Song Lyric of the Day (The Rolling Stones, on a Line of Cars, ‘All Painted Black’)

“I see a line of cars and they're all painted black
With flowers and my love, both never to come back.”—English rock ‘n’ rollers Mick Jagger and Keith Richards, “Paint It Black,” from the Rolling Stones’ Aftermath LP (1966)

Sixty years ago today, “Paint It Black,” was released as a single in the U.S., eventually spending two weeks at number one during the summer and serving as the lead song of their fourth studio album, Aftermath.

Among the early hits of the Rolling Stones, this one remains distinctive to me. With “Satisfaction” in 1965, Mick Jagger was already well-launched on the misogyny that characterized so many of his subsequent lyrics, and he stayed stuck in the same mental groove in in two songs from this new collection, “Under My Thumb" and "Stupid Girl."

But “Paint It Black” gave evidence of something larger than dissatisfaction with “the birds” that so obsessed the Stones’ lead singer. It’s far more than the sweet, strings-laden melancholy of “Yesterday” by their compatriots in the British Invasion, the Beatles.

From Brian Jones’ unusual, even unnerving sitar opening, the Stones were evoking a severe depression with the potential to throw you off your axis, even locating it in something specific: grief (that “line of cars” suggesting a funeral procession).

“ ‘Paint It Black’—I wrote the melody, he [Jagger] wrote the lyrics,” Richards recalled in his 2010 autobiography, Life. “It’s not that you can say in one phrase he wrote that and he did that. But the musical riff is mostly coming from me. I’m the riff master.”

According to Simon Harper’s May 2025 account, the March 1966 recording session for the tune in RCA’s Los Angeles studio wasn’t jelling. Producer Andrew Loog Oldham had decided that, if no movement occurred in 10 minutes, they’d move on.

Just then, bassist Bill Wyman suggested Hammond organ pedals, with Jones—tiring of his normal six-string guitar and becoming the band’s de facto multi-instrumentalist—tried out sitar chords he’d been strumming, the byproduct of tutelage under virtuoso Harihar Rao.

The song had evolved into something far more mesmerizing and disturbing than what everyone in the studio had been hearing originally. The other Stones supposedly felt that their collective improvisational input entitled them to share songwriting credit on the band’s sixth single with Jagger and Richards.

In the end, it may not have mattered that much. In the early 1970s, to free themselves from their early, pugnacious manager Allen Klein, the Stones signed away rights to this and others up to 1971.

And that would be enough fill most ordinary people with the kind of depression associated with “Paint It Black”—except that the Stones have made so much more money, and been even more savvy about saving it, since then.

Oh, by the way: some audiophiles have their recordings of the song with a comma in the title: “Paint It, Black,” as seen in the image accompanying this post. Why?

Years later, Richards confirmed that it was the band’s intention not to include the comma. It was a mistake on the part of their record company, Decca, that produced the errant punctuation mark.

This reminds me of what happened with one of my favorite Supremes songs, “Stoned Love.” Writer Kenny Thomas had written it as “Stone Love,” intending to evoke the strength of amour with the lyrics. Yet when it came back from the Motown warehouse, the letter “d” had been tacked onto the first word of the title.

I couldn’t help but think that someone at the record plant had been stoned when he made that mistake—and that similarly, a mind-altering substance led someone at Decca to insert that idiotic, confusing, useless comma. If that was the case, it’s too bad that the Rolling Stones didn’t take the cue and quit drugs cold turkey.

Spiritual Quote of the Day (C.S. Lewis, on How God Answers)

“When I lay these questions before God I get no answer. But a rather special sort of 'No answer.' It is not the locked door. It is more like a silent, certainly not uncompassionate, gaze. As though He shook His head not in refusal but waiving the question. Like, 'Peace, child; you don't understand.'” —British novelist and religious author C.S. Lewis (1898-1963), A Grief Observed (1961)

Spiritual Quote of the Day (St. Paul to the Thessalonians, on Hope Despite Grief)

“We do not want you to be unaware, brothers and sisters, about those who have fallen asleep, so that you may not grieve like the rest, who have no hope.

“For if we believe that Jesus died and rose, so too will God, through Jesus, bring with him those who have fallen asleep.

“Indeed, we tell you this, on the word of the Lord, that we who are alive, who are left until the coming of the Lord, will surely not precede those who have fallen asleep.

“For the Lord himself, with a word of command, with the voice of an archangel and with the trumpet of God, will come down from heaven, and the dead in Christ will rise first.

“Then we who are alive, who are left, will be caught up together with them in the clouds to meet the Lord in the air.

“Thus we shall always be with the Lord.

