It’s always interesting to come back to a song you wrote about a few years ago and see if it still evokes the same reaction when you listen to it. Although the song may remain the same, a lot has changed – the world around you, your own life, and perhaps even your own outlook and attitudes. While that doesn’t change the song, it does change the world it now inhabits, and so how you, as an individual, may consider it.
So it is with “For Thy Sweet Love Remembered Such Bliss Brings,” which I first heard on Little Meister‘s ep A Midnight’s Tale three years ago. It was interesting to find, upon rereading what I wrote, that I had taken a contextless overview, describing the music as its own reward, as if considering that such creativity exists in an artistic bubble rather than as part of the world.
The older, hopefully wiser, me sees things differently. Whilst music is indeed in itself a worthy reward, that is a cop-out on my part, an easy and perhaps meaningless description. Today, I consider such delicate and graceful music more of a refuge from the dark and often unfathomable world that races past us.
Found in its space and graceful tones, its wandering sounds, and its welcoming nature are everything that the modern world is not. Although grossly generalising, music has become brash, people, thanks to the internet, boorish, politics mean and art shallow and opportunistic. This love song feels like a refuge, the product of a more innocent and empathetic world, a place where you can take the music at face value and merely enjoy it.
So, if music can be its own reward, all too often, it is created with ulterior motives: a fast track to fame or fortune, celebrity, and sensationalism, the product of marketing men and fashion gurus, music made for and by zeitgeists. This, like everything Marius does as Little Meister’s, is the opposite of that, and that is very welcoming to find in this cynical and monetised world.
The music may not have changed, but the world has, and so have I. As the world becomes a tougher place to find peace, Little Meister’s tracks like “For Thy Sweet Love Remembered Such Bliss Brings” are the antidote; as the light of the artistic world dims, such music is the beacon that we head for.