Ponytail Picks #19 - Water
Pour yourself a big ol’ glass of H20 and dive into our picks for this week. Nobody drinks enough of the stuff anyway.
LISTEN
4 Ways Water Can Seep Into Songs
The Doors - “Riders on the Storm”
The sound of thunder is a pet sound of mine. I love it, whether it’s coming from a weather pattern or in the background of a song, like it is here. I know The Doors are a controversial band. Not everyone likes their long, drawn-out jams. But their use of this storm sound couldn’t be better.
The Shins - “Your Algebra”
I had to go looking for this song. I knew I remembered hearing water dripping somewhere on The Shins’ Oh, Inverted World, but I couldn’t remember which track it was on, and “Your Algebra” isn’t exactly the album’s most popular tune. But the atmosphere it creates wouldn’t exist without the drip-drop that’s all too familiar to anyone from the Pacific Northwest. It makes me think of home.
Andy Shauf - “Eyes of Them All”
The water sound in “Eyes of Them All” is the most subtle one on this list. But if you pay close attention, you can recognize the liquid’s influence in the glass-rim note held throughout the song—another favourite sound of mine. Judging by the theme of the album, there’s a good chance that glass is filled with something a little more inebriating, but we’ll let it slide.
Otis Redding - “(Sittin’ On) the Dock of the Bay”
Here’s a song everyone can love. And how does it start? With the ebb and flow of a peaceful shoreline. The lyrics aren’t exactly peaceful. They’re rife with sadness, frustration, and longing. Looks like nothing’s gonna change, Otis sings. Everything still remains the same. But the rhythm of the ocean joins in as if to say, “Change is constant, buddy.” Maybe not the condolence he was looking for, but it sure makes the song beautiful.
-AK
Any aquatic appearances in music you think I missed? Leave them in the comments below.
WATCH
All is Lost (2013)
Robert Redford on a boat in the middle of the ocean. Pretty much music and dialogue-free except for an appropriate “FUUUUUCK” somewhere in there. This, combined with the frequent long takes make it an immersive and exhausting watch—you’re right there with him through the ups and the downs (that’s waves for ya). The water is relentless and threatens life as much as it gives it.
The Lighthouse (2019)
Water’s the worst, especially when yer on a godforsaken island in the middle of the sea. The slime, the monsters, the seemingly endless depths. Take Thomas Wake’s soggy curse of his lighthouse-keeping partner Winslow:
Hark Triton, hark! Bellow, bid our father the Sea King rise from the depths full foul in his fury! Black waves teeming with salt foam to smother this young mouth with pungent slime, to choke ye, engorging your organs til’ ye turn blue and bloated with bilge and brine and can scream no more - only when he, crowned in cockle shells with slitherin’ tentacle tail and steaming beard take up his fell be-finned arm, his coral-tine trident screeches banshee-like in the tempest and plunges right through yer gullet, bursting ye - a bulging bladder no more, but a blasted bloody film now and nothing for the harpies and the souls of dead sailors to peck and claw and feed upon only to be lapped up and swallowed by the infinite waters of the Dread Emperor himself - forgotten to any man, to any time, forgotten to any god or devil, forgotten even to the sea, for any stuff for part of Winslow, even any scantling of your soul is Winslow no more, but is now itself the sea!
Finding Nemo (2003)
The waters of life teem with beauty and with pain. We lose and we find. We remember and we forget. And through an ocean’s weight of anxiety and stress and despair, all we can do is hold onto those unexpected bits of wisdom and hope: “Just keep swimming.”
-JB
READ
Thomas King - Green Grass, Running Water
I already recommended this book back in Ponytail Picks #2 (“Borders”), but I can’t bear to put anything else here. The ever-trickling and eventually overpowering presence of water throughout the story/ies serves as a powerful metaphor/not metaphor for the power of stories to break down the social and ecological dam(n)s and borders of colonialism.
I wrote about it for a Canadian Literature class I took seven years ago, so if you’re interested in reading a more in-depth academic essay on the book, you can check that out here.
I also wrote a song about it for the same class. You can click here for a written explanation of it (and if you dare, you can listen to a rough demo of it here) but for the purposes of this recommendation, here are the lyrics:
Water, water, is all, it seems
Lakes and puddles, trickling streams
Coyote does what Coyote means
Breaking down dams with stories and dreamsGod the white man rolls up his sleeves
Indian woman’s gonna have to leave
Jesus and Noah, Ahdamn and Eve
It’s Christian rules, now you better believeFamous explorers or murderin’ men?
On who tells the story it all depends
Rights to fight for, land to defend
or Treaties to break and people to bendCowboys and Indians, good guys win
John Wayne and the fairer skin
Anything else would be a capital sin
It’s the White House, white man, Hollywood spin
The first stanza is repeated in between the others, pushing back against their tides of terror with the help of the trickster Coyote. Give Green Grass, Running Water a read if you haven’t already and let me know if I’ve adequately captured the spirit of the book!
-JB
We’ve drenched ourselves in enough water references to last a couple weeks. Next time, we’ll try our best to make our way through the sticky theme of…