This might turn into a little series were I break down and explore the particular impact that songs have had on me.
I remember listening to this song as a 14-year-old on my way to school. At the time I was at St. Ursula’s—an all-girls catholic school. I hated it here. Not because it was an all-girls school- that was my favorite part. What I hated were the teachers who always assumed the worst of teenage girls. But I loved the freedom I felt being surrounded by other girls. Free from the watch of boys going through puberty, on sizzling summer days, I would hike my skirt up to get more air. There was Didi, a cool girl in matric who shared the same taste in music as me. To this day when the song “It Ends Tonight” by the All-American Rejects plays, I think of her. On my way to school I would sit in the second last row of the bus, put my headphones in and daydream. Robbie William’s Feel always felt profound for me. At the time I did not have the words to describe what it left with me, but I do now.
We all know the phrase “happily ever after.” “Ever after” implies a stability and a continuity of the preferred emotional state: “happily.” It means that the beginning of the rest of your life has arrived. The first time I heard this phrase was at the end of the Cinderella film when she rides off into the sunset with her prince charming. Her happily ever after was about living the rest of her days in material comfort and an everlasting love with her prince, never to experience hurdles that life throws. Of course, we know that this is the most fictitious part of the story. There is no such thing as a happily ever after. But there is such a thing as a life ever after.
“Feel” is a song of existential anguish written and performed by Robbie Williams. He seems to be questioning his purpose when he opens the song by admitting that he is “Not sure I understand/This role I've been given.” The ambivalence towards life itself is aptly communicated when he says, “I don't wanna die/But I ain't keen on living either.” His feeling of disconnection from himself and his life are most palpable when he says, “Before I've arrived/I can see myself coming.” I’ve known this disconnection. When your alarm rings and you play out your whole day on your head until you see yourself climbing back into bed—and that is your only motivation for getting through the day. The first part of the chorus:
I just wanna feel real love
Feel the home that I live in
The home is the space of the ordinary. It is where we live out the most mundane tasks of life: washing, eating, cleaning, and sleeping. If you watch the music video, you will see that Robbie spends a lot of time in the bathtub. We see him attend to his tasks on the farm andpass time doing uninteresting things. This is life. The inescapable, mundane and repetitive tasks make up most of our lives. I think when he says this line, he is expressing a deep desire to connect to the boring, the mundane, the quotidian. The salt of the song is in the line where he says:
I just wanna feel real love And life ever after
A life ever after. It is not the “realistic” version of a happy ever after. It is when the ordinary moments of our lives rise to the magical, the whimsical, the transcendent dreams we had for ourselves. It is when you realize that the moment you had been dreaming of as a teenager, is happening to you right now. It is when you have spent your whole life listening to a songwhose meaning will only ever be significant to you, and you finally hear it live. Mine was Dvorak’s Rusalka. It is when you have dinner with your best friend from high school: your conversations have not changed much from when you were teens to now: from complaining about homework to complaining about overtime; from overthinking a note a boy passed to you, to overthinking a text a boy sent. It is when you look over at your friend, or your date, the sun lights their face perfectly, and you wonder if there could be more between the two of you. It is when one day, you find yourself sitting across from your spouse of three years after setting the table in the home you share. They have dished up for you, you crack a joke, and their laugh still makes your heart warm. It’s when I saw Didi after 10 years, and we both sang “It Ends Tonight” when we made eye contact at Clearwater.
A life ever after is a series of moments over a lifetime, in which your adult life is a return to what you used to do as a teen, or when your adult life mimics the dreams you had created for yourself as an adolescent. It is when the mundane becomes infused with an intangible magic that makes your life feel cinematic.
Right now, I am still swimming in the existential angst that Williams describes. But I am also treading water, waiting for my next life-ever-after moment to come along like a lifeboat. And hopefully when it comes, I will remember myself typing this on the 23rd of July at 02:39.
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