“Therefore, console one another with these words.”—1 Thessalonians 4: 13-18

The 1612 image accompanying this post, Apostle St. Paul, was painted by the Spanish Renaissance painter, sculptor, and architect El Greco (1541-1614), and hangs in Museo del Greco, Toledo, Spain.

Quote of the Day (Alfred Lord Tennyson, on Words and His Grief)

“I sometimes find it half a sin,
To put to words the grief I feel,
For words like nature, half reveal,
and half conceal the soul within.
 
“But, for the unquiet heart and brain,
   A use in measured language lies;
   The sad mechanic exercise,
Like dull narcotics, numbing pain.”— British poet laureate Alfred Lord Tennyson (1809-1892), “In Memoriam” (1850)

 
Alfred Lord Tennyson died 130 years ago today. As part of his duties as poet laureate, he wrote verses made for public occasions, such as “Ode on the Death of the Duke of Wellington” and “The Charge of the Light Brigade.” Even his Idylls of the King, his poetic retelling of the Arthurian legend, may be regarded as a warning to his countrymen on the responsibilities and dangers posed by their growing empire.
 
Since my college days I have been fond of the latter, and even more so of “Ulysses,” a poem of resolution, commitment and courage, even in the face of the unknown—uncharted parts of the world, or the human spirit’s response to aging and mortality.
 
But over the last couple of years—since the start of the pandemic, actually—I have felt a greater connection to a poem in a more private vein: “In Memoriam,” his profoundly moving elegy for his friend Arthur Henry Hallam, who died suddenly of a cerebral hemorrhage in Vienna in 1833, aged 22.

Most famous for its closing verses—"'Tis better to have loved and lost/Than never to have loved at all"—the poem is a far more profound symbolic and philosophical consideration of sorrow over a lost friend. The shy Tennyson ended up with a profound sense of gratitude for how Hallam drew him out of his shell when they were college classmates at Cambridge.

 
The pain of the loss was so profound—and, I suspect, Tennyson’s frustration at not finding the adequate words to describe his grief was so deep—that the poet did not publish this meditation for another 17 years after his friend’s death.
 
What led me to reconsider this poem that I first encountered 40 years ago? My own experience.
 
I was lucky enough not to lose someone close to me in my youth the way that Tennyson did. But age brings a reckoning to anyone lucky enough to live well into middle age.
 
The loss of my parents was hard, but I could console myself with the thought that they had been graced with very long lives. It was a far different matter when, starting in December 2020, I lost five good friends of roughly my age within the space of 13 months.
 
I couldn’t understand why all these people had died decades younger than their parents had been at their time of their passing. I couldn’t understand why I would no longer be able to talk to these people I’d shared so much with. I couldn’t understand why such good people could be gone for good.
 
Like Tennyson, I have found words unequal to the tasks I’ve assigned them—to console the relatives of these friends, or to summarize, as much for others as for myself, what we have collectively lost.
 
Yet, like the poet, I find that words do have their value in a time of sorrow, though not just “Like dull narcotics, numbing pain.”
 
Words bring a semblance of sense and control to minds that, because of the limits of human understanding, still struggle with the wounds and shocks of mortality.
 
In trying to understand what a single death meant to me, words have become a daily means of reevaluation and rededication to all that I will hold beyond price for the rest of my own days. In using words to explain why I valued these friends, I found a way to formulate what I valued.
 
As much as any poet I can think of, Tennyson explored the physical, psychological, and spiritual dimensions of coming to grief. When I think of what each of my deceased friends represented, I keep coming back to the infinite value of a single life in the eye of a higher power—or, as Tennyson put it:
 
“Oh yet we trust that somehow good
Will be the final goal of ill,
To pangs of nature, sins of will,
Defects of doubt, and taints of blood;
 
“That nothing walks with aimless feet;
That not one life shall be destroy'd,
Or cast as rubbish to the void,
When God hath made the pile complete;
 
“That not a worm is cloven in vain;
That not a moth with vain desire
Is shrivell'd in a fruitless fire,
Or but subserves another's gain.”

Spiritual Quote of the Day (Poet Christina Rossetti, on Finding ‘Hope in Grief’)

“Say not, vain this world's turmoil,
Vain its trouble and its toil,
All its hopes and fears are vain,
Long, unmitigated pain.
What though we should be deceived
By the friend that we love best?
All in this world have been grieved,
Yet many have found rest.
Our present life is as the night,
Our future as the morning light:
Surely the night will pass away,
And surely will uprise the day.”—English poet Christina Rossetti (1830-1894), “Hope in Grief,” in The Complete Poems, edited by R. W. Crump and Betty S. Flowers (2001)

This is for all those who lost friends and relatives to COVID-19 this past year—or who could not, because of the disease, be there at the moment of passing for their loved ones.

