No. 036 - Cécile McLorin Salvant's “Thunderclouds” changed my life
Poet Elaine Bleakney is walking, wondering, and befriending this song this spring
This Song Changed My Life is an independent music publication featuring essays from people all around the world about the songs that mean the most to them. Created by Grace Lilly, supported by readers.
• 3 min read •
The song that changed my life — I need to bend the prompt a bit. There is usually a song changing my life. Right now it is “Thunderclouds” by Cécile McLorin Salvant.
This song feels like a wondering friend. I will try to explain. I can only explain by how this song makes me feel (wondering, wonderful).
I have a friend. At the beginning of our friendship, we did the thing humans do when they first incline toward and marvel with each other: tell each other “everything.” Our languages riffed and wove. He gave our burgeoning friendship a name: Repetition Club. I love this. The feeling of new friendship: “Have I told you this story? I think I did; I feel like I did before we ever met.”
If Repetition Club is real (it is — and, like all else, subject to change), Salvant is its goddess. “Sometimes you have to gaze into a well to see the sky,” she sings. Once, twice, thrice, four times. It moves from suggestion to invitation to imperative. Repetition Club is about caring and getting through to the other in their lostness. Each time Salvant delivers the line it’s a little different, somehow both strenuous and gentle, and a dash more loony.
There’s a wish blossoming into adamance in Salvant’s repetition in “Thunderclouds,” a gift for ones who love (all of Ghost Song offers itself as a friend to doomed lovers). A relief, her Noel Cowardesque tilt on romantic suffering. Open your mouth and swallow the sun!
If you watch Salvant perform “Thunderclouds” below you will see her smile and beam — and pianist Sullivan Fortner, too. There is something avid and joyful in their friendship — something we know and don’t know about in their performances — I mean, just watch them at home during Big Covid.
I tip my hat to writer Nate Chinen, friend of my youth and onward, for pointing me to Salvant when he first wrote about her for his Substack, The Gig. If you love jazz or music at all, perceived as it lives by a brilliant perceiver, read Nate. Here’s the post he wrote that hooked me on Salvant.
There is so much more to say. Why not sing a song that doesn’t say everything, instead? The last lines of “Thunderclouds,” sung in French by fairy book school children, are from Colette: “In its early stages, insomnia is almost an oasis in which those who think or suffer darkly take refuge.”
And here is Salvant’s note on “Thunderclouds”:
“I was trying to be grateful for everything that was happening to me and saying thank you to even the horrible stuff when I wrote ‘Thunderclouds.’ I was at a place where I was finding gratitude even in things that I was complaining about. The pandemic was a rough period for all of us, and that’s ‘Thunderclouds’ in a nutshell. The thundercloud itself is such a beautiful thing, but it’s also an announcer of doom — I wanted to capture that.”
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About Elaine
Elaine Bleakney is a poet and founding member of Repetition Club. She lives in Asheville, North Carolina, and writes Stranger and Stranger.
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What a beautiful essay! And I don't know this song at all. Thanks!
Cute post! 💌