james’ opinion

There is a certain response some music evokes in me that I can only describe as relief. I cannot hear the opening bars of These Days without feeling this, as if a weight I wasn’t aware of has lifted from me suddenly. No guitar tone has ever sounded sweeter. Certainly no other piece of music can raise my mood so reliably. Somehow it always takes me by surprise. I exhale, every time, as if sliding into a warm bath. (I am reminded of a Maria Taylor lyric: “There’s just a time when we must / all let go / of the breath that we hold”.) In that sense I suppose These Days is literally breathtaking.

The song, written by a teenaged Jackson Browne and recorded first and most famously by Nico on her 1967 debut album Chelsea Girls, was introduced to me and the rest of my generation through Wes Anderson’s film The Royal Tenenbaums. Since then it’s slowly becoming a bit of a cliché, the number of YouTube (and professional) covers growing steadily each year. (I can’t scoff: I performed it myself at an open mic recently.) I’m told Daniel Radcliffe named it as the song that would play at Harry Potter’s funeral. I have no sensible response to this statement.

Despite its recent popularity the song yet divides people. Many I’ve shown it to maintain that Nico cannot sing. I’m not sure they really mean that— I mean, she’s on-pitch, she holds the notes, you can more or less hear the words all right even through the clipped Germanic accent— but I presume it’s her unusual timbre people struggle with. Her voice is low and sombre and androgynous and very obviously foreign, and I guess some people think that’s ugly. (Or, in at least one case, “retarded”. She’s not retarded, she’s German.)

I don’t agree. Nico’s mannered but pained delivery, older than her years, makes me ache with empathy. None of the numerous other versions I’ve heard over the years, including Jackson Browne’s own (rather tedious) solo recording, has held a candle to Nico’s perfect capturing of the song’s character: this proud woman is facing her life’s regrets with dignity and quiet resignation, but sounds as if she can barely admit this, can barely face the vulnerability of her own confession. It is the saddest, sweetest thing in the world. “Please don’t confront me with my failures,” she politely requests of the listener in the song’s final line. “I had not forgotten them.”

This politeness is, I think, important. I learnt to fingerpick by imitating Jackson Browne’s careful, ornate guitar work (and as far as I’m concerned it competes with Nico’s voice as the star of the song); meanwhile, the strings, politely insistent but never intrusive, attend to the melody like a patient but disapproving butler, careful not to offend. This is all arranged with thin and delicate precision, like china teacups balanced on a tray. You fear at any moment the whole arrangement will topple and shatter.

I think this is These Days’ hidden tension. The song is so precisely and exactly pretty you fear for its life. The urge is to cherish it, to protect it. It seems absurd that so many people now know and love the song, for this is not some brash rock anthem to be tossed around, manhandled; it’s breakable. Handle with care, YouTube.

Nico was unhappy with the finished Chelsea Girls album, the label having covered it with strings and flutes and all manner of cheerful baroque-pop things that went against what I suppose was her preference for simple, raw arrangements. She recorded a lot of icy, witchy, frequently abstract songs afterwards, with harpsichords and screeching feedback and deathly moaning, and I adore much of this, but it troubles me to think that Nico may have gone to her early grave hating These Days. I know, at least, they didn’t play it at her funeral.