(The image accompanying this post of Christina Rossetti was painted by her brother, Dante Gabriel Rossetti, in 1877.)

Song Lyric of the Day (Sarah McLachlan, on the ‘Deep and Endless Night’ Before Life)

“Once there was a darkness

Deep and endless night
You gave me everything you had, oh, you gave me life.”— Sarah McLachlan, Séamus Egan and Dave Merenda, “I Will Remember You,” sung by McLachlan from The Brothers McMullen: Original Motion Picture Soundtrack (1995)

The lyrics of “I Will Remember You” reflect, in an often literal way, their first notable context: The Brothers McMullen, a comedy-drama by novice writer-director-actor hyphenate Edward Burns in which a trio of Irish-American brothers sort out their current relationships even as they are haunted by family and cultural history.

But particularly after 9/11, the song grew into something far larger: a hushed goodbye to the dead, replayed repeatedly (helped undoubtedly as much by McLachlan’s angelic vocal as by the hymnlike melody) at funerals and other memorial services for that first great American tragedy of the 21^st century.

These days, these lyrics are reverberating far more insistently around America. The attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon claimed just short of 3,000 lives, but the toll so far from COVID-19 in the United States alone is already nearly 100 times that amount.

The narrator of “I Will Remember You” sings of gratitude to a lover for bringing life after “deep and endless night.” Americans are in the midst of a desolation more engulfing than one individual’s private emptiness, though. Right now, as we prepare for a darker, colder season before vaccines universally distributed assure life, all we can do is obey McLachlan’s tender but weary urging: “Weep not for the memories.”

Film Review: Kenneth Lonergan’s ‘Manchester by the Sea,’ With Casey Affleck

Ever since seeing his directorial debut, You Can Count on Me, back in 2000, I have been eagerly awaiting the chance to see another movie by Kenneth Lonergan. But he had such trouble with Margaret (arguments with Fox Searchlight Pictures over the final cut kept the movie out of circulation for years after shooting ended) that it seemed to come and go before most of the public even knew it existed. For a while, he retreated to Off-Broadway, gravely disappointed with what had happened with his life and career.

Perhaps making a film centered on Lee Chandler, the taciturn, tormented soul of Manchester by the Sea, was therapeutic for Lonergan: no matter how angry, even self-pitying, the director-screenwriter might have felt, his problems could never compare with those afflicting this janitor/handyman.

Lee’s natural habitat is New England in mid-winter: Warmth and light have disappeared from his life. He capably performs his work—shoveling snow, cleaning out toilets, and other assorted jobs. But he never smiles, never becomes emotionally involved with anyone—and frequently annoys tenants and gets into drunken brawls in bars.

In the mid-19^th century, Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick described similar spiritual desolation: “Whenever I find myself growing grim about the mouth; whenever it is a damp, drizzly November in my soul; whenever I find myself involuntarily pausing before coffin warehouses, and bringing up the rear of every funeral I meet; and especially whenever my hypos get such an upper hand of me, that it requires a strong moral principle to prevent me from deliberately stepping into the street, and methodically knocking people’s hats off—then, I account it high time to get to sea as soon as I can.”

As I watched Lonergan’s quiet but profoundly moving drama, I couldn’t help associating Lee with Melville’s narrator Ishmael: the tight mouth, the “damp, drizzly” environment, funerals, even punching people one hardly knows. Lee, however, doesn’t have Ishmael’s option. The sea, where he and his brother Joe cemented tight bonds of freedom and fellowship, is now closed off, like everything else in his life, in a fog of grief and self-laceration.

Flashbacks show both Lee’s happier times and the catastrophe that ended his children’s lives, his marriage and, seemingly, any hope that he might emerge from his self-imposed life sentence. 

But in the present, Lee is, despite himself, jolted out of his numbed isolation: Joe has not only died of a heart attack, but named his brother as guardian of his teenage son Patrick—and even financially facilitated Lee’s move back to Manchester, the town that knows all too well the source of his anguish.

The role of Lee was supposed to go to Matt Damon, but prior commitments led him to withdraw and accept a producer credit. Instead, the part went to Casey Affleck.

A decade ago, Affleck (pictured) performed unexpectedly well in his brother Ben’s adaptation of the Dennis Lehane detective novel Gone, Baby, Gone, and even was nominated for a Best Supporting Actor Oscar for The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford. But offscreen, his participation in a hoax by Joaquin Phoenix and involvement in sexual harassment lawsuits filed by two women (since settled) sidelined him from consideration for roles that might otherwise have come his way.

Now, his performance as Lee thrusts Affleck back into the Hollywood casting conversation. His slow gait and dead eyes reveal more than words can the emotional numbness of his character. To its credit, Lonergan’s script does not provide Lee with an easy way to grace, and Affleck provides this haunted man with a physical tightness that makes his strangled despair easy to understand.

