And would it have been worth it, after all,
Would it have been worth while,
After the sun­sets and the door­yards and the sprin­kled streets,
After the nov­els, after the teacups, after the skirts that trail along the floor–
And this, and so much more?-
It is impos­si­ble to say just what I mean!
But as if a magic lantern threw the nerves in pat­terns on a screen:
Would it have been worth while
If one, set­tling a pil­low or throw­ing off a shawl,
And turn­ing toward the win­dow, should say:
‘That is not it at all,
That is not what I meant, at all.’

The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock, T.S. Eliot

Politi­cians, jour­nal­ists, busi­ness­men, ath­letes and hip­ster frown on it, but artists must, absolutely must, be sin­cere. The work of any artist relies on a fun­da­men­tal sense that they mean what they say, that they are trust­wor­thy. They may use sub­terfuge as a means of seduc­tion, but the ulti­mate goal must be some sort of hon­esty. Art fails when the artist can­not reli­ably report the truth, per­haps by not being aware of it, which is not uncom­mon, or delib­er­ately so, like Richard Strauss or Puc­cini. Telling delib­er­ate untruths about sub­jects opens up ques­tions of ethics and morals, and it is imper­a­tive to sin­cerely express what it is you mean. And it is the sin­cer­ity of two new record­ings about dif­fi­cult sub­jects, peo­ple who are suf­fer­ing, that makes them both so astonishing.

Matt Marks’ The Lit­tle Death: Vol­ume 1 and Corey Dargel’s double-CD Some­one Will Take Care Of Me are both about love, dif­fi­cult, fraught, com­plex love. It’s love in cir­cum­stances most of us would prob­a­bly rather do with­out, but it’s love expressed with great musi­cal skill and pro­found emo­tional, moral and eth­i­cal sympathy.

These are also, lit­er­ally, the­atri­cal records, works meant for the stage pre­sented for lis­ten­ing. Some­one Will Take Care Of Me is made up of musi­cal the­ater pieces Dargel has been pre­sent­ing for a few years, and Marks’ work will be mak­ing a two-week run in July at the Onto­log­i­cal The­ater. Both releases work musi­cally, with Dargel’s two pieces com­ing off as dis­crete sets of songs cir­cling around dif­fer­ent sub­jects, while The Lit­tle Death sounds like a com­pan­ion record­ing to a musi­cal or opera; it stands well on its own and will wet the appetite for catch­ing a per­for­mance in person.

But, back to love and sin­cer­ity. The vast major­ity of songs ever writ­ten are about love of one kind or another, so what sets the songs on these CDs apart? For Matt Marks, it’s the con­flict between love, and lust, for God and for a girl, while for Dargel, it’s love as two dif­fer­ent afflic­tions, one rel­a­tively mild, hypochon­dria, the other rare, dis­turb­ing and deeply strange, Body Integrity Inte­gra­tion Dis­or­der. Now, please keep read­ing, because these record­ings are wonderful.

Love at a tan­gent is Dargel’s métier. His debut release was the mem­o­rable Other People’s Love Songs, songs about the loves of other peo­ple, spe­cific cou­ples and their indi­vid­ual mem­o­ries and expe­ri­enced. The new music con­tin­ues and expands his role as a medium of love, express­ing the thoughts and feel­ings of oth­ers who may not have as capa­ble a voice, and doing so with implicit empa­thy. He han­dled all the music on the first release, but the new discs fea­tures accom­pa­ni­ment from the Inter­na­tional Con­tem­po­rary Ensem­ble and drum­mer David T. Lit­tle on Thir­teen Near-Death Expe­ri­ences, and pianist Kath­leen Supové for Remov­able Parts. Dargel has in indi­vid­ual style, empha­siz­ing bro­ken up pulses and chords in the music and singing across wider inter­vals than most oth­ers do, which enhances the already attrac­tive res­o­nance in his voice. These tech­ni­cal means allow him to set his lyrics in expres­sive and musi­cal ways, scan­ning the dif­fer­ent rhythms of his into into phrases that don’t have to con­form to a four or eight bar reg­u­lar­ity. The arrange­ments for ICE on the first disc open up the tex­tures for light and space, the music bal­ances vibrant attacks with a basic gen­tle sup­ple­ness. Even though Lit­tle is behind the kit, he doesn’t keep a beat so much as define the shift­ing meters and pulses, while the piano, strings and winds line the space around the vocals and put the songs on display.

