We require a work of art to speak to this...

How to describe it? It is Hats. The band is the Blue Nile. They have existed for over twenty years, but have released only three works to the public (Hats is their second album), totalling less than three hours of music.

I mentioned the word “lunacy” before. Melancholic beauty has a certain lunacy to it, if only in the sense that we are very much alone as we experience it, lost inside perception, helpless to persuade another human being of its source—but because of that helplessness I believe there’s an album of this lunatic sort for each of us. It’s an album very like a novel, one of those novels, the few you hesitate to press on friends for fear they will prove unworthy of your friendship. And for fear that you have disclosed too much of yourself, let something slip which you should at all costs keep private. A private, broken love is always more interesting than perfect love. We dislike perfect love, and dislike hearing about it. But miserable love? We require a work of art to speak to this, to contain the misery, perhaps leaven it—at the very least to preserve it for some reason as part of memory and desire, thus remaining a reliable connecting point for that desire. Andrew Solomon once wrote that “depression is the flaw in love.” I do not want to debase clinical depression by throwing that word around when I mean something far less crippling. But for the common sadness of daily—not to mention nightly—living, there is a language of flaws, cracks, bits of experience that stick in perception. Art is among those flaws. If you don’t believe me, investigate what your imagination calls up as random associations the very next time you find yourself staring into familiar landscapes. That picture? That sound? Welcome to your own theory of the melancholic. You are not alone.
Paul Winner, www.maisonneuve.org