If My Heart Were A Ball It Would Roll Uphill

Lyrics

The point of the title being that the heart defies the laws of physics. So, you know, if we're being technically correct (the best kind of correct) it should be something like "If My Heart Were A Ball (Assumed Spherical) It Would, From Rest, Roll Uphill Without Required Force Applied Towards Slope". And, I mean, it's not like the song doesn't already have the most unweildy title of any in the band's catalogue, so really, that lack of attention to detail is just sloppy.

'Love can do the impossible' is the point. Like, say, a band of unfashionable forty-something prog-rockers getting an album's writing, recording, production and release funded entirely by fans' pre-orders through the internet. And this was in 2001, well before the age of Myspace. Or, y'know, the fans of an unexpectedly and unjustly cancelled TV show rallying against the decision strongly enough to get a wrapup miniseries filmed, and through their continued love, keeping it in the public conciousness enough to get further additions to the series made years later. Or, y'know, the kind of love that has nothing to do with fandom, but... that's not really what this song's about. No reason it couldn't be, no reason it shouldn't be, but it isn't.

"If My Heart Were A Ball It Would Roll Uphill" is the final track on Anaraknophobia and it is a decidedly climactic affair. It rocks like a mother for a good long while, and Hogarth's vocals become increasingly frenzied, culminating in a loss of the ability to form sentences.

hard ball dream love now roll
fall clown stain truth space time
race give black white all one
church state god fast as I could cry
laugh hide feel no clouds will
to win sweet seed you me
hard ball dream love now roll
fall clown stain truth space time
never do that, never do that
will to win, will to win, never do that
give black white all one wild
church state now roll
fall clown stain truth space time
race fruit
GIVE
never do that
If my heart were a ball it would roll uphill
All one insane wild sweet heart
Wild rose

I really, really love the stream of conciousness chanting. It's chock full of little callbacks to the rest of the album, and further, and it's all layered over the top of itself so you have many voices all chanting at you from all different directions. That is always a good idea. Trust me.

Video: If My Heart Were A Ball It Would Roll Uphill (Live in Amsterdam, 2001, again)
Did you ever fall in love?

Quartz

Lyrics

Definitely another one for the "Successful Experiments" pile. It's about how much of a fool's errand it can be to try to remain friends with someone after a failed relationship, as quite aptly demonstrated by Big Brother contestants Ziggy and Chanelle this last week. I apologise for that reference to anyone who is not a fan of the show, but they've been my inspiration for picking this song to write about right now, so I felt I ought to give them a mention. Really though, they do fit the subject matter extremely well.

"Quartz" uses an extended metaphor centred around the line "I'm clockwork and you're quartz". (As in "quartz clock". Wikipedia to the rescue, as usual). Hogarth gets a pretty amazing amount of mileage out of this metaphor, and it's pretty much uniformly good mileage too; there's barely anything that's really stretched to accomodate the point, and so very many gems; "You're only happy when you wind me up/And I know you're so reliable it isn't true/And it's so easy for me to break down" is particularly brilliant, but there are so many lines I could be listing here. It's definitely one of the best sets of lyrics Hogarth has ever penned.

And then they take all that and couple it with some truly exemplary instrumentation; Pete Trewavas' mechanical walking bassline, regular as clockwork, is not only a perfect fit for the song, it also gives a pretty unique sound. And not just among Marillion songs; I don't think I know any other song that sounds quite like this, though obviously there is a fairly large library of songs out there that I have never heard, and never will.

It also ends with a couple of my favourite song ending tropes; everything suddenly cutting out with a "One of these days/You're just gonna STOP!", and then that being a fake ending, because whoever the song is adressed to is the quartz and Hogarth is the clockwork in the analogy, and as such needs to take a minute to slowly wind down. I actually never got that until seeing Hogarth's clockwork dance in the video below. I hope this project will continue to increase my appreciation for some of the songs like that.

Video: Quartz (live in Amsterdam, 2001)
Yes, that is a cricket bat.

Separated Out

Lyrics

I guess you could sort of count this one as "important" too, and so I shouldn't be doing it already, but whatever. I stole its name, I thought I should give it the courtesy of early admission too. I'll make up for it by doing a b-side or something tomorrow, OK?

"Separated Out" is all about celebrating the life of the outsider, the freak, the anorak. The Marillion fan. It illustrates this point by featuring a few samples from cult 1930's film Freaks (I know, I know, you can read the sidenotes on the lyrics page too) and such stellar lines as "Am I enough of a freak/To be worth paying to see?" and, my personal favourite, "Everything I told you, including this/I already forgot". It's another one of those big, dumb rock songs we talked about earlier, but unlike that one, this one's pretty fun to listen to, if you're in the right mood. I speak from experience when I say that being in a room full of hundreds of other freaks certainly helps you get into that mood, which is why this is one of their live staples, despite not actually being all that great on record.

And then there's "If you like I'll tell you about it/You wouldn't want to know" which quite excellently encapsulates the dilemma that I'm sure anyone who is a fan of anything at all has faced at some point in there lives; you want to shout your love out from the rooftops, you want everyone in the world to know about this wonderful thing that you have discovered, but in all likelihood, they won't understand and all you'll get is funny looks. Which is where yesterday's entry comes in: "They'll laugh at you anyway/So why don't you stand up and be beautiful?" See, there is a plan here. Yeah, right.

We accept her one of us, we accept her one of us, gooble gobble, gooble gobble, WE ACCEPT HER WE ACCEPT HER

Video: Separated Out (Live from Forum, London, 5/12/2005)
Poor quality, and only the first two minutes, but dude! I was THERE!