You Are Working For The Joy Of Giving

There’s a scene in a relatively early Grant Morrison comic called St. Swithin’s Day where the protagonist, a self-declared “neurotic teenage outsider,” manages to forget his troubles in the middle of everything by putting on a Velvet Underground song – I forget which one, maybe “There She Goes Again”? – and surrenders to it, the way it makes him feel, the way it makes him lose his inhibitions and dance and everything else melts away in the perfectness of the music. Belle and Sebastian’s “Lazy Line Painter Jane” is that song, for me.

It’s not a perfect song, I know that, and they’re not a perfect band. For the longest time, they weren’t even a band I particularly liked – They seemed too twee, too affected, posing instead of honest, a band pretending to be a band, if that makes sense – and it’s taken me leaving Scotland and getting older to appreciate them more (There are many bands I can say the same about, oddly enough). But even when I didn’t really like Belle and Sebastian, I knew that I completely adored “Lazy Line Painter Jane”; from the very first listen, I found myself unable to listen to it without my heart swelling in size, touched by the gentleness and swooning at the organ and jangly guitar at the end, surprised and excited by the rawness of Monica Queen’s voice in comparison with everything else around it (Her first words, the way she sings them, still make my ears stand up even now, years later; it’s like she’s saying “Yeah, this is where the song really gets going”). It’s one of those songs that I could sing from start to finish, but the lyrics that stand out are the occasional lines that ring in my ears and brain as being… I don’t know, honest? kind? somewhere between there, perhaps (“Being a rebel’s fine, but you go all the way to being brutal,” “Boo to the business world,” or the entire “But you read in a book/That you got free in Boots/There are lotions, there are potions/That you can take, to hide your shame from all those prying eyes” section). It’s a song that feels true, for some reason.

With the benefit of age, nostalgia and wishful thinking, I think I’ve realized why I’ve always loved this song; without any reason or specific experience to back this up, “Lazy Line Painter Jane” feels like something that completely describes the experience of being young and optimistic about the world at a point where everything is still scary and new and possibilities are as worrying as they are exciting. But maybe that’s just me.