Musings on Nick Lowe recording

When I was a young man, one of my best friends was a journalist who supplemented his newswriting with being a music critic. He liked the singer Nick Lowe. As the singer has aged, he feels that it is not appropriate for a middle-aged man with gray hair to sing old rock songs, so he has continue to write and perform more acoustic behavior. I was struck by some of his interviews and performances on radio, so, for my birthday, I got his new recording, That Old Magic. I hasten to add here; I get more religious insight and sensibility from secular recordings than I do from much contemporary religious music, in terms of both content and musicianship.

I like the first cut, Stoplight Roses, the best. He takes the image of seeing someone buying a bunch of roses from a vendor at the street corner, and it blossoms into a song about relationships. Lowe is at the stage in life where he knows that relationships require tending, attention, and care. As an Englishman who loves gardening, he knows that stoplight roses are forced roses that lack the fragrance of a garden rose. For him, roses are a present that should be selected carefully for special occasions or as a desperate plea for forgiveness. Buying them as an afterthought seems to him to be a symbol for making one’s life in relationship an afterthought as well. Love is so precious, so in need of tender nurturing that it cannot be even touched by roses for “love’s promise in cellophane lace.”

Failure to tend love, results in the reason for “house for sale.” No, it is not a sign of our economic doldrums, but a sign that the singer is moving on”because this is a place where love used to reside.” Since it is not more, no mere possessions can hold it occupant any longer. It physical decline matches the decline of the “happy home.” After all, is it even possible to advertise a “home for sale?” Still, he wonders if “peace, love and understanding could make it as good as new?”

Relationships are a two-way street of course. So in Sensitive Man, he realizes that he can read his love’s unspoken looks like a book, but at the same time, he often is lost and needs some more direct clues into her thoughts and feelings, so he won’t be left out in the cold. The great risk is in I Read a Lot, lonely and blue don’t even begin to describe his feelings of being bereft. The person finds time a burden without love, so he retreats into the world of fantasy in reading, “population, one.”

He makes the explicit baptismal point that we need to cast of our old self with its faults in order to discover the new self discovered in love that are new every morning. “That little boy lost look doesn’t seem to work so well anymore.” It is self-deception to think that we can help a relationship flourish if we rely on the shame face we dust off on the back of the bathroom door.”

As he faces aging, he considers his hope of “crossing the Jordan’ at death, “checkout time.” Like so many people he misses that heaven is a gift from a gracious God, not the toting up of a moral bookkeeper who sees if the total of good outweighs the wrongs. As he writes, will I be forever damned for a long-forgotten crime?” Yet, he holds out hope that he shall sing Rock of Ages with the angels.

Still., love renews. Love always, always, holds out hope. He closes the record with “Til the Real Thing Comes Along. Far too often, we withhold parts of ourselves waiting for a perfect love that will not be found in this side of the Jordan. Indeed, as Augustine said, our souls are restless until they find rest in God,” the real love that enables us to love fully and well, on both sides of life’s aisle.