A true peak moment in life is when you meet new music that you immediately and instinctively understand you will draw upon as long as you live.

It’s when a record that will live forever in your home on vinyl is getting its first play and already it’s hit your heart quite hard.

You know you’re not going to be able to end your dialogue with this music for a good while, if ever. (You never have to.)

As any of us could, I can cite a bunch of albums that will never stop nourishing. Records that have shown me how to grow, mostly in a good way, I hope, for decades now, and still do.

Such as Bowie’s Low, Lou Reed and John Cale’s Songs for Drella, Kristin Hersh’s Hips and Makers, The Flaming Lips’ Clouds Taste Metallic, Smog’s Red Apple Falls, and John Grant’s Queen of Denmark. Also endlessly immersive albums that showed up more recently, like Christian Löffler’s Parallels and Penguin Café’s Rain Before Seven.

There’s also A Lazarus Soul’s 2019 masterpiece The D They Put Between The R & L, and their album that is coming out on July 5th, called No Flowers Grow in Cement Gardens, but which is available now.

So I admit I only heard No Flowers Grow in Cement Gardens for the first time today, June 27th, except for the singles that I heard when they came out, ‘The Flower I Flung Into Her Grave’ in April and ‘Black Maria’ in May. Yet an entire collection of songs like ‘The Dealers’, ‘Wildflowers’, ‘New Jewels’, ‘Diver Walsh’ and ‘Glass Swans’ has already kindled intense emotional energy and curiosity.

One thing I’ve learned over the years is that on first listens you cannot yet expect to understand what the music is literally making you think or feel. What I wonder now is: should we ask songs to speak clearly as if they are explaining themselves? Is that a good goal? Why do we want this? I’m not sure we should, and I’m not sure we do.

In a way the early uncertainty is as good and indefinite as any moment in your relationship with the songs. There’s no The End. (‘Funeral Sessions’, for example, five hundred listens later, doesn’t arrive at one lyrical meaning. It continues, eternally, to mean multiple things.)

Sometimes when you think you can articulate what the music and lyrics say you’ve had to over-simplify them; edit them. You try to figure what the singer has said as if any song could say just one thing.

That’s certainly not what ‘Glass Swans’ does.

Brian Brannigan is always somehow able to convey that his characters’ hearts are hurt and full for several simultaneous reasons: hardship, healing, laughter, love and lingering loss among them.

The first way of connecting with ‘Glass Swans’ is to listen to the song that immediately precedes it, called ‘Diver Walsh’. This is narrated by a character who is not still around in an earthly sense.

Maybe it’s because I have been a psychiatrist since 1999 that what I hear here is a post-mortem statement of painful fact by a person who has died by suicide. Or maybe I hear this because a couple of my closest friends died in this way. But to be honest I think the lyrics of ‘Diver Walsh’ are unambiguous, regardless of who’s listening. The protagonist sings: “Play me now a slow air, the Swans of Glass / A sobering reminder now our summer’s past / I took a dive at twenty-five / I raised my hands.” (Please do contradict me if I’m wrong; I’d love to be wrong.)

‘Glass Swans’ arguably has more multiple meanings. It opens with energising Joe Chester guitar and as a vibrant soundtrack to its singer’s strolls along the Royal Canal (“Wandering works the workday dirt away / I go down to the water to heal me of my haze … A hare chases the mist off of the day / & I go under the bridges for an echo like a Far I phase”).* But what I currently hear is that the Glass Swans, having migrated from ‘Diver Walsh’, are not going to turn out to be actual swans.

In keeping with ‘Diver Walsh’, the Royal Canal and the Glass Swans represent recurrent mortality alongside natural beauty. They’re the spiritual ghosts of people who have chosen not to float any longer. The stroller states, “& as I bow as I meet the Glass Swans of the Royal Canal / They’ve been out here all night and they’re sacred as I wander past”.

The first appearance of the titular birds in ‘Glass Swans’ is: “& I smile as I greet the Glass Swans of the Royal Canal”. So you wonder—are these actual swans, like I used to walk past along the Grand Canal at Goldenbridge, as they guarded their cygnets?

But the song continues, soon afterwards, with “& I bow as I meet the Glass Swans of the Royal Canal / They’ve been out here all night and they’re sacred as I wander past / Do they sleep with their heads under water? / Do they sleep with their heads under water?” As the song concludes, the narrator continues to smile at the Glass Swans:“They’ve been out here all night & they’re as ice as I wander past”.

The repetitive use of “glass” increasingly reminds you that glass is a fragile object that cannot float. A glass object is one that must sink and if it represents a life, that life must have ended through drowning.

The Glass Swans lyrically become spiritual everlasting beings whose lives are no longer in danger: “Do they kneel with the sod as their altar? / Do they sleep with their heads underwater?”

Beyond this, the only other reference to swans on the record is in ‘The Flower I Flung Into Her Grave’: “& that swan, a soul in flight / Those dark wings cutting through the night”. And one quickly recalls the Royal Canal characters who pass away at the end of ‘Lemon 7s’, from 2019: “Your prince slept for a thousand years & you, you wept a puddle of tears / As you threw his few belongings off a cold Bull Island pier / You’re sleeping in a 2 man tent beside the Royal Canal / Smoking Lemon 7s through a broken bottle neck / Pills ground down like powder, ’til your problems are no louder than / A little infant whimpering for Ma to come & help”.

‘Glass Swans’ is a stunning song with multiple potential poetic meanings. Still I think what I’m writing about, less specifically than about the lyrical meaning of one song, is how much what you hear in any song can differ from what anyone else hears, and indeed what you yourself will hear in a different hour or on a different day or decade.

One of my favourite things about music: it never stays the same.

The death by drowning of people who went on to become Glass Swans just made me so sad as soon as I heard it. (Along with ‘Diver Walsh’.)

But that’s not what the narrator confines himself to. He opens with an apparently comical reference to canal walks: “I go down to the water to heal me of my haze / In the winter I curse the flies / In winter I yearn blue skies”. The narrator then smiles as he greets the Glass Swans, although he knows these are people who have passed on: “& I bow as I greet the Glass Swans of the Royal Canal / They’ve been out here all night and they’re sacred as I wander past”. So this song is mainly a tender tribute.

So there’s little certainty. All I can state as a fact is: despite the open spirituality of ‘Glass Swans’, despite the reference to “the sod as their altar”, Christianity is not part of this song.

How do I know this?

Firstly, Zeus, the swan-like God, is Greek. No swans feature in the Bible. Secondly, as the narrator walked the Royal Canal, in summer and winter, he was listening not to ‘Sé an Tiarna m’Aoire’ or ‘Amazing Grace’ but to ‘Quante Jubila’ by the Rastafarian reggae master Prince Far I. Rastafarianism is the only religion that ‘Glass Swans’ recognises.

It feels good to be certain about something.*