Max's Musings

Amazing Grace and The Stranger

Amazing Grace and The Stranger

I've been using these blogs to highlight stories I've written and the songs that have inspired them.

As I've looked over my files, I'm surprised to see how often music appears in my stories. Sometimes it's mentioned just to set the mood, or maybe the era, or even hint at character. But more often, as I re-read the story, I remember music playing in my head as I wrote. That's especially true for songs with compelling narratives--songs like "Take on Me" or "Ode to Billie Joe." But in other cases, it's the lyrics, as in "Amazing Grace." In still other cases, it's magic blend of timbre, harmony, and melody. Billy Joel's paene to loneliness and existential angst, "The Stranger," is one of these latter songs.

Pairing Billy Joel and a traditional hymn might seem a strange choice, but both played a role in inspriing one of my stories. The lyrics for Amazing Grace are by an Anglican curate, John Newton, while it was an American Baptist preacher who paired the lyrics with the tradtional tune, "New Britain," creating the version familiar today. Billy Joel has said that he wrote his song without any core themes in mind. Perhaps that's the genius of the song--it's truer than true, as Hemingway might say. In any case, for me it evokes the kind of loneliness and existential angst one finds in authors like Albert Camus and his book with the same title.

In any case, the title for my little story, "Amazing Grace" , certainly comes from the famous hymn, and the ending echoes some of the words in that song. The story starts by mentioning a piano playing in a lonely bar and a man slouching nearby, his eyes leaking loneliness. I remember listening to Joel's song, "The Stranger," while writing the story and trying to capture the feeling of the song's opening, where he whistles the haunting melody while playing spare chords on the piano. That was the mood I was shooting for. Later, the piano man in the story sings the song, in a bit of heavy-handed foreshadowing.

I'm not particularly happy with my story. The direct inspiration was a classic short story, "My Object All Sublime," by Poul Anderson. Anderson's story was much better, and I probably should have left well enough alone. I've struggled with several different endings to my story, and found none of them satisfying. Maybe I'll come back to it, as I've done with the various versions of "The Flying Dutchman (version 4)" . The most recent one of that story, written today, seems best to me. I've not yet given up on "Amazing Grace" .

For a link to "Amazing Grace," I chose a scene from the sitcom Cheers. Here, the bar's customers hold a wake for a departed friend, but as the wake proceeds, they remember the many awful things the friend had done. They get so angry, they take an effigy of their friend and plan to burn it. Diane, though, has other ideas, in one of the most effective endings ever to a sitcom. Since my story is set in a bar and ends with hope of redemption, this seemed like an appropriate link.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IeeN4YCNn6o

For "The Stranger," I chose Billy Joel's 1977 performance at Carnegie Hall.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qdLPI6XhEN8