That Isn't What I Meant To Say At All
Belle and Sebastian: 'Get Me Away From Here, I'm Dying'
In which my personal favorite song for picking up and leaving town turns out to also be a pretty good soundtrack for staying put.
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For a long time this was my official song for moving on: onward, upward, into my next chapter. This was partially because of the rancorous opening lyrics (Oh, get me away from here, I’m dying / Play me a song to set me free), but equally because of their juxtaposition with the jangly, jaunty music. This person, whoever they are, is trapped, stuck — but that’s not the whole story. Motion feels possible.
I first heard the song in 2001. I was in high school in central Pennsylvania. One of my classmate’s dads had an account with eMusic, a pre-Spotify, pre-Apple Music service that, for a monthly fee, let users download as many mp3s as they wanted from a handful of independent record labels. There were no serious protections against account-sharing, and my classmate’s dad, my classmate, and several of his friends (myself included) were all using this one username, poking around and downloading whatever. This was before the infinity of streaming; there was pleasure to be had in the act of digital accumulation.
When I came across Belle and Sebastian, I recognized the band name from the blog of a childhood friend’s cool older brother who’d studied abroad in Scotland. I downloaded everything they had, and “Get Me Away” quickly became my personal anthem: the song I used to celebrate how over high school I felt.
That spring, instead of going to prom, I drove with friends to New Jersey, where we caught a bus to Manhattan and spent the weekend in someone’s older sister’s apartment on the Upper East Side. In the car to Jersey we listened to a CD-R filled with Belle and Sebastian songs. When “Get Me Away” came on, it felt perfectly right. No Hollywood music producer could have done better. We were speeding (literally) out of our constricting old lives and into the wider world, vibrating on a glorious new frequency. The song was right there with me, and I hoped I would remember the moment forever.
I left home for a gap year in Europe. I listened to Belle and Sebastian while walking the streets of Glasgow, the band's hometown. I went away to college, then left that college for another college. I graduated and moved to Philadelphia to intern at a crummy alt-weekly, then to New York to intern at a magazine. Then to Abu Dhabi to help start a newspaper. Then to North Carolina for grad school. Then to Illinois because I’d fallen in love with someone who lived there.
As each move approached, “Get Me Away From Here, I’m Dying” came back into rotation, helping me tell myself that my current chapter was something I was ready — no, eager — to leave behind. Onward! Upward!
Fast forward a decade or so. Still in Illinois. Working on a magazine piece about Belle and Sebastian1, I started paying attention to the song’s lyrics beyond the first few lines. (Isn’t it funny, how long we can go without doing that, even with songs that mean a great deal to us?) I realized the song isn’t actually about — or isn’t just about — the desperation to be somewhere else. There are lyrics that suggest the narrator is an ambitious musician (nobody writes ‘em like they used to / so it may as well be me), and also a sentimentalist (I always cry at endings) with a taste for stories where innocents triumph over adversity, in part by leveraging their facility with language (I could kill you, sure / but I could only make you cry with these words). It’s slippery stuff: a story about stories, how they please, empower, and mislead us.
Oh, the third verse begins, that wasn’t what I meant to say at all. The regretted utterance is never specified. I used to think the lyric was vague by design, a container for everything that every possible listener regrets having said. But here’s another possibility: that — the thing the narrator didn’t really mean — is, in fact, the song’s very first line.
Get me away from here, I’m dying. Most of the times I’ve sung along to those words, I haven’t really meant them. Moving from chapter to chapter, I often was truly excited, but that excitement was intertwined with fear and a bittersweet sense of loss. Once my plans for leaving were fixed, I rushed to exaggerate how unambiguously ready I was, and how bad staying would feel. “Get Me Away From Here, I’m Dying” played along.
These days I don’t have much use for an official moving-on song. I haven't relocated in over a decade, and I don't know for sure when (or even, I suppose, if) I will. But I still listen to “Get Me Away” pretty regularly. Turns out it's also a great song for staying geographically put, looking back on old moves with new eyes, wondering at the tricks and gifts of time.
Sometimes, the absence of a clearly defined next chapter makes me anxious. Again, this sentimental song meets me where I am. I’m dying, Stuart Murdoch sings at the end. Oh, I’m dying. But, with the band playing cheerfully behind him, his delivery feels streaked with lightness and freedom. I love hearing it, and don't mind the possibility that I'm projecting what I want to hear. There are more ways of moving forward — of being set free — than literally getting away. Last I checked, Murdoch still lives in Glasgow. ✹
Here’s the piece, occasioned by the 2022 release of A Bit of Previous.
And would it have been worth it, after all,
After the cups, the marmalade, the tea,
Among the porcelain, among some talk of you and me,
Would it have been worth while,
To have bitten off the matter with a smile,
To have squeezed the universe into a ball
To roll it towards some overwhelming question,
To say: “I am Lazarus, come from the dead,
Come back to tell you all, I shall tell you all”—
If one, settling a pillow by her head
Should say: “That is not what I meant at all;
That is not it, at all.”
This brings back memories :-) … including how we advocated for this to be the walk out song for our high school graduation ceremony … and it was unceremoniously rejected by the faculty.