Imagine this: it’s 35 degrees and you’re on a small poolside on some greek island somewhere. The year is 2017, you’re writing a dissertation about grief and landscape, you don’t like your boyfriend, and you and a pal have escaped to the sun to think about philosophy and art and trauma whilst drinking daiquiris and getting really badly sunburnt.
The sky is infinitely blue. Like an Yves Klein on acid. A clumsy and easy metaphor, but I’m making it so there. Your hair is permanently salty or chloriney or somewhere inbetween. The buildings so impossibly white, the roads so impossibly dirty. You smoke cheap greek cigarettes and drink cheap greek wine. You go to fish restaurants and eat the catch of the day and you forget how weird and unstable your life is because nothing matters out here. The sun shatters on the surface of the pool, and in its fragmentations you find a reflection of self you could never have found somewhere whole.
That’s the feeling I get when I listen to Isabella Crowther’s ‘Swimming Pool’. The chime-like opening notes, descending from a height like dew descending on hot summer evenings. Or striking the way the sun does on the surface of the water. There’s something of Ben Howard’s comprehensive musical world building here – where he structures an atmosphere with guitar strings. Crowther builds worlds too, rising and falling like breath.
When her voice slides in, it’s after we’ve picked up a more recognisable guitar strumming pattern. Something akin to the folk I listened to as a teenager and tried to replicate in my bedroom. There’s something nocturnal about this song, even though it evokes the lazy disorientation of bright white light on deep water. Listening to it I feel out of my depth. Perhaps the light itself isn’t sun, but floodlights. The double tracked backing vocals “oh yeah, yeah” the bounced back reflection on the swimming pool’s floor.
I think it’s the pre-chorus that gives me that nocturnal turn. There’s something confessional about it: ‘I feel I’ve been breaking through, and then I feel I’m the deep end of a swimming pool’. I’m not even sure I know what that means, but it has a quality of something whispered to someone over pillow in the dark in the small hours of the morning. I’ve not been able to get the chorus out of my head. It has no words, and its undulations remind me of the odd music of an exhale underwater. The rhythmic front crawl; the rising inhale under a raised arm, the expulsion of breath as you turn your face downwards. That’s the chorus for me, the smooth glide of a body through water.
Yet the chorus opens with this low open string, that lifts the mood entirely. I feel like Icarus flying too close to the sun. I can’t remember what film it is, where someone, lying on their back in some kind of drug induced high, floats above the town. Listening to it now, on headphones at full volume (lol sorry future me for the ear drum damage) in Paris I have familiar feel of untethering. Almost like the only thing keeping me tethered to my own feet is this open string, sounding a shift in the mood. I float, the city street is the deepend of the swimming pool, the people the shuddering water. Boy, I’m in trouble now.
Yet it’s interesting to note that Crowther hasn’t actually mentioned swimming or water for the rest of the song. Rather, its about, I think, the disorienting experience of falling for someone that perhaps you shouldn’t (Boy I’m in trouble, now). The strangely visceral experience, when listening with closed eyes on my bed, of being caught in deep still water, is caught entirely in the song’s sound. It’s truly masterful, really. It’s a kind of escapism we need, right now. Yet it still manages to translate something of the isolation we’re all feeling too. There’s anguish there, as well as a reaching kind of connection to someone else. the ethereality of Crowther’s vocal, as well as the conversational nature of her lyrics almost makes the whole thing seem like a dream of what things used to be like, or what they might be again. Yet, it’s not really of the moment. I feel like, when I listen to it, that I’m sort of listening to a future relic, sent back in time.
An image of white sun, blinding on clear water. Electric eel reflections skittering over the bottom. Me, under water, lying on my back on the bottom, looking up at the surface of the water. Watching the scant bubbles that escape my mouth rise to a surface that shivers and crackles with the acceptance of the sun. My body floating back up to the surface, my head breaking into air, and the frantically taken breaths after a long time of taking none.
A long time ago, I wrote about it here, I went for a very early walk through a park near my house in London. I watched the city unfurl from its suburban slumber, the sun breaking the bank of sky and shooting amber gold into the paleness of dawn. Walking to meet a friend for coffee this morning, I’ve listened to this song on repeat; lost in the shifting Volta of crowther’s vocal. That last time though I spoke about the untethering of the morning feeling dangerous. Like I was losing my grip on solid ground. This time it’s an intricate kind of loosening. The winter is sliding away, the promise of turquoise mornings is found in the cornflower of this one, and the sunlight caught in this track. The laces and ties that bind us to the earth throughout the winter, so that we might save our energy and keep ourselves warm, are beginning to come undone. We strain at them despite the fact that we’re still confined, or locked down, or caught in the couvre-feu. Yet I feel I’m unspooling from the present moment, holding on the the “strings silver inside me”, caught on the open strings of the track, holding on and unreeling. Boy, I’m in trouble now.
I hope you enjoy this bop, though. Tell me what you think of it in the comments, and add it to your playlists.
Goose FM 