Forgive the immediate gesture to the title. But… Silence. There are two opposing yet not necessarily mutually exclusive definitions of silence. One is that silence is a void, a vacuum, a vent that is gaping and empty. It is a placeholder for conversation. Or thoughts. Or merely ordinary sounds or signs of life. Definition number two is that silence is a heavy, haughty yet humble host of emotion, repression, submission, and even aggression. A dam. A conduit for a lack of ability in expression.
But there is a secret third definition, and that is the merging of the two, which gives you Silence by Sonny Casey. This song could not have been named anything else lest it would lose the completeness of bearing all three meanings of the silence being blunted: a defeated vessel in an abyss, home to questions and complaints that have somehow both outlived and obeyed an expiration date.
The song starts out with an indictment, “Did you think you’d get away with it,” but Sonny’s vocals would have you believe that she is serenading someone she is in love with. The gentleness does not stem from affection; it comes from the kind of scar that has joined your skin as a permanent part of your body, a kind of peace that settles after deciding that forgiveness or forgetting are not the only options. You can stay angry. This is evidenced by the chorus’s declaration of, “I’m still here / And so is he,” which proves that having overcome the “the mess that you left” is a kind of subtle revenge on her parent, who ostensibly did everything they could to make sure an instinct for survival was the only thing she and her brother learned from them.
A wondering ensues. She still wonders if the time that has passed has changed anything for her parent, her father most likely. Anger is there, but anger is a result of a lack of closure. This goes on for years because she goes from, “He’s twenty years old / I’m twenty three,” to “I’m twenty six years old / I’m twenty three,” still wondering the same things. The only morsel of closure is going from “Or is it easier / To just pretend,” to “Or is it easier / To just let it end,” indicating that she understands that the way her father pretended nothing was amiss when he was still around is no different from him walking out completely; he being there and not being there looks and feels the exact same.
When the ponderous percussion enters on the second verse, with Tom Osander on the drums, she is remembering the violence from her past under the guise of asking her father if he is still that violent, and the percussion gives the impression that the images are coming to her beat by beat in unforgiving flashbacks. The strings, played by Aine Delaney, that join in on the second chorus slow everything down and ground the melody, which enhances the effect of the understanding that time has passed, something has been added, and something has settled, but the wondering still wanders, unbidden.
There seems to be a fourth definition of silence that is embedded in this song: the pause that is born after asking a question, swelling with anticipation, dying a slow, gentle death the longer that it is alive.
Written by Leo August
