Contemplating Skylarking

In mid-June, I began my final twelve hour trek home to Michigan from New Hampshire, my heart heaving heavily each time the thought occurred to me: “I’m finished with college.” As I pulled onto to Interstate 91, the finality was crushing, nearly as crushing as the meeting I had just hastily departed. I had requested a former professor to write a letter of recommendation for my graduate school applications, and sat in horror as she explained why she would not do so. I’m pretty sure I even heard some crabby old voice cackle, “Welcome to the real world!” as I climbed in my car and left campus for good.

Though my heart turned to sand in those painful moments of explanation, it was only minutes later that I found solace in the road as it was, if nothing else, a twelve hour diversion from thinking about the future. Indeed, it was a time to reflect on the past and present. My thoughts of the past turned to my commencement exercises, only a few days old and still green in my memory. And the present, well, that was an open road through Vermont, Massachusetts, New York, and Canada. As I pondered that final ceremony and this twelve hour road trip from college to real life, existence revealed itself as a set of events; cyclical series of transitions, rituals, and moments. We remember the signposts and hang onto all the tiny details we can along the way, but most of our history is the between, forever lost to the gray vagueness of man’s limited recollection. Reflections on memory are always dear to the heart in transition, so it was no surprise to when I turned once again to the album that brought me to these cyclical ideas of life, XTC’s masterpiece Skylarking.

Skylarking was released in the fall of 1986 after a quarrelsome recording session with producer Todd Rundgren at his Woodstock, New York Utopia Sounds Studio. Andy Partridge, the more prolific half XTC’s songwriting duo, had various problems with Rundgren’s production techniques and general overbearing personality throughout the sessions. Rundgren left Partridge with a bitter taste in his mouth, and in post-session interviews he frequently revealed his displeasure with the way the sessions turned out. Colin Moulding, the other half of XTC’s songwriting team, put it rather bluntly in a 1989 WBRU interview, “Todd likes to do things the Todd way…and if you don’t like it, then the sparks are gonna fly.”1

Rundgren’s overbearing personality was well-intentioned as his contribution to the album provided a theoretical framework for which the songs could exist. Rundgren encouraged the arrangement of the album into a tightly sequenced tour de force, resulting in the most coherent and well-constructed album the boys from Swindon ever made. His vision for Skylarking harnessed the band’s growing studio ambitions after abandoning touring in 1982. English Settlement (1982), Mummer (1983), and The Big Express (1984) saw the emergence of the band’s more complex studio stylings, washing away almost all of the frenetic energy and punk rock flare of their earliest efforts. Rundgren’s efforts to construct their potential into a landmark album resulted in Skylarking, a song-cycle encapsulating an entire summer’s day in fifty minutes. Even Partridge later conceded that Rundgren “squeezed the XTC clay into its most complete, connected, and cyclical record ever...A summer's day cooked into one cake.”

So perhaps the weather and season were just perfect for me to stumble across this gem during the early morning hours of a 2000 summer night. It was truly love at first listen as I downloaded three random songs off KaZaA or some other terrible Adware-riddled, computer-eating client during the Great Napster Succession Race that dominated my late high school internet years. From these three tracks, I just knew I had stumbled across a special album and a special band.

I purchased Skylarking only a few days later on cassette, finding it used for seventy-five cents among dirty copies of Journey’s Greatest Hits, a “Bedtime with Beethoven” sleeping music collection, and various Tom Cochrane singles in the cassette tape graveyard at my local record store. I had been collecting tapes at the exact time most stores were selling all of their stock off at dirt cheap prices. My car’s old tape deck stereo was rewarded for its struggle against CDs and the general abomination that was Detroit commercial radio at the time with the Smiths’ Louder than Bombs, the Flaming Lips’ Transmissions from the Satellite Heart, and the Sex Pistols’ God Save the Queen among others. However, none held indefinite reign over my car stereo like Skylarking.

I must have heard every song at least a hundred times over that summer. The cyclical nature of the album made even more apparent by my deck’s auto-reverse feature. The album simply never left my deck that summer, endlessly flipping itself and starting again, over and over.

Despite countless repeated listen sessions and present-day back-of-my-hand familiarity, Skylarking still entrances me. Though most artists and albums create an ambiguity about their meaning and concept prompting listener interpretation, the well-known explanation and semi-intention of Skylarking does not cheapen its value. In fact, if nothing else, the history provides an established dialogue that I myself can now easily enter despite the generation gap between myself and the album.

