The Nearer the Fountain, More Pure the Stream Flows - Damon Albarn

In my book of thoughts
I have found written on my heart
The true history, of the sadness that I start
Illuminated, only by tears
Cinnamon Girl, I summon you here
Lay by my side until the light, appears

In the fourth hour of night, at first sleep
An angel came to me
And she warned me, of the battles I would leave
Illuminated, only by tears
Cinnamon Girl, I summon you here
Lay by my side until the light, appears

"The Moon Exalted" - Dr. Dee, 2012, Damon Albarn, premiered live October 9, 2021 at the Globe Theater. What a concert!!! Livestreamed in 67 countries.

Archived 02/05/2022

If you arrived here by way of Substack this is a repeat of the introduction you can skip by going straight to the the song by song lyrical analysis.

The Nearer the Fountain, More Pure the Stream Flows treads lightly. As a songwriter historically Damon Albarn always did, meaning there were very small traceries perhaps in the past. I presumed this might be a little stronger, which it may be, but only just. The songs I felt were most notable in the past were "The Universal" and "Sister Rust". 

I'm omitting songs from the album that clearly aren't related or where the meaning's been explained, for example "The Cormorant": "It was more of a sung conversation with myself and the cormorant and the water and everything that’s taken place on that beach over 25 years." The same goes for "Daft Wader" (though it is in terms of the album's theme a death celebration not unlike a wake, but furthermore is grounded as a celebration particularly of martyrdom in a location of the world where such celebrations still take place), and reiterates the concept of particles, so there is a running connection, and this grounds the album as a concept in a martydom/resurrection cycle in terms of the song's sequential placement on the album), though that's not what's going on in the transition verse or the last.

Damon Albarn had also referenced "Polaris" (the first single video release), which according to him has to do with the nuclear ballistic missile, and viewing avian beachcombers (oystercatchers) in terms of a totalitarian Animal Farm analogy, a comment which feels like the song tread too lightly with the dark, enough that he had to say the quiet part out loud, which means the album embarks in the realm of totalitarian end of the world as setting, (also predicted, see the last sentence under "Universal" attributes to look for), all of which seems to fly in the face of the song's airy atmosphere and possible personification. (I did get one lyric wrong, meaning I interpreted "joining the saline to start an inspection of the lines" as entering the sea (as in universal unconsious sea, which means the inspection of the lines would be positive, not reflective of a totalitarian might is right heirarchy, -ah, dour Brits). I was also wrong on the timeline in that the album was commenced prior to the onset of Covid-19.)

Absent these sorts of tracks and the instrumentals there are several songs to talk about, and instrumentals have meaning.

As mentioned in the long proposal (way down at paragraph 46, plus six numbered points)), if I am following the course of events, there have been three cycles now of death/disappearance followed by rebirth, and I attempted this because there's been a third rebirth, meaning there was a full expectation of a cycle of dark isolation entering into light/rejoining, which is what the course of this album and indeed this song selection actually does. It does it in congruence with the symbolism I have predicted below paragraph 46, meaning the star and moon in the feminine as feminine object (if there is indeed a connective theme to these songs, which may only exist in this analysis here, where the thematic elements connect to how these concepts have developed along the perceived course of universal inspiration delineated in the book). This will simply illustrate those signifiers as observation as opposed to invoking them. I'm not saying it's what they are, I'm observing how in this context they'd be interpreteted. This album is sparse and broadly arch-typical, there is nothing to signify anything beyond that, meaning this signifies nothing beyond concurrence with the cycle of collapse and rebirth, which is not, in terms of the proposal, very much at all, meaning it does not lend support that my proposal's really happening, unless it ends up contributing to this occurring similary with many artists concurrently across a really broad spectrum with sufficient specificity elsewhere (which is already happening, both perhaps intentionally and accidentally).

Given the timetable of its inception, this was expressing a vein of isolation that had nothing to do with the pandemic, and in terms of concurrency, it expressed coming out of isolation and reunifiying at the exact turn of the moment, and did so as an expression of coming out of personal loss.

The Nearer the Fountain, More Pure the Stream Flows

You have gone
The dark journey that leaves no returning
It's fruitless for me to mourn you
But who can help mourning?

To think of life that did laugh on your face
In the beautiful past, left so desolate now
When youth seemed immortal, so sweet it did weave
Heaven's halo around you

Earth's hope to deceive, you were the fairest and dearest
Where many were fair, to my heart you were nearest
Thе year has its winter as well as its May
Thе sweetest leave us and the fairest decay

The nearer the fountain, more pure the stream flows

To think of life that did laugh on your face
In the beautiful past, left so desolate now
When youth seemed immortal, so sweet it did weave
Heaven's halo around you
Around you
Around you
Earth's hope to deceive around you
Around you

The nearer the fountain, more pure the stream flows


Royal Morning Blue

Rain turning into snow
You put on your robes and disappear
Into new realities
Thought and memory
Stay by your side

Royal, royal morning blue
You are saved
And nothing like this had ever happened
Before
I’m saved
The nearer the fountain
Royal morning blue, royal morning blue
I’m saved
Royal morning blue
Royal morning blue, royal morning blue

Running out of the things
Sent to give us wings
To fly away

Into royal morning blue
Memories of you
At the end of the world
Stay by my side
At the end of the world
Stay by my side
Royal morning blue


Combustion

Instrumental

It's Iceland. Volcanos.


