Together We're Stranger

One of the greatest albums I’ve ever heard begins with twenty-three seconds of garbage noise. It’s the sonic equivalent of being dropped into a blender running at maximum power. Once it subsides, though, a sound that I shall never be able to scrub from my mind emerges. It’s the sonic equivalent of a foreign valley, where one can see nothing but barren hills for miles, and in this perfect clarity, one can recognize that they are, in fact, entirely alone. Understood in the context of the rest of the album, it represents the immense pain of a breakup, but on a more practical level, it grabs the listener’s absolute attention, tearing through the tight-knit flesh of reality and bringing them into a surreal plane of sound

The breakup album, for better or worse, has become a staple of pop culture. It is marked by emotional highs, of fleeting moments of vulnerability defended by grating cynicism, and of course, the oh-so-beloved jabs at whomever wronged the artist. Together We’re Stranger is a breakup album, that much is for sure, but it’s a label it doesn’t wear easily. If some heavenly deity attempted to stretch a latex balloon over the surface of the Earth, this album would be Mt. Everest, deforming and even piercing the film that attempts to constrain its magnitude.

The first words of the album come almost three minutes into the first track, “Together We’re Stranger.” The first four tracks form a twenty-eight minute suite that contains most of the album’s narrative. This first verse in the title track is one of the most lyrically dense moments on the entire 47-minute record–a record that prefers sparse portrayals of pain to overdone spiteful breakup standards–and because of this unusual density it’s clear that the listener ought to pay attention to this overture of the story that’s about to come.

“We step outside

And face the poisoned weather

You and I are something else together

Arm in arm

We'd waste our charms forever

Drifting off, despite the cost

Afraid to ask for better

You and I are something else together”

I really do believe that this album is perfectly written, and it speaks for itself better than I ever could. But keep in mind the movement in unison, the sacrifices people make when they enter a relationship, contrasted with the undeniable truth that there is something transcendent about a relationship that makes it more valuable than the sum of its parts and the penalties it extracts–these are all at the core of this work of art. Think back to those first few seconds. If this is a breakup album, then they must represent a moment of unbearable pain, followed by a comparably infinitely larger span of chronic suffering and contemplation. That is the essence of this album.

The listener is left to wander the almost-ambient landscape for a few minutes. The core of the track comes from another song, “Drugged,” by Bass Communion. No-Man and Bass Communion are both projects of the mastermind that is Steven Wilson–Bass Communion being his catalog of ambient works made from the scraps of his solo albums and albums for his most successful project Porcupine Tree, and No-Man being his first musical endeavor, a band comprised by himself and Tim Bowness, a lifelong friend, collaborator, and genius in his own regard. This album came out in 2003, and it was No-Man's fifth album. As Wilson and Bowness are both squarely in the progressive side of music, there isn't much of a standard in their discographies to compare this album to, but even so, one can tell that this album was a departure from anything they had done up to this point.

I don’t want to go into depth about every song on the album, at least, not now. On one hand, I have far too much to say, and I’d need to realistically give weeks of my time to analyzing and dissecting this album’s complexity and emotion in a way that truly satisfies me. On another, I believe more than anything else that every person’s interpretation of a work of art is as valid as any other person’s, and I’m always disheartened when I find myself reading something about a piece of art that changes how I perceive said work of art. I don’t want to tell you how to interpret the album, especially assuming you’ve never listened to it! Even so, for the sake of the completeness of this blurb, I’ll say a bit about each song.

“All the Blue Changes:” The most repeated line in this section is “all the blue changes, rearranged,” which to me evokes something like a cutting room floor. Our narrator is on their knees, desperately shifting memories around to make them into a shape that their pained mind can tolerate, desperately trying to figure out what went wrong and why and if he could’ve done it all differently, though it should be noted that the music doesn’t decline into madness here, in fact, the song is on a constant crescendo, and a stripped-down melody is slowly overtaken by angelic chords. Perhaps this is the beginning of acceptance, and the nascence of a realization that a failed relationship can, despite all its pain and emptiness and rawness, make one more whole. It’s a song of change, of shifting, but one of settling and accepting all the same.

“The City in a Hundred Ways” is a brief instrumental, but it is also a line in the previous song. To me, it makes me think of driving in a car through one’s hometown, passing by all the landmarks that were made significant because of romantic love, and being forced to remember, even after the messiest stages of healing have passed.

“Things I Want to Tell You,” the last song of the suite, is impossible in its scale. It would take a thousand words to even begin to explain its nuances. It portrays a loss of love in an almost identical way to chronic pain and mental illness. Bowness himself commented on this, saying, “It seemed tragic to me that all this individual emotional history was fading or lost, trapped inside a malfunctioning brain, forever incapable of being properly expressed.” The finality of the breakup has finally arrived, the dreamlike state is exchanged for a nightmarish reality, and the worst part is, as the title suggests, that none of this hellish emotion could ever be expressed to the one person who used to help the narrator get through all of life’s hardships. How does one go on as a shell of themself, a shell riddled with festering sores of sorrow?

“Bluecoda” was not originally on the album. It’s a scrapped and brief epilogue to the suite, quite possibly from the perspective of the narrator’s ex-lover. It’s a lyrical mirror image of the title track, and I’d best leave its particulars for you to discover.

The final three songs, “Photographs in Black and White,” “Back When You Were Beautiful,” and “The Break-Up for Real,” are not a part of the suite, which itself could have made for a very complete work of art. Indeed, the suite already contains in its twenty-eight to thirty minutes more emotion and turbulence than one could find on most full-blown albums, but Together We’re Stranger has more to say. The final three songs come across as supplemental texts, or short stories, using the building blocks and motifs of the suite. They’re all exceptional, and this time I really will draw a line in the sand and not say anything more about them. They all provide new angles to see relationships through, and they provide variations and deeper explorations of the narrator’s feelings. They’re best felt and interpreted without any preconceptions. Despite their seemingly extraneous nature, the suite would feel a little incomplete without them just as much as they’d feel a little incomplete without the suite. Perhaps that in itself is a message about relationships.

The cover of the album depicts an otherworldly yet still obviously human (there appears to be a city in the background) landscape. In the foreground are two lines, forming silhouettes reminiscent of bedsheet ghosts, two lines that cross over each other in their arcs but never intersect. Our characters crossed paths, but they never overlapped. But what would it mean for these lines to overlap? Would they have coiled together? Or would they have merged, becoming one line, its constituents indistinguishable from one another? Regardless, even the cover has a thesis of its own: a relationship forces two independent strings of life to forge a path together. I think our narrator would have used to see that as something beautiful, and of course, there is beauty in such an idