A notification came up on my phone in January. I keep notifications on for about four or five YouTube channels and nothing else, which is as much of a relationship as I want with that app. Tom Scott, Beard Meats Food, Spiceler, Gorillaz. This one was Gorillaz, and I clicked it immediately.
It was the video for The Hardest Thing / Orange County. I was gone inside the first minute. Damon Albarn gets to the line about the hardest thing and the beat kicks in underneath him, bright and quick, with Anoushka Shankar’s sitar behind it. I knew before it finished that it was going on the playlist and staying there.
Eight months later it’s my most-played song of the year, and it’s the happiest sad song Gorillaz have made. Things are undeniably sad in it, but it keeps going anyway, whistling, telling you there’ll be brighter days. On Melancholy Hill is the only other one of theirs that does this to me, though that one sits closer to missing someone. Orange County has got past the missing and on to being glad it happened at all.
Kara Jackson comes in over the top, Bizarrap keeps the whole thing moving, the sitar sits underneath all of it, and there’s a whistle that will not leave your head. Nothing in any of that sounds like a song about dying. You can have it on in the background for weeks. I did. It was a while before I paid proper attention to what Damon was singing, and longer before I noticed what had been done to his voice. He’s muffled and slightly thin, like an old speaker in the next room, while the sitar and everyone else stay clean. He sounds like he’s standing somewhere behind the rest of the song.
Orange County is track five on The Mountain. Track four is a separate song called The Hardest Thing, and Tony Allen opens it. Allen died six years ago and he was one of Damon’s closest collaborators, so his voice is the first thing you hear on a record he didn’t live to finish. Damon and Jamie Hewlett both lost their fathers while The Mountain was being made, and the sleeve is dedicated to them along with everyone else who didn’t make it to the end of it.
I keep coming back to two lines. The first one:
I don’t need to explain that one, because everyone brings their own person to it. It might be someone you still smile about when they come to mind, or someone whose life was cut short and the phone call that told you. If you haven’t lost anyone yet, you will. The cheerful music makes it land harder. You’re whistling along and then it’s just there.
Elsewhere in the song Damon wonders whether what he leaves behind will be enough. This is a man who has been making records since 1991 and has torn down and rebuilt what Gorillaz sound like four or five times over. If he’s still worried about his legacy, the rest of us have no business feeling settled about ours. Maybe legacy is far smaller than any of us want it to be. Somebody remembering a meal you cooked, or hearing a song and thinking of you, and not a great deal else.
The Mountain is full of Indian music, and none of it is there as decoration. Anoushka Shankar’s sitar runs through the record, Amaan and Ayaan Ali Bangash play sarod, Ajay Prasanna’s bansuri turns up on more than half the tracks, Asha Puthli sings on The Moon Cave, and there’s a brass band from Jaipur on The Manifesto. Parts of it were recorded in Mumbai, in Jaipur and on the ghats in Varanasi. Asha Bhosle sings the hook on The Shadowy Light, “Majhi Re Majhi”. It was the last thing she ever recorded. She died in April, six weeks after it came out.
I’m finishing this at Coimbatore airport, waiting on a flight to Raipur and then home, with Orange County on repeat for the fourth or fifth time since I sat down. It’s a song about saying goodbye to people you love and I’m listening to it on the way to see mine. That isn’t grim. It’s the same reason the whistle is in there.