Darkness to Light

Darkness to light
Crushed satellite stars
In silent conga
I can't wait any longer
Can you get me to A&E soon, please?

Broken mirror
Carousel of my life
You reflect the particles as they fall
The darkness and the light

Coz you are my baby
[In] Silver and blue
Are the colours I choose
To paint you a picture
With my hand held [high] above my heart
Silver and blue


Esja

Instrumental

"This is the outline of the mountain, and it moves with the contours around a certain harmonic destination. You’ve got to give [the musicians] some sort of harmonic destination. Once you start saying, ‘Play in a certain way’, you’re missing the point. It’s how they feel once they start to tune in to just staring, and not thinking about what you’re playing. So, listening, being sensitive to each other. It’s like everyone’s got a paintbrush—and how do we keep moving but somehow inhabit our points of view? When I was writing over the top, it made it easier having this harmonic reasoning behind all of this abstract stuff." - Damon Albarn

I didn't find a direct translation of Esja, only a word of mouth reference to it from an English person on a site saying it meant "mountain or strength or clay or rock" in Icelandic. Above and beyond being the mountain outside Reykjavik, it appears the mountain possibly got its name due to its clay type (with broadening of the word springing from the mountain itself), as the old Nordic meaning is cited as "a kind of clay". It is a given name in Iceland for girls. So this is the grounding/orientation of the music in a true natural terrestrial sense. (-Was it literally, "look at this mountain", which gave the instrumental of the profile of the mountain?) It is truly interesting in terms of how fundamental and ancient that is, both in religion/culture and geologic time/earthly reality.

The word "Esja" grounds this context in terms of an earth bound feminine. So the instrumental centerpiece of the album, arguably the improvisational subject that was the inspirational fount initially (apart from the water body, as per the above link), orients the album in the feminine musically, as in regard of a named mountain, the whole of nature.


The Tower of Montevideo

The Tower of Montevideo has many rooms
Some of them are empty since I left you (Since I left you)
Standing in silhouette by the long window
Drinking coffee and scrutinised by the black cat
Who lies on the day bed and abandons the world
As the hours slide off the page like clouds somewhere else

In the Tower of Montevideo

Once, there was cinema and we had parties
And the light at the top of the tower could reach Argentina (Since I left you)
Where they talk behind doors of new worlds and faraway places
And the portrait of the artist was kept down in the basement
In the Tower of Montevideo

The Tower of Montevideo

I can hear music
I can hear footsteps
Ghost of the empty room
Montevideo
The Tower of Montevideo


Polaris

Polaris
If you get blown off course
In filling in the parts of your life
That have disappeared
Medicating
Quick step reflections
In the dark mirrors of our lives

Polaris
Watching the embers fall
Onto sublime boulevards
Medicating
Joining the saline to start the inspection of the lines

See the birds they have been taken by the wind
They are not together now
They will have to wait until tomorrow
To see each other again

Polaris, Polaris
Polaris, Polaris

See the birds they have been taken by the wind
They are not together now
They will have to wait until tomorrow
To see each other again

The infinite pages we scroll out upon the golem
In the shadow of the oak
I miss the alarm and the music therein
And so back to the vision
All around us

Particles

When the night patterns the room
And black sands return
I will drift away from land
As the sky begins its burn
Only you, darling
Can call me back in

For the particles are joyous
As they alight on your skin

The nearer the fountain
The nearer the fountain
More pure the stream flows
And sweeter the river
Into which love grows
I have cried for you, darling
Are you coming back to me?

For the particles are joyous
As they alight on your skin
The particles are joyous
As they alight on your skin


The Nearer the Fountain, More Pure the Stream Flows

This song is based on a poem by John Clare, which donates the album's title, and is the album's core theme: the closer you are to the flow's source the purer it becomes for you. This song is about the grief of loss, namely that of losing an individual you are close to through bereavement, either by death or departure. This frames the entire context of death/rebirth in this personal frame of reference. Earth's blessing of youth imbues a false promise of immortality, with May as the month of seasonal resurrection. (May has now come up three times, with both these songs having their launch then.)


Royal Morning Blue

Damon Albarn on the natural inspiration behind "Royal Morning Blue".

"It can be raining and then suddenly the temperature can drop a little bit and then it starts to turn into snow. In my mind when rain turns into snow that's a really positive thing, a metaphor for hope."

"The idea of rain turning into snow was really more of a metaphor for hope I suppose during the pandemic; -that's how I kind of sort of perceived it. I think a lot of people had an opportunity to slow down and be/live a more kind of/sort of quieter existence for a while and listen, and therefore be be able to listen to nature and realize how glorious it is. I've always felt a deep need to not lose my sense of grounding to the earth, and especially the sea really".

A song like Royal Morning Blue is at the crux of it all, you know, it's like singing for reversal or renewal".

That the metaphor is positive springs from the sum of his observation in Iceland's climes (1:35). Having observed twenty years of glacier recession from his property there, rain turning into to snow is representative of things restoring themselves. Knowing full well it doesn't really reflect the truth, it provides a sense of optimism when it happens nevertheless by being representative of what should. We are in agreement on that sentiment.

Damon Albarn was fulfilling a commission for a French festival by bringing a sixteen piece orchestra to Iceland to record. The sense of isolation came from the setting before Covid hit. "[T]he environment I was in alluded to that kind of condition, you know, that perspective, the ideas that I'd been playing around with pre-pandemic fitted beautifully into the state of mind that I was in. So it's a fluke that the two come together."

"I think that's what all good artists are doing, they pick up the future before it happens." - Damon Albarn (It's a thought.)

From that start point, let's address what the lyrics actually say juxtaposed with what I already declared the snow to symbolize (as in thankfully I've done this already), with the analysis of the song "Night Raid" on the album that started all of this (GHOSTEEN), in combination the first time it "just happened" to happen subsequent to my proposal, which was Tears for Fears' "The Tipping Point".

Bear in mind that when I was waxing poetic about a snow event to what I thought was Billy Corgan himself masquerading anonymously on his official online forum soon after my takeover of his contest, it was a rain to snow event in the sense that it cooled into it (somewhere between February and April 2001, which you'd be surprised to learn was pretty rare in my neck of the woods, as a coastal temperate rainforest climate practicallly guarantees the opposite happening). An irregular snowfall coinciding with when Billy appeared to start posting to me online anonymously for the first time for me connoted everything "January" meant between Billy and myself as per personal encounters already, (first dream I ever had of him, combined with first encountering him face to face in London in January 2000, (p. 1258), followed by concluding my takeover of the Meaning of Machina Contest by launching the meaning on January 3rd 2001.

As he possibly signified his personal conversion on his next subsequent album release (did you think The Smashing Pumpkins songwriter whose smash hit began with "the world is a vampire" and concluded with "and I still believe that I cannot be saved" would have ever arrived at "Jesus, I"), it became imbued with the weight of the transcendent resurrection signifier as well, only to come full circle when I discovered the live October 1998 Halloween edition of "X.Y.U' while writing the book, a rabbit hole which would have never made mention without that "runaway flake of snow" personification of the feminine object of consummation on "Night Raid". So now this rain/snow transition has occurred three times as well, twice after I predicted it would as symbolism on the feminine side. You don't get much more feminine than putting on a robe while leaving a partner's bed, which is the likeliest context of this song, almost giving it a postcoital connotation, which in a way makes it sequential to "Night Raid".

When the song's object arises, she shifts and disappears into new realities formed on the basis of thought and memory, her sole company. If you knew how I lectured WPC/Billy on the formation of reality, as in still managing to attain transcendent truth by active choice and how the feedback loop provided an objective context for this (and that his first possible online reply to his first received courier on this was to acknowledge it with the exhortation to continue to "practice the science of reality",(p. 1775), upon which he got this second bon mot), you would simply smile.

The active verb at the center of the song is that she is saved, and so is he, with the closing refrain that she remain with him, safely ensconsed in memory, at the witness of the end of the world. (Did predict that would be part of the mentallity for some odd reason, and voila here it is.)

To top it off, the first song on GHOSTEEN invoked the queen personification, which hadn't happened since communications/song analysis with WPC/Billy began with subsequent artistic output after I'd predicted this would happen as the outcome of my public experiment, where I proved the situation by my ultimate meaning of Machina becoming subject matter of the universal music feedback for several years after my online advent on his website in 2000. This is bookended by the fact that the 160 plus page letter to Martin Gore precipitated from hearing one song, Depeche Mode's cover of David Bowie's "Heroes", with the letter including a full explanation of what the lyric "I, I will be king, and you, you will be my queen" meant in his context, which happens to be a great deal if you take the subsequent Delta Machine and sundry into account, as conjuncted with Chapter 16/"Salome", "Reflektor" (Anton Corbijn directed four of these videos), and the last of David Bowie). 

