My Heart Still Beats – Tobin Mueller (reviewed by Dave Franklin)

I wish more musicians were as brave and inventive as Tobin Mueller. Sure, there is a place in the world for “woke up this morning,” “my baby left me”, and, increasingly, in the modern age, songs about text messages and night clubs. But do we have to endure so many slings and arrows of this hardly outrageous and indeed unfortunate music?

Better, surely, that music makers have something to say, something to make the listener think, music that can be mused on, hidden depths to be explored. My Heart Still Beats, one of Tobin Mueller’s less common vocal tracks, is such a song, and it is worth noting that although his music falls more often into the realms of instrumental creation when he does offer up a lyrical track, it is because he has something that he really needs to say.

Mueller uses this song to narrate a complex and tragic event. It tells of a beach party crashed by local criminals on the island of Saint Martins. A true story centred on a 19-year-old woman who thinks she has found her Eden, only to have her dreams dashed that very night in the most violent and violating of ways. Justice prevails, but it posits how such an event affects the rest of your life. Can you move on or allow the incident to define you?

In lesser hands, the song would become merely a dark and brooding affair, but here, as it moves through many moods to musically tell its tale, a fantastically varied array of sounds is used to match the unfolding lyrical flow. From the tribal jazz vibe with a Afro-Caribbean flair of the innocent opening chapter to the fluttering flutes and joyous realization of having found paradise, and then through the dark turns that the music takes to reflect the characters’ abduction and brutal torment, we are carried along with the events as described by the music.

And then the musical coda, the narrative after-words that provide the springboard to a life beyond the tragedy of that night, offers hope that a normal life is once again attainable.

My Heart Still Beats is a song cycle, a 3 act musical play that neatly says everything it has to in just 6 minutes, and it is worth noting that Tobin Mueller is also a playwright, something which makes perfect sense when you observe how he uses music to set moods and build backdrops to lyrical scenes, sometimes complimentary, sometimes foreshadowing and anticipating something yet to come.

It shows how he can use a sonic palette to paint with musical hues, use time signature changes like blocks of colour, beats to sketch structure, tone and texture to add detail to the lyrical outline and use rhythm and pace to direct the mind in the same way that a painter uses lines and flow to draw the viewers eye across the canvas and focus on the necessary detail.

My Heart Still Beats is many things. It is a complex but rewarding music piece, ever-shifting, ever-evolving. It is an essential narrative of tragedy and survival. It is an exercise in mood and how music can tell a story as succinctly as the more apparent and direct lyrics that float above it. And it is a reminder that all musical forms impact and borrow from each other – that the musician’s art is also that of the playwright, that the skill of the composer is akin to that of both the narrative novelist and those who use words to conjure the more abstract evocation of emotion, and that the painter just uses a different medium to make visual music.