The Cure song Robert Smith found tragic: “It upset me dreadfully”
The Cure’s Robert Smith has been through a lot in the name of art.
Most people find it difficult to navigate through their memories, feelings and experiences, especially if said experiences are tough to face or worse, traumatic, as most of the time, we prefer to look forward rather than back, and when we do exist in the past for a little while, we often come out the other side wondering how we even got through the mess at the time.
Listening to The Cure is a lot like this – sometimes, it feels like the ideal soundtrack to your own wallowing. Smith’s experiences become our own, and all the times we’ve ever felt loss and loneliness in relationships or other aspects of life come to the surface, swirling in this beautifully confrontational kaleidoscope of viscera and emotion.
Often, this is because Smith’s best songs are inspired by moments when he felt his lowest, but the best part is that these aren’t always as on-the-nose as you might expect, which is also why experiencing them over and over cuts so deeply – the dark undertones are subtle, but powerful enough to linger with you afterwards, like ‘Lullaby’, for instance, was inspired by a recurring dream Smith had when he was younger, but its concept of sadness centres more heavily around using melancholia as a source of comfort.
‘M’ is similar in that regard – while songs like ‘Pictures of You’ and ‘Apart’ are more forthcoming in their sadness, ‘M’ tackles the complexities of Smith’s fixation on it, like feeling isolated and disillusioned in a world where the noise around drowns out and into the sidelines, it’s a subdued kind of sadness, one you’re not even entirely sure is all bad.
With the latest release, Songs of a Lost World, Smith proved that he is as committed as ever to making art that feels ripped from his very soul, with songs that dig deep into the man behind the music and lay everything bare, and one in particular was ‘And Nothing Is Forever’, a song that Smith wrote in an effort to process and heal from a broken promise.
“It’s about a promise I made to someone who was very ill – that I would be with them when they died,” Smith explained. “And I wasn’t. For reasons beyond my control, I broke that promise, and it upset me dreadfully. I can’t change it, but by memorialising it, I hoped it might ease the weight of that moment.”
Like many of the songs on Songs of a Lost World, ‘And Nothing Is Forever’ sees Smith pouring all the emotion into the arrangements and his voice, while his words speak from the perspective of someone who yearns to make another promise. “You slide down close beside me,” Smith sings, “In the silence of a heartbeat / And wrap your arms around me / With a murmured lullaby / There’s a memory of the first time / In the stillness of a teardrop / That you hold me for the last time / In the dying of the light.”
Once again, Smith puts his heart through the grinder in the name of art, revisiting memories and the parts of himself that, beneath it all, he’d probably rather forget. But instead of ruminating, he transforms the wallow into something more hopeful, inviting us all to sit with the pain until it becomes something less cutting.