Oh yes and "blue". -Favourite colour. Martin Gore's "Room" was a "Blue Room" because Bono made it so. (Again, searchable in the book, p. 729)

The song also expresses that it is being saved, and "royal morning blue's" proximity that makes him "nearer the fountain", equivocated to his memories of her. The phrase appears to be both a personification and embarkation/destination, and given how the album's title is juxtaposed in the second verse, either salvation is the source or the source is salvation. Which is interesting in my view because my personal experience of salvation as Jesus was in January 1996, which seasonally equated with when rain turns to snow as the moment transformation/salvation. 

Lastly and finally, the expression of snow coming out of her body for that one live performance of "X.Y.U" was a singular positive variation on a running theme that I've already explained thanks a one line allusion in "Ariel" on Johnny Marr's Fever Dreams Pt. 1, which in this interpretation harks back to the allusion Billy began on Machina/Machines of God of shards of glass circulating under her skin in a song that described individuals arriving inside her body, which I considered an analogy for a body of connective awareness in terms of what was universally inspired. I discussed the analogy's progression having occurred after personally using the analogy of stepping out of the mirror in Bono's presence as what I was doing by giving him writing in the present tense to intercept the inspirational feedback loop I thought was happening in his own mind. Shattering the mirror was an act of appearing out of the creative reflection, so when this appeared in tandem, I speculated that the individual shards described on that album were an indication of how this act had begun individuation among the whole.

When Billy improvised that performance with her taking a razor to cut the snow out of her body so it began to snow (and this defeating the jackal), it was when I'd begun a journal for the first time in order to externalize it, so the sum of observation wasn't simply inside my own head, and I began to react in terms of tryng to act on it, by leaving the country. What's interesting is that with this album Damon Albarn has externalized and transitioned into a new analogy. which in this context means much the same thing, with "particles" that alight on her skin. So a momentary transformative analogy which signified a great deal in its time has in turn arrived at a new one in one place.

The last and final irony is that this act of externalization did not of course reach everyone. When I was in Ireland writing to Bono (which was the first time I attempted to contact anyone in what I perceived as the universal inspirational feedback loop), Radiohead produced this song after Bono received two letters hand to hand on a pretty embedded (if you will) album (it was the first with them, you can look it up in the book). The message didn't come to them. Thom Yorke is still singing presently to the unreachable reflection in the mirror (the mirror never shattered for him), but in a state of reconcile at least. Fun Times!


Combustion

Big thing in the narrative, p. 28. Not small, no, not at all. Also the song sequence fits the course of the narrative.

 

Darkness to Light

This song is the transition of the title itself, and the connective tissue, with "broken mirror" and "you reflect the particles as they fall" in the same verse, again signifying a woman as love object with "silver and blue" as the colours of choice for the man to create a freize of love in this moment. I said on Valentines I'd come up with two images out of this to paint, a Valentine's one in warms/golds I actually tried to begin sketching, and one I later decided to use to center the miracle amaryllis inside the Easter [super]moon(s). So this to me is really amazing, like a mirror intention, in the "right" colours I always knew were mine, that were in the music. (Here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, silver here.)

That and I said, "I'm asking nicely. Just give me my book!" That was all I asked.


The Tower of Montevideo

In no dismissal of fascination with location, the core concept of this is along the lines of "in my Father's house there are many rooms". And the palace was empty, thanks to a break up and departure, leaving an accompanying black cat (that she is). But the music has returned now, there are footsteps and ghosts. 

 

Polaris

"Polaris" in the first verse sounds like a name addressing someone who was blown off course engaging the past to come to terms with loss in it. (I just spent 160 pages explaining what happened, which was literally filling in what got totally erased.) Connotes salvation by orientation on the North Star. Second verse: Also witnessing the end of the world apparently, followed by the promise that birds blown apart by the wind will see each other again. 

The golem is a second reference to being made of clay, or unautonomous raw matter not yet human (potentiality), upon which an infinity of words are writ, happening in the shadow of the oak. It wasn't just the dream where I flew to his playing and descended on an oak. Every ecosystem I've lived in in North America was oak, or next to one. (In Canada that's quite the odds.)

In Iceland the musicians began predawn to play with the dawn, but the existential vision is there as a resort. The vision all around us has been restored. The past has been restored.


Particles

Here being nearer to the source permitting higher purity is the clime which permits love to grow, with the rejoinder of repatriating the loss, because there was one. The worth is in the particles' joy as they alight on her skin. 

You can read Damon Albarn's point sourcing for "particles" at the bottom of this page. (Again, so two Jewish references, which means I don't feel remiss mentioning Jewish tradition but nonetheless deleted them.)

The chorus is literally what I'm putting on exhibit. The particles attracted in this instance are the songwriters. This has been going on all my adult life. And this time, it is joyous, as I knew it would be; it wasn't always the case. And that is what these posts are delineating to show you, that this really happens in real time. The musical feedback lights up when you re-enter progression. Fleeing is not possible, but you can disappear.