One expects Lonergan, given his background as a playwright and screenwriter, to excel at dialogue, but he also shows an instinct here for emblematic silent moments (e.g., the agony of watching an EMT unit hoist a gurney carrying a loved one into the ambulance)

He also provides multiple members of the supporting cast with moments to shine: not only Michelle Williams as Lee’s ex-wife Randy (in a scene, almost sure to earn her an Oscar nomination, when she vents her anguish in order to get Lee to release his); but also Friday Night Lights’ Kyle Chandler as Joe; Gretchen Mol as Joe’s brittle ex-wife, an alcoholic he doesn’t dare trust to raise his son; Matthew Broderick (a frequent star in Lonergan plays and films) as her new pious boyfriend; and even Lonergan, in a cameo as a pedestrian who, with one remark, goads Lee into one of his rages.

Manchester by the Sea runs counter to the action-packed drama that Hollywood loves. Slow-moving, naturalistic, it thrives on an intense focus on character and refuses to pander to audiences’ wishes for a snap ending that ties everything up in a nice big bow. It simply has the ring of truth about the way that ordinary people live their lives. Let’s hope that during awards season, it is properly recognized.

Quote of the Day (Patrick Swayze, on Honoring Lost Loved Ones)

“When those you love die, the best you can do is honor their spirit for as long as you live. You make a commitment that you're going to take whatever lesson that person or animal was trying to teach you, and you make it true in your own life... it's a positive way to keep their spirit alive in the world, by keeping it alive in yourself.”—Patrick and Lisa Niemi Swayze, The Time of My Life (2009)

Patrick Swayze would have been 60 years old today, and though he lost his life to pancreatic cancer nearly three years ago, the example of how he lived his life endures. We baby boomers, faced with the inevitable loss of loved ones, can find special meaning in the lesson that the star of Ghost and Dirty Dancing learned after the death of his father in 1982.

For all his fame, as Swayze and his widow Lisa recounted in this memoir, the actor was not without pain and disappointment in his life, including his father’s death, his sister’s suicide, the loss of a baby in the third month of Lisa's pregnancy, and Patrick's mid-career alcoholism. Wanting to live his life in a way that would have made his father proud helped him to get off the mat and re-commit to the eternal verities.

(A prior post of mine, written after his death, can be found here.)

Quote of the Day (Queen Elizabeth II, on Grief)

"Grief is the price we pay for love."--Queen Elizabeth II, in "Quotes," Reader's Digest, June/July 2010

Quote of the Day (George Herbert, on Christ and Grief)

“Arise sad heart; if thou dost not withstand,
Christ’s resurrection thine may be;
Do not by hanging down break from the hand
Which, as it riseth, raiseth thee;
Arise, arise;
And with his burial linen dry thine eyes:
Christ left his grave-clothes, that we might,
When grief
Draws tears, or blood, not lack an handkerchief.”—George Herbert, “The Dawning”

This week, I thought I would conduct a little experiment with the “Quote of the Day.” For every day this week, I’ll spotlight some verses—something that this blog, I’ve come to see, does not do enough.

My experiment was inspired by two sources. One was reading, in an essay by David McCullough in an anthology called The Writing Life: Writers on How They Think and Work. The Pulitzer Prize-winning historian quotes the advice that one of his recent subjects, John Adams, gave to son and future President John Quincy: “Read somewhat in the English poets every day. You will find them elegant, entertaining and constructive companions through your whole life." And then this great line: “You will never be alone with a poet in your pocket.”

(Young Adams took his father’s advice to heart—really to heart—confessing later in life, “Could I have chosen my own genius and condition, I would have made myself a great poet.” The subject of his major poetic work, Dermot Macmorrogh, Or, the Conquest of Ireland. an Historical Tale of the Twelfth Century, has great interest for me, but it’s probably just as well that he didn’t continue in this line, as reviewers were pretty savage about his work. Like his later follower in the Oval Office, Abraham Lincoln, Adams found a more natural outlet for his writing talent in prose, particularly as exercised in the law and politics.)

The other inspiration for this experiment was a short story writer-novelist-memoirist, Chris Offutt. At a writers’ workshop I attended a decade ago, he advised members of his fiction-writing class to read some lines of poetry every day, because they made you aware of the weight of words.

For the first entry this week, I thought I would start with the above quote—in the manner that John Adams recommended—with the English 17th century “metaphysical” poet George Herbert. It fulfills my own inclination toward spiritual quotes on Sunday. Perhaps just as important, for baby boomers with aging parents, it serves as a powerful reminder of what needs to be borne in mind throughout their struggles—the enduring grace provided by Christ.