I Do Believe You Are What You Perceive

On Lyrical Cherry Picking, Getting Loaded & Philosophy Through Song

Each time I hear the line ‘her life was saved by rock’n’roll’ in Lou Reed’s hymn to the glory and the transcendent power of rock’n’roll, I truly get a little chill cos I immediately recall what it felt like to be that little five year old girl just shaking and dancing to that fine, fine music, lost in the moment, rock’n’roll coursing through my growing veins. It’s a feeling so pure I want to drink it. It gives me an inkling of what it must be to have religion as your backbone; sanctified, exultant, uplifted and held close.

A handful of songs have become my own looseleaf collected version of Bible stories, an existential roadmap, a How To guide to life. Songs are where I turn to find myself and to find answers. And certain lyrics just resonate so hard they drive a nail in the wall of consciousness and become flag bearers for the soul.

‘I do believe you are what you perceive’ is a seemingly off the cuff Lou Reed lyric from the song ‘I Found A Reason’ on the last real Velvet Underground album Loaded, that I hear as a powerful philosophical proclamation hidden in a romantic pop song, a statement of intent that could have just as easily been written by Dolly Parton, or anybody who ever took their own raw material and fashioned it into something that aligned better with their idea of what was cool or beautiful.

The same song also gives us the equally pertinent advice ‘I do believe if you don’t like things you leave’. Walk away Renee. The overarching theme here is self responsibility. You have the power to create and make what you need in life and to move on down the line if you’re not finding a reason to stay. Which is exactly what a disillusioned Lou did before this opus was released into the world, moving back in with his parents to his teenage bedroom in Long Island and working for his dad as a typist before eventually finding his feet again in his solo career, going on to casually drop more philosophical pearls at our feet with every album, often accompanied by an obnoxious snarl. Lou didn’t want to be a benevolent God, idolised and adored. He found and celebrated beauty in small things; ‘I like to watch things on TV’, ‘Just a perfect day/Drink sangria in a park/And then later/When it gets dark/We go home’. Despite all appearances, Lou Reed embraced the gratitude attitude. And despite his reservations about the album, I still get high on Loaded all the time.

The overwhelming message from the collected songbook of Dolly Parton - who would seem to be Lou’s polar opposite at first glance - is also ‘to thine own self be true’. Dolly has seen it all and has sung our lives and feelings right back to us for over 50 years. Along the long path she’s been traveling she’s been seen as it all too; a sidekick, a punchline, a one-dimensional sex symbol, a traitor to country music, cheap, ambitious, insincere. But with every passing year, the unvarnished truth becomes clearer, Dolly is the same now as she was when she released her first single in 1959, the same as she has always been, and her core commitments to kindness, respect, hard work, plain talking and solid principles, with a joyful zest for love and life and sex and playfulness have elevated her to an iconic shapeshifting quasi-religious vision of all that is great and good in America. Showbiz razzle dazzle and down-home dirt. A rhinestone and a diamond. A blessed angel and a raunchy promise of a good-time, even at 77. Powerful business savvy and corporate branding genius with a pure heart and the best intentions. Her recorded catalogue provides a ticket to ride through the world as Dolly sees it – both mythical and hokey, she advocates for loving freely, dreaming big, appreciating the small things, finding resilience and strength and wonder in nature, time, God and the unexplainable. Absorbing her songs, album by album, year by year, gives the careful listener an accidental compendium of Dolly-osophy distilled through song, that can only be summed up in Dolly’s own lyrics: The day we’re born we start to die, don’t waste one minute of this life, get to livin’.

The answers to everything you need to know to live well are right there inside her songs. She claims her favourite of her own songs is ‘The Coat of Many Colours’ and describes it as being about “respecting the differences in all of us.” Dolly refuses to judge and urges us to do the same - she apparently declines all the invitations she receives to judge; drag shows, singing contests, songwriting competitions, dog shows. She just wants to lift us all up.

The songs of Leonard Cohen are all spiritual devotionals made human, carnal, earthly. He has a knack of elevating the smallest moments to the elysian and letting the sacred be profane. This all-knowing lyric from ‘Anthem’ seems to hit people hard with the understanding that even perfection contains imperfection, and even the broken is beautiful.

There is a crack- a crack in everything
That's how the light gets in

The last time Leonard appeared in public he was 83 and promoting his final studio album, his 14th, released posthumously. Unadorned, he recited these lyrics from the final song on the album:

Listen to the hummingbird
Whose wings you cannot see
Listen to the hummingbird
Don’t listen to me

A final gift. A prayer to meditate upon. A sacred text. Rock’n’roll, the Devil’s music, is full of them, if you listen close enough, like arrows to the heart.