I was born not much more than a year before Skylarking was released, and throughout the fourteen years the album existed outside of my consciousness, much in popular music and the very basic way we perceive and interpret albums had changed. The fragmentation of albums into songs so long observed in commercial singles and radio became an album-wide phenomenon with the emergence of compact discs, allowing the user to effortlessly skip between tracks as if the other songs were not there. As I approached Skylarking, I used perhaps the most disjointed way of digesting an album, random mp3s obtained through file-sharing collections. I was given three random songs to understand an album, to understand the larger picture.

As McLuhan meant to say, “The medium is the message,” and the way my generation has come to experience albums cannot be overlooked. New processes and media force us to reinterpret old material in a new frame of reference. Skylarking was written as a complete album, to most likely be consumed as a vinyl record or cassette tape. The digital age challenged this fact, urging the listener to reconsider the album as a collection of songs, perhaps empowering the form through a new sense of fragmented time and phase.

Though the majesty of Skylarking can be obscured outside of the song-cycle vision created by Rundgren, the glory of the songs as they stand-alone is a testament to the craft and skill of Andy Partridge and Colin Moulding. A digital reading of Skylarking makes a bold statement on the fragmentation of time in the album’s cycle. Though the album begins with crickets and birds awakening and closes with a twilight bonfire, the songs of the summer’s day traverse an entire life, from the joys of the juvenile to the mundane of the mid-life even onward to death. Listened to in sequence, the picture is complete and linear. Listened to at random, the album creates a mosaic of universal life experiences, conjuring memories of our own life along the way.

The magic of Sylarking lies in this fractured state and the way technology allows us to revisit and reimagine. My favorite songs have changed over the years as I have grown older, and certain lines resonate more with me than before. The songs that have faded from favor don’t disappear; instead, they marinate in the fondness of rose-tinted recollection, conjuring memories of what once was out of the gray expanse of time. “Grass” simply and elegantly brings forth childhood playtimes, some innocent, some not so innocent, all previously forgotten, now uncovered. “That’s Really Super, Supergirl” opened the wounds of those intentionally ignored break-ups and unrequited feelings that still find a way to smart after all these years. As I move through my life, so the album moves with me, still always anchoring me to my past.

Perhaps not unlike the comic medium XTC continuously reference in their songs (Skylarking’s Supergirl, Black Sea’s “Sgt. Rock (Is Going to Help Me),” the Dukes of Stratosphere’s “Brainiac’s Daughter,” etc.), Skylarking’s new power lies in the fragmented, simultaneity of time within its cycle. In comics, time exists concurrently in all panels, and all panels exist on every page at all time. We can flip pages back to relive a moment we just experienced, or flip forward to see where frames will take us next. Comics create their own temporal universe; one not necessarily grounded in chronological linearity, yet instead in the reader’s own logic, no mater how alien it might be to another.

So succeeds Skylarking. While my favorite moments change as I grow older, they do not follow the linearity of the album’s cycle as Rundgren sequenced it. I can appreciate his effort; however, my point of view demands a different sequence each time I listen. The somber reflections of Colin Moulding’s “Dying” reinforced the importance of small details in creating a foundation for my own memories as I drove from New Hampshire to Michigan. Moulding’s observations of wedding days in “Big Day” rang just as true for me on graduation day, as I wondered if I could maintain the true passion in my heart against the oncoming financial struggle of the real world. “Will your love have the fire and glow, like on the big day?” Then these thoughts lead me to “Earn Enough for Us,” where I become completely certain I’ll never earn enough money to support “us,” let alone myself. All out of order on the album, all in the order of my own life experience.

The timelessness of Skylarking comes through in these interpretations, not only for their universality temporally, but also in the general human experience. The album shows a thorough understanding of time and modern life as a collection of events, moments, and situations that we can all relate to. Adolescence heartaches, jobs, weddings, affairs, mid-life crises, and death are all events that will become a part of our life. Yet every visit to the album is a celebration of all of them, both mundane and extraordinary. Each moment gets the same treatment.

These moments become Skylarking, but then, what does “skylarking” even mean? Passing on the rather obvious working title “Day Passes,” XTC chose a word meaning to frolic or run up and down the rigging of a ship in sport. For an album of such ambitious goals, the title comes as a bit of playful irony and cynicism which had always been inherent in XTC’s works, right down to their band name’s play on drugs and letters. Maybe in tune with their well-practiced cynicism, it was a comment on the mundane system of events our lives all seem to take on, independent of geography, culture, or time period. Perhaps we all are just frolicking on the same rigging of a ship in sport, and each life is as inconsequential as the next when you view the larger mosaic of existence. Myself, I prefer to consider Skylarking a celebration of the mundane, romanticizing life’s processes and events in song for what they are: signposts and details we mold into and hold onto as memories, like great fishing poles into the expansive grayness of our tired minds.