The Free Ride Of Grace

Belle & Sebastian “The Ghost of Rockschool”

“The Ghost of Rockschool” is such a strange and misleading title for this song, I can’t help but imagine that Stuart Murdoch went with it because it distracts the listener a bit from some plainly religious lyrics about his relationship with God. But as clear as that is, the song takes some odd tangents. It starts off with the idea of the “free ride of grace,” which is this very Protestant notion that grace is a gift from God, but shifts to what I suppose is a vision of his own afterlife, and some sort of psychedelic experience. He also sings about a woman with “no soul to discern” who “was put there to tempt you like the perfume of flowers.” This is pretty harsh, but all the same, she seems to be the reason he’s seeing God in everything around him, and why he’s turning to his faith. There’s no reconciliation of this conflict in the song, it’s just left to the grace of God as the song builds to a gorgeous, gentle crescendo.

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Belle & Sebastian “Woman’s Realm”

This one is like listening in on a series of conversations, or looking in on a series of scenes, and piecing together a story. I’ve always taken this as a dialogue between a sad sack guy and some troubled girl, and them both trying to figure out whether they should make a go of things, or just kinda…do not much at all. Both sides are in some in-between space – he’s cleaning up after a party, she’s on a late night train – but their minds are the future, and hoping for some proper situation. Is it “a boy, a girl, and a rendezvous”? An “interesting way of life”? Or, the path of least resistance, “deny yourself the benefits of being alive”?

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