All My CDs, pt 48: The Transit Rider

The Transit Rider - Faun Fables

I recently had a conversation with a friend about finding beauty in ostensible ugly things - things that are grotesque, pitiful, scary, or just plain weird. My friend suggested that any inclination toward the macabre is only morbid fascination, while I argued that often my attraction to such things is genuine and unironic. Sometimes, I like ugly things because they're beautiful.

My love of Faun Fables began with a song about roadkill. And that was actually one of the less experimental songs on this album. I hesitate to speak of my love of this music because it is so beautifully offputting that I do not trust others to see its beauty as readily as I do.

The Transit Rider is a concept album (and you all know how much I love concept albums) about public transportation - mainly trains,  but also touching on other modes of transit. Even with those tangents, the focus on the experience of a rider on a public commuter train is clear and consistent. I first discovered it when I was still spending many of my days on busses - either long-distance greyhounds to visit family or commuting to school via RTA. A bus is not a train, but there are many overlaps in the experience of riding them, so naturally I identified strongly with The Transit Rider.

As to the style of the music, it is difficult to describe, except as strange. The first sounds heard on the album are the distinctive rhythmic noises of a train clattering down a track, and suddenly a human voice imitates its long and plaintive whistle. In a later track is In Speed, a song from the perspective of the train itself, where more voices combine with various instruments to complete an onomatopaeic portrait of the train's sonic reality.

The other tracks similarly blend human voices with instruments or recorded noise to create some unique effects. I No Longer Wish to Compete is a poem spoken in an urgent whisper over the background noise of some crowded public place. The poem is about wanting to retreat from the bustle of urban living to a more solitary, peaceful existence - and the contrast of the whisper over crowd sounds is evocative of that desire.

Other songs are more musical in the expected sense, with sung lyrics and instrumental background, if sometimes with bizarre words. One of my favorites has always been Roadkill, the first Faun Fables song I ever heard. Centering around the image of a dead coyote by the highway, it paints a landscape of other road-related scenes that reads almost like a shamanic ritual. It ties all things together in a very cosmological metaphor of the road itself: "and the gray road (and the gray road) / is the great worm (is the great worm) that eats its tail / beneath our feet."

The House Carpenter is a cover of a well-worn ballad, connected to the transit theme only in that it involves a journey at sea. Yet there are more subtle connections in the themes of abandonment and the fears, doubts and vulnerability that are constant companions of those who travel alone. Several songs refer to that vulnerability. Fire & Castration superstitiously guards against danger with possibly-useless charms. Dream on a Train makes explicit mention of the dangers of falling asleep on public transport. The Questioning portrays the borage of intrusive yet well-meaning conversation that threatens an introverted train rider who may well prefer to ride in silence.

Yet in spite of these threats, there is a peace and a spiritual calmness to be found in travel that is also reflected in many of the songs. Taki Pejzaz, Earth's Kiss, and especially I'd Like To Be seem to evoke the mesmerizing sight of a landscape passing in a train window, detailed yet motion-blurred, and the gentle rocking rhythm of the vehicle allowing the mind to relax and wander into a kind of oneness with all things.

The Great Worm that eats its tail may be continually engaged in self-destruction, but also in self-creation, as is the world itself in its continual moving from one state of being to another. And these are the kinds of mystical revelations that may occupy your mind on such an early-morning commute. I know that's when they tend to come to me.

Next: Family Album