The Hazards of Love

So here we are: episode two. Let’s do it.

I got out of the shower today – I had to get out of the shower twice – because the first time, the music player on my iPhone was shuffling songs from an album. I wanted to play an album – and I’m going to talk to you about the album in a minute – but I wanted to play a specific album from track two, because track one is basically nothing. It’s just a noise. There’s no point; it’s just a slow, warm kind of build-up that takes about a minute.

So I played from track two. Maybe that was bad on me, but what that signalled to Apple was, “Oh cool, you want to shuffle the album, and you also want us to try and mix the bits of the album into each other.” No, dog, I don’t want you to do that.

I just thought, “Oh, I don’t know,” played the actual song I wanted and carried on. And it happened twice more. I kept going into the interface, into the Now Playing thing, to try and toggle things off and on.

I was listening to an episode of Pappy’s Flatshare Slamdown, which is a comedy podcast – actually it’s just called Pappy’s Flatshare now – and I was listening to one of their episodes from, I think it was this week, where one of the hosts, Tom Parry, was bemoaning how technology basically should have stopped about 20 years ago. He was like, in a good strong Midlands accent, “From about 2005, technology should have stopped. They’ve all gone mental. They’ve all gone mad.”

And I was like, yeah, whatever, because they were talking about AirPods and stuff, and there are some useful features and whatever. But I kind of think he’s got a point, man. I just wanted to play an album, and there are now so many toggles.

If I, a 42-year-old man who’s been using technology since it was invented, who’s been using an iPhone since the iPhone 3G before they brought out the 3GS – and, apart from one year in the Android wilderness, I’ve been iPhone-exclusive from 2009, and a Mac user from mid-2009 – if I can’t just play my music because the interface is confusing, your interface is too confusing.

This isn’t me being old. This isn’t me being out of touch. This isn’t “Oh, come on, Grandpa, you boomer,” whatever. No, no, no: you done made your interface too confusing and weird. There are too many options. I had to untoggle four things, and I didn’t know which one was toggled on and which one was toggled off, because it just wasn’t clear enough.

Apple want things to look pretty; they don’t want things to look functional. That used to be a criticism that people laid on Apple many years ago. They used to say they were form over function, and that was not actually true. It was form sometimes – not at the expense of function, but certainly at the expense of cost and at the expense of time and stuff like that. But back in the day they weren’t really form over function. They were design: things should look lovely and beautiful, but they should also work really well. There’s a whole thing about how the computers were really neatly laid out on the inside as well, because there’s a pride in your work and all that kind of stuff. All of that I get.

But it’s got to the point, over the last five–ten years, where there is just this creep towards “It’s got to look pretty. It’s got to look aesthetically nice.” (There goes the train.) It’s got to look aesthetically nice rather than be really functional.

Like, for example, maybe something should light up green to let you know that it’s actually activated. Or orange. Those are good colours to say “the thing is on”. But just toggling between white on a black background and black on a white background – rather than just toggling between the two, how about you use, I don’t know, colour? And it doesn’t have to be colour that’s derived from the underlying content. It doesn’t have to be colour that’s derived from the album art. It could just be its own little hint of colour to let me know that I did the thing. It’s not too much to ask.

Anyway, I got it working. And just that in and of itself – “I got it working” – makes me feel like one of these people who doesn’t understand technology. And I do, I swear. I’m smart, not like people say.

Anyway, the album I was listening to – and I’ve been thinking about this album a little bit since I started watching a new-to-me series or season of Dimension 20, which is a Dungeons & Dragons role-playing visual podcast. It’s something that works where you get about 90 to 95 percent of the benefit of the show without watching. You don’t have to watch it, but it’s fun to watch it. I have it on in the background and I listen to it while I’m working.

They’re very long D&D sessions between six comedians – seven comedians – and they’re great. I really love them. They’re fantastic. The season that I’m watching now starts in a kind of gothic horror vibe, and I really like that world, that aesthetic. I’m thinking more the outside nature kind of thing: vines and fauns and all that kind of stuff. Maybe there’s an element of… I’m trying to remember the place… Narnia, that was the place. Maybe there’s a kind of Narnia vibe. It’s forever autumn – it’s either autumn or winter, it’s never one of the others. Or if it’s spring, it’s because it’s the end of the book.

I dig all that. There are scary things and there’s lore – L-O-R-E – there’s deep lore and just magic in the ground and in nature and in the leaves and the trees. I love it. It’s great. It’s just a vibe.

