“My Song” isn’t my favorite song from English poet and musician Labi Siffre, but it is the one that makes me the most intensely nostalgic for the 1970s. The instrumentation, the vaguely Burt Bacharach-ian quality of the melody, and the earnestness of the whole thing immediately reminds me of the generally pleasant if unremarkable music that seemed to surround my childhood.
But it becomes especially powerful when we can hear Siffre performing it now that he’s in his 80s. The hint of defiance in the lyrics is stronger when you know that he survived some of the most tumultuous times to be a gay man. And the line “I know that as long as I live, I will sing my song for you,” no longer feels like the romanticism of a man in his 20s. Knowing that the men he dedicated his love songs to have now passed away, it becomes clear that he’s being true to his word.
I get the impression that Siffre’s music keeps being re-discovered over and over again every five or ten years, as a new generation of people realizes there’s more to it than is evident at first. Apparently his song “Crying, Laughing, Loving, Lying” was used as the theme for the movie The Holdovers. And it’s likely that most people will recognize the hook from “I Got The…” because Eminem used it as the basis for “My Name Is.”
“Bless the Telephone” was released into the world in 1971, the same year I was, but I don’t remember ever hearing it over the past 55 years. Maybe it was just out in the ether patiently waiting for YouTube to randomly recommend it to me and have me sitting on the couch sobbing at 9am. Maybe I did hear it and filed it away, and it’s been lurking in my subconscious all this time, ready to pounce and make the simple line “I love you” feel like getting a sledgehammer directly to my heart.
When I heard the song the other day, a meme was percolating around the phrase “this has been talked about extensively you’re just 21,” and it was just another reminder of how tiresome social media is. That performative hipster mindset taken out of the independent record store and applied to everything, everywhere, all the time. I realized I didn’t care in the slightest that I wasn’t the first to discover or rediscover this simple, magical, song; and I didn’t even care that it was likely recommended by the algorithm because it’s a Tik Tok trend or some such nonsense.
I just thought it was delightful that I can be halfway through my fifties and jaded, and I can still be discovering new, wonderful things.
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