door Roger Klaassen (met dank aan Samy Herskowicz)
Mount Eerie is een muzikaal project van de Amerikaan Phil Elverum. Ik kende de beste man niet, al maakt hij al vanaf 2004 cd’s en lp’s. Vorig jaar verscheen zijn lp ‘Now only’, met daarop het nummer ‘Tintin in Tibet’. Je kunt het nummer hier beluisteren.
Het lied gaat over een herinnering aan een oude (vakantie?)liefde, met wie de ik-persoon enkele romantische weken heeft beleefd. Toppunt van romantiek was het hardop voorlezen van de Franse editie van ‘Kuifje in Tibet’, liggend met zijn hoofd op haar schoot en dromend van sneeuw en hoge bergen.
Op de albumcover geen Kuifje, geen Tchang of Tibetaanse monnik, maar wel een plaatje van Rascar Capac. Hmmm… we gaan de andere liedteksten er ook eens op naslaan. Hieronder in elk geval ‘Tintin in Tibet’.
Tintin in Tibet
Mount Eerie
I sing to you
I sing to you, Geneviève
I sing to you
You don’t exist
I sing to you though
When I address you, who am I talking to?
Standing in the front yard like an open wound
Repeating “I love you”, to who?
I recorded all these songs about the echoes in our house now
And then I walked out the door to play them on a stage
But I sing to you
I picture you
When we first met, you were 22
I drove my truck onto the ferry to Victoria in the morning
Where we met and talked forever in your apartment with evening falling
So I brought my blankets in and slept on the floor right next to your bed
In the morning, barely awake, I saw you standing right above me
Peeling an orange and looking hungry
“Do you want some?” you asked me
And then just avalanched into me with pieces of orange
And weight and kissing and certainty
I remember you a few days later in Tofino
Where we’d driven to play a show you’d set up for us at a surf shop to no one
Then we slept in the back of my truck and got woken up by the cops
So we went down to the fishing boat dock to ask whoever for a ride
Across the water to Meares Island to just get left there for the day
And we did that and brought some food to eat and went through the big trees
Abandoned and in love, totally insane, apart from the rest of the world
We had finally found each other in the universe
Lying on the rocks, waiting for the boat to come pick us up
I read the one book we had with us aloud
With my head on your lap, sinking into you
Tintin in Tibet in French
And we thought of devotion and snow and distant longing in the Himalayan air
High and cold, with a bell ringing out
And then right before you died, thirteen years later in our house
I remember through your gasping for oxygen, you explained
That you were thinking about that high, cold air
Wrapping the globe, singing above the mountains of the Gods
And I do picture you there, molecules dancing
But I’d rather you were in the house watching the unfolding everyday life
Of this good daughter we made
Instead of being scattered by the wind for no reason
So I sing to you
Songwriters: Phillip Whitman Elverum
Songteksten voor Tintin in Tibet © Kobalt Music Publishing Ltd., SC Publishing Dba Secretly Canadian Pub.
