Welcome To My Life

Suki Waterhouse x Belle & Sebastian “Every Day’s A Lesson In Humility”

“Every Day’s A Lesson In Humility” is a title that could reasonably be applied to nearly every song in the Belle & Sebastian catalog, in as much as it’s basically the thesis statement of nearly everything Stuart Murdoch and his bandmates have written for three decades. It’s a world view that balances acknowledgment of life’s many difficulties with an equal awareness of the beauty in life, particularly in the smaller moments. This song, made in collaboration with musician/actress Suki Waterhouse, comes at the title premise idea from a few directions at once. It’s a song about shaking off little humiliations, it’s a song about wishing you could communicate with your younger self, it’s a song about trying to make the best of what you have. The most interesting angle in this song for me is how they approach relationships as a frustrating and beautiful mystery – you don’t know how long anyone will ever be in your life, and the amount of time someone’s in your life isn’t necessarily proportional to their impact.

Waterhouse, whose voice isn’t far off in timbre from that of central B&S member Sarah Martin but conveys a little more angst, fits very naturally into the Murdoch milieu. This would’ve sounded lovely in Murdoch’s voice but I think Waterhouse’s glamor is key in setting the scale of it, particularly in the way in places someone who arguably has it all – a music career, a modeling career, an acting career, her boyfriend is the guy who plays Batman – and asks you to understand her as an ordinary person doing ordinary things and experience ordinary emotions. She subverts her image, but also opens it up.

Buy it from Bandcamp.