And what songs. Songs about love as some­thing to enthrall and sur­vive, as an unavoid­able ill­ness, songs in the voices of peo­ple who, despite their deficits, love and want to be loved. If that sounds too much like the bathos of Mor­ris­sey, Dargel has so much more charm and wit, as well as an effort­less touch. Songs that say “… I was given Ritalin/Little did they know/That babies grow/A lit­tle less with each dose,” and “There’s no mystery/Given my family’s med­ical history/I’m headed for an early demise/The only sur­prise is what it will be for me … Car­diac arrest or clin­i­cally depressed,” or “I’d like to think/You’re more mature/But you spike my drink/And now that I’m awake/I’m shaky and unsure/And just to tor­ment me/You con­vince me/There there is no cure” to what could only be two afflic­tions, one of them being love. Of course, he also sings ‘Some­times a Migraine is Just a Migraine,’ and wraps the series with an almost main­stream pop song, bright and with hints of a waltz, the title track, in which ill­ness is both metaphor­i­cal and phys­i­cal, and where the pro­tag­o­nist is loved until the end: “my prog­no­sis absolutely hopeless/But some­one will take care of me/As ill­ness devours my mor­tal clay.” Dargel is an opti­mist, and his opti­mism is humane and necessary.

Thir­teen Near-Death Expe­ri­ences is an excel­lent cycle, Remov­able Parts is even bet­ter. In his quiet way he makes the incom­pre­hen­si­ble under­stand­able. How can we under­stand the over­whelm­ing feel­ing that our cor­po­real selves are incom­plete exactly because we are intact, that remov­ing a hand, an arm or a leg will make us whole? Dargel turns BIID into a metaphor for love; impos­si­ble love, unre­quited love, lost love, love that needs some kind of solu­tion to work, and the solu­tion is the loss of a body part. It’s inge­nious and also pow­er­fully affect­ing, the lyrics are haunt­ing and lovely. It’s worth quot­ing the entirety of ‘Fully Func­tional’ to show how it works:

You made me make believe
That we would lie in bed for­ever
We would do noth­ing at all
But sleep together
And if one of us had to leave
The other would nat­u­rally fol­low
But your heat just like your legs
Turned out to be cold and hollow

We were never fully func­tional
The tragic vic­tims of our cir­cum­stance
But we were funny and orig­i­nal
And we rede­fined romance
Open-ended impro­vi­sa­tional
No one need lead our dance
Non-committed and non-emotional
I guess we never had a chance

It was beau­ti­ful while it lasted
I would help you out of your chair
And out of your under­wear
Caress­ing your skin-tone plas­tic
Was noth­ing short of divine
It was fan­tas­tic
Hold­ing your phan­tom hand in mine

The music helps this work, of course. Sup­pové is sen­si­tive, force­ful and pre­cise as an accom­pa­nist, and the straight­for­ward qual­ity of the arrange­ments — some, like ‘Fin­gers,’ are fairly famil­iar pop — and the lyri­cal mate­r­ial moves the expres­sion into ever more inti­mate realms, helped by close, nat­ural mik­ing of the singer. The songs and the music move inward and upward, towards an inevitable con­clu­sion and a sense of accep­tance and even some joy, and grad­u­ally pare away ele­ments, seem­ingly by design. The dance­able pop of ‘Cas­tra­tion’ sup­ports the con­sid­er­a­tion of “why would I pass along these defec­tive genes/They’ve caused me noth­ing but trou­ble … I don’t want to just stand around waiting/For that inevitable rejection/Really all I’m doing is accelerating/The process of nat­ural selec­tion.” The next track is the penul­ti­mate, ‘Brain,’ “and when the doc­tor asks you what’s the matter/Just tell them I need a hemispherectomy/And the only way that you’ll respect me/Is if I stop call­ing you and stop stalk­ing you/Is if I for­get how much I love you.” After this, the singer’s voice is lit­er­ally gone; the lyrics for the final track, ‘Every­body Wannabe,’ are con­veyed via processed com­puter voice. As the odd, vaguely human voice says “it’s bet­ter for me this way/To be unable to speak at all/Because it’s always been so hard for me to say good­bye,” the music expresses a feel­ing of sat­is­fy­ing final­ity. Heard as a whole, all the songs lead­ing to this last one, the result is mys­te­ri­ously mov­ing. The deep strange­ness of the con­text is tem­pered by Dargel’s lyri­cal and musi­cal artistry, and he is reveal­ing some kind of truth to the lis­tener by stating:

I did not choose to have the feel­ings I have
But I did choose to act on my feel­ings
And you should be more kind
You should not tram­ple on the feel­ings of those you love
That is no way to behave