And it got me thinking about the album The Hazards of Love by The Decemberists, which was the first album of theirs that I’d heard. I’d never heard of The Decemberists before. I now count them as one of my favourite bands. I’m very rarely disappointed by their music. There are some bands that I really, really like, but then there’s been one album where I’ve been bitterly disappointed, or one album that’s just kind of slid past me.

I have that a little bit with Muse, and I kind of want to go back to Muse, because the last album that I thoroughly loved was the… I can’t even remember the actual name of it. The 2nd Law? The 3rd Law? The 4th Law? Despite really liking Muse, I actually can’t remember a lot of the names of their songs, but I really dig them. Weird.

So yeah, The Decemberists have never really disappointed me. But this was the first time I’d heard them, in 2009. I don’t remember where I was when I was listening to it, but I think I either heard a track, or someone talked about it, or there was something – I heard one particular song, and then I got the album. Something like that.

I think I gathered it was some form of concept album without ever really reading into it. I gathered there’s obviously a story that’s connecting these things, but because I didn’t know the band previously, and the band does not typically make concept albums, I didn’t know if this was just what they did. There are lots of interludes and various things, so I didn’t know what the default Decemberists setting was. This was a completely new thing.

There’s a particular track called “The Rake” – or “The Rake’s Song” – which is dark and gritty. Well, I mean, it’s fucking dark. It’s really good, but it’s also grim.

I really, really like the album. From what I’ve read subsequently, I think it’s had mixed critical reception, and one of the problems with it is it’s really hard to know what the hell is going on. You can get a vibe, because there are aspects that are told very clearly. There’s a woman called Margaret who comes upon a fawn. The fawn transmutes – transforms, there’s the simple word – transforms into a man. I didn’t realise it was just a man; I thought it was maybe a bit more mythical from how it was described. But no, it’s just a dude. He’s called William. They make love and they have a relationship and it’s all lovely. And then the darkness happens.

I just read up the story today and I was like, oh, I completely didn’t know what was going on. There’s this great song which is a dialogue between what pretty clearly sounds like a mother and a son. It has this refrain: “This is how I am repaid?” – as a question mark. “This is how I am repaid?” It’s such a great line.

There’s an interlude, and then it proceeds into a new song called “The Rake’s Song”, which is all about a dude what kills his three kids because he doesn’t want to be tied down in marriage. I did not know that those two were not connected. That’s why there’s an interlude in between, but I didn’t know this. They’re not connected.

Because there’s only two singers – that’s what makes this a lot more confusing – there’s only two singers really in the band. There’s a male voice and a female voice, which is helpful enough, but it’s really hard to know: now there’s been a break, this is a new dude, this is not the dude that was just singing.

My head was thinking: because he said, “Can you grant me one night that I can spend as a mortal man?” – he was rescued from the human world and given immortality, and hence his mother, the queen of something or other, Snow Queen or something, is like, “And this is how you want to repay me?” So they come to a deal where she’s like, “I’m going to take you back, and you have to come back into my world, and in exchange you can have one night with your missus.” And he says, “Fine.”

I’m telling this like a “three men, a horse and a…” yeah, walking into a bar.

So then there’s this interlude, and then the Rake comes along. In my head I was thinking, well, part of the deal was that he’s going to… because they’re talking about having a baby. William and Margaret have this whole thing about having a baby. They’re going to have a sweet little baby, and it’s this lovely song, “Isn’t it a lovely day,” and they’re reminiscing and talking about how they’re going to have a kid. And then I’m thinking, well, time has moved on and the guy’s murdered the three kids as some kind of dark bargain.

No, that’s not what happens at all.

What happens is – spoilers – the Rake is a whole new character. He then captures Margaret and takes her across a sea or something, and there’s got to be a parting of a sea. And then William – the dude what was a fawn – vows to sacrifice his life in order that Margaret can go free. So he’ll die as long as Margaret can be set free from this Rake who’s captured her.

Then a thing happens where the ghosts of the three kids – and when I read this, I was like, oh, that makes sense of one of the songs in the album now. That’s where that creepy song comes in, because you’ve got these creepy voices – they come and kill the Rake. Thus the couple are then able to spend their lives together and bemoan the hazards of love.

And that is the plot of The Hazards of Love by The Decemberists, which, now you know it, is worth checking out as an album, because it’s really, really good.

On that note, that’s going to be me. I had a lot of fun doing that. I didn’t know it was going to take me 15 minutes to tell you the story of The Hazards of Love, but yeah, you should definitely listen to the album.

In the meantime, we’re going to have a weekend, and I’ll speak to you again on Monday. So, take care.