track Two: Loved By You

Look for: the clean, almost Joshua-tree era, ringing notes of the guitar and the lyric that gave rise to the title of Salim’s 2018 album, Somewhere South of Sane. This song is earnest. A plea. I want to be loved by you. I need something and maybe you don’t notice. Maybe it feels like you don’t care even if you care a lot. Even if the daily grind is only a grind because you are trying to prove how much you care. But words are words and actions are actions. YOU is the emphasis. Not the collective “you,” not “I want to be loved by you… mysterious person I haven’t met yet.” It’s the pick me, choose me, love me scene from Grey’s Anatomy. In my head, I see someone lost behind a newspaper and the other person has to rip it away – I’ve been here the whole time. It doesn’t matter if it ends badly. Love me and – no matter what – we get to be glad it happened. No wondering “what if.”

Track Three: Under Attack

Look for: the syncopated nature of the chorus – “Ticker tape of useless thoughts…”

I have written before about the “emergency – break glass” nature of songs in my life – and as I have strung these Salim Nourallah-inspired narratives together over the course of several years, I am left wondering if I’m accidentally putting together his biography or my own—this song fits in to that category.

Keep this song to fight off the negative inner monologue that most of use deal with on a daily basis:

If the average human can manage 60,000 thoughts a day and 80% are negative, we can use all the help we can get.

There has to be a moment in the writing of certain songs where the writer pushes back from his physical and/or emotional “desk” with a satisfied grin and says, “damn, I’m good.” This song contains one of those moment: Misery keeps you company/always feeds you loving lies …

Absolute perfection.

Negative self-talk may be lies, but at the end of the day, we are the only ones inhabiting the space between our ears. It’s hard not to listen.

Track Four: I Don’t Know

This is another up-beat number with weighty content.

The optimism possibly of youth/newness… then confusion. Things are a certain way… and then they aren’t. I am here. I am with you. I am doing this thing or that. Remove one piece and the rest start to wobble, topple, fall.

It’s easy to pack the days of your life with so much activity, you can’t or won’t question if you are where (or with whom) you are supposed to be. Work all day, come home, eat dinner, play with the kids, walk the dog, fall in to bed so exhausted, you don’t have the time or inclination to question if you are where you are supposed to be. I’m content… but am I happy?

I don’t know if the future holds is what I want/And that can be a pretty scary thought

Love… and fear. Could there be anything more native to the human condition?

Track Five: You Are Beautiful

This is another song to keep in your emergency kit.

Unlike Under Attack, this song is slower and more wistful but the same themes of negative thoughts and beliefs are woven throughout. Again – we are the only one truly inhabiting ourselves and therefore we are our greatest barrier to just seeing ourselves and where we are; sometimes the greatest liar is our own nature.

We make what we visualize/come to be, come to life

Suicide took a dear friend of mine this year. I can’t help, but think of him when I hear this song.

Sometimes the lens we gaze through is permanently darkened and the light never comes.

And we stay lost.

Still, the message I take away from this song is hope. “You are beautiful… and perfect in every way.”

Track Six: The Sound of Suffering

Pair with Let’s Be Miserable Together (from Salim’s 2020 EP of the same name), sometimes it’s more fun to hang out on your cross than to climb down and live life; to take advantages of good things that might come your way… if you weren’t busy with fingers plugged firmly in ears going “lalala.”

Through the sound of your suffering/Can you hear anything else?

Track Seven: I Can’t Take Another Heartbreak

Another deeply catchy tune that yanks the rug out from under you.

I actually guessed this would be a single (Salim assures me only two of the tracks on the album have that distinction and this was not one of them – color me surprised.)

We all deal with daily heartbreak. To be alive in the 21st century is to be slowly and methodically crushed mentally, physically, emotionally. Daily life and all it contains will break your heart. I’m dealing with everything I can right now and you want to throw happiness in to the mix? There’s no time for that, I’m going to be late for work.

Your partner stands at the home threshold watching you run off. Their heart in a brown paper bag, held out like a sack lunch you forget, “Come back…?”

I can’t right now. No time.

Gut punch line of this track: I love you/You love me/So how come neither one of us is happy?

Track Eight: Avalanche

Listen for: the visceral, unsettling Twin Peaks-style bassline.

This song hurts. The pain will be different to each listener because, again, we are viewing Salim’s art through the lens of our own experience, but this song is easily the rawest track on the album. And unlike the other tracks, with pain as an undercurrent to a snappy beat, there is nothing here to protect us. The doubt, the fear, the what ifs in the other songs all culminate in this deadly lyric: our love don’t stand a chance.

I think a lot of you will understand when I describe this song in terms of cold: how you can occupy space with someone and feel the ice coming off of them in waves. You have to move out of the way, change rooms, go somewhere else or your fingers and toes might start to blacken. A regard you used to be able to bask in; turn your face up to and drink in like flower drinking in the rays of the sun, turns deadly and soon there will be nothing left. No safe place to go.

I read the beginnings of a book or an article or something a long time ago (probably recommended by any of a number of therapists I’ve had), equating relationships to a series of choices to either turn toward or turn away from your person even if the turning toward is to just mention something mundane, “Hey, did you see that thing I saw?” “Huh. Yea, weird.”

The turning away in this song is complete. Lovers are now enemies. Ears are deaf. All the chances used up. Salim’s whispery delivery evokes fear of final collapse and consumption. If I say this any louder, if I ask you to see me one last time, the snow and debris will come rumbling down…

Too late.

Track Nine: Invisible Man

I’m an invisible man/You don’t notice me/I’m like a potted plant…Losing self-respect just as fast as I can

Familiarity breeds contempt. Unlimited access will get you taken for granted so fast your green, leafy head will spin.

A week ago… a month ago… a year ago – name your time frame, the inevitable progression of a relationship will go from the happy, drunk-dazed, rapid heartbeat flush of infatuation (aka The Fun Part) to conquest won. Come here, do this, watch this show I know you hate, do this thing I know you hate, hold my purse, stand there. Wait for me to come back.

The trying stops. The danger begins.

Track Ten: Let Go

This song puts me in mind of the quote about monkeys in rooms writing Shakespeare. I wonder how much of the human experience is practically identical and yet we all suffer shoulder-to-shoulder in silence.

Let go/You’ve gotta let go/Surrender to the things you can’t control

I’ve had a similar idea in mind evolved from years in therapy: control what is in your power to control.

For better or worse, the musical journey is over.

Make whatever sense of it you wish, the material presented here is from a time past in the writer’s life. Decisions were already made, hurts felt, love lost and found and lost again in whatever order makes sense to you as the listener. Like a Little Lending Library or one of those penny dishes at the gas station: take what you need from this song/album/life and move on.

Let go.