In his own, dif­fer­ent way, Marks is just as empa­thetic and expres­sive about the human con­di­tion. To make an arti­fi­cial, but use­ful dis­tinc­tion, while Dargel is mak­ing a social argu­ment, Marks is mak­ing a polit­i­cal one (though nei­ther is inten­tion­ally doing any of that). Two of the things that fuck up Amer­ica are reli­gion and sex, and they fuck up Amer­ica because the loud­est, most per­va­sive dis­cus­sions about each are essen­tially igno­rant of their qual­i­ties and their almost per­fect eli­sion. Watch­ing TV or read­ing the news­pa­per, one would never imag­ine that a per­son could be both reli­gious and sex­ual, when of course being reli­gious and being sex­ual are two of the most basic qual­i­ties of being human. But the pro­fes­sional scolds and igno­ra­muses would be out of jobs if Amer­i­can cul­ture opened its eyes to this sim­ple truth. And so lit­tle girls pledge their vir­gin­ity to their fathers, priests rape chil­dren, a Con­gress­man and his mis­tress make a video pro­mot­ing absti­nence and unwed teenagers in Red states become par­ents. And Matt Marks makes a record …

The Lit­tle Death is music the­ater, pop/rock opera really, and tremen­dously accom­plished. Marks made the whole thing him­self and plays all the instru­ments, except for gui­tar and trum­pet, and sings the part of Boy with the excel­lent and ver­sa­tile Mel­lissa Hughes as Girl. The music cap­tures pop styles in the way a musi­cal does, by hit­ting cer­tain num­bers, but there’s noth­ing wrong with that approach (Urine­town is a great exam­ple of how well the stan­dard style can work) and in any case the music is just so good that I found myself strolling through Brook­lyn this morn­ing hum­ming ‘OMG I’m Shot’ to myself, cer­tainly the best sock-hop-dance-pop-driving-rock song about being shot ever writ­ten. The Lit­tle Death also offers bits of stag­gered punk and erotic rock bal­lad, but in a nut­shell Marks works very much like Mikel Rouse, but more explo­sively intense and exu­ber­ant, with touches of Carl Stone. Mak­ing music in this the­atri­cal style means con­nect­ing with, but not pan­der­ing to, the audi­ence, there’s some oblig­a­tion to give the lis­tener enough of what they may expect or be famil­iar with as a bit of leg­erde­main before hit­ting them with the goods.

In this case the goods are that a young per­son could be full of lust for both God and Girl and not be a car­i­ca­ture sched­uled for an upcom­ing very spe­cial “Dr. Phil.” Boy and Girl are not car­i­ca­tures, though. Their names may be generic, but Marks treats them with focused hon­esty, express­ing their con­fu­sion with sim­plic­ity, but never patron­iz­ing them or mak­ing them simple-minded. Like Dargel, he has great sym­pa­thy for them and can fill in their depths with well-chosen bits of cul­tural shorthand:

Boy: I like Face­book!
Girl: I like MySpace!

Marks does most of his work with the music, repeat­ing pithy, apho­ris­tic lyrics under a chang­ing bed of har­mony, tex­tures and beats that car­ries the dra­matic line along just as music in a tra­di­tional opera does. He is explic­itly mod­el­ing a lot of the music after Chris­t­ian pop, and since Chris­t­ian pop is the step-child (bas­tard?) of main­stream pop, young singers emu­late the sim­u­lated sex­u­al­ity of wail­ing melisma com­mon in every­thing from Katy Perry to ren­di­tions of the national anthem before ball­games. In ‘Come Boy,’ Hughes repeats the lyric “come boy, come to my church boy” with unmis­tak­able, pow­er­ful lust. Her singing, and Marks arrange­ment of Bill Gaither’s devo­tional ‘He Touched Me,’ is the pivot point of the music, the drama and con­cep­tion, the moment when the piece turns into itself in the unre­solved con­fu­sion of the char­ac­ters. They love and want each other, they love and want Jesus, and they think one of these things is wrong, but which one? The music dri­ves this con­flict home with inten­sity, and then draws to a sur­pris­ingly gen­tle con­clu­sion, in an almost joy­ous anthem, with the ques­tion of want­ing both things, the cer­tainty and doubt in each, before Boy and Girl.

Marks makes us feel the hurtling con­fu­sion of young peo­ple on the cusp of think­ing for them­selves, whip­sawed between two equally pow­er­ful desires and cul­tural con­ven­tions that tell them they are mutu­ally exclu­sive. Dargel makes us feel the unteth­ered sen­sa­tion of peo­ple who do think for them­selves and find those thoughts a mis­fit for the world they live in. Nei­ther artist con­demns, both offer under­stand­ing and sym­pa­thy. While we must await what hap­pens in the con­clu­sion of The Lit­tle Death, in the mean­time you should be lis­ten­ing to these record­ings for their sin­cer­ity, human­ity and the plea­sure of hear­ing artists com­mand such expres­sive powers.