SONGS FOR A HEALTHY SOUL - SNOW PATROL'S This Isn't Everything We Are

This is Snow Patrol’s most complete song. I heard it on Later With... Jools Holland recently and first impressions had me yearning to hear it again. Last week I watched the guests on The Graham Norton Show ooh and aah after the band performed it and the next morning I woke up to Chris Evans waxing lyrical about it on his radio show. It takes the emotional tenderness of Run and Crashing Cars, gives it that Snow Patrol anthemic swell and then adds the ingredients that make it a song for a healthy soul.

This is a pastoral song. That first listen came at a time when a good friend was going through a dark night of the soul and all I could think about was that this was everything I wanted to tell her. In a game of poker This Isn’t Everything You Are would see U2’s Stuck In A Moment and raises it 64 billion dollars. Keeping it in my friend’s scenario, Bono speaks about the situation itself and asks my friend to look beyond the moment, see beyond the horizontal walls pressing in and rise above the moment to see a more hopeful future. I think that that can be good advice but Gary Lightbody’s lyric hits a deeper spot. Lightbody targets my friend’s life itself and asks her to look not at a wider time perspective but at wider perspective on herself. She is more than this one dimension of her soul that is being oppressed. There is even some practical advice in the midst of the sweep with the advice to not to do anything rash This heartache, deep and damaging as it is, is only part of who she is. Focusing on the other aspects of her life might be that which keeps her on her feet to find that happier day:  

 
Then in one little moment

It all implodes

This isn't everything you are

Breathe deeply in the silence

No sudden moves

This isn't everything you are

Just take the hand that’s offered

And hold on tight

This isn't everything you are

There's joy not far from here

I know there is

This isn't everything you are.

 Brilliant!

Comments

[JM]

That's a powerful lyric. I have to confess to being a bit of a Snow Patrol skeptic in the past, but will definitely check out that song at least.

On a similar theme, I've been enjoying the song "Hard Times" from the newest Gillian Welch record - "hard times ain't gonna rule my mind."