Creative Non-Fiction Joshua Sauvageau Creative Non-Fiction Joshua Sauvageau

Stay In My Arms

I haven’t very much ambition for the mad existence of our time

Art should make us FEEL something

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AI does not

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Art should make us FEEL something 〰️ AI does not 〰️

A good friend recently forwarded me an article about an AI—I hesitate to call them—“band,”1 who are presently racking up 1,400,000 plays per month on Spotify.

Anyone with a brainstem could have seen this coming, but this whole pathetic story made my blood pressure spike like a diabetic’s after a double Whopper with cheese meal.

It was a scant thirteen months ago that I filmed this video featuring Colin Meloy, the songwriter and lead singer for an eminently REAL band, the Decemberists (who get 785,000 monthly listens on Spotify). Host Bill DeVille asked Meloy his thoughts on AI in music:

watch from 13:11-14:35

Which brings us to the Roaring Twenties. No, not the one that the current occupant of the White House claims we are in, but the Roaring NINETEEN Twenties. The age of Gatsby, Duke Ellington, the Harlem Renaissance, flappers, the electric chair. A decade before the Great Depression would wipe out our national wealth and drive millions to deaths of despair.

Two of the more influential composers of the decade were George Gershwin (“Rhapsody in Blue”, “An American in Paris”, etc.) and Cole Porter: songwriter extraordinaire who penned classics like “Just One of Those Things,” “Night and Day,” “Begin the Beguine,” “Easy to Love,” etc. etc. Seriously, just look him up.

One of the forgotten composers of this era, and a direct contemporary of Gershwin, Ellington, and Porter, was Marc Blitzstein. Blitzstein was married to novelist Eva Goldbeck. Goldbeck suffered from an eating disorder and succumbed to breast cancer in 1936.

As many creative types do, Blitzstein attempted to transmute his grief into art. His grief-cycle spawned a popular musical (A Cradle Will Rock) and one of the best art songs I have ever heard: “Stay in My Arms”.

Our tempo’s automatic

Science reveals

Our pace is acrobatic

Life moves on wheels

I nearly flatlined the first time I heard “Stay in My Arms”. The jazz-era harmonies hooked me, but it was the heart-wrenching lyrics: timeless and universal (while at the same time so specific to Blitzstein’s grief over his late spouse) that had me listening to it on repeat—sobbing.

The real clincher is in the coda, which requires the singer, for the first time in the song, to ascend to his falsetto voice—the range of vulnerability—to issue a plea, an anguished cry:

I love you

You love me

That much is plain, dear

The world’s insane, dear:

So stay in my arms

[you must hear this version by William Sharp & John Musto]

We know by now that his Love is departed, which makes the singer’s anguish that much more acute. Fifteen years after my first listen, I still get chills every time.

Let’s see AI conjure that.

Blitzstein (1905-1964). Beaten to death at age 59 outside of a Gay bar in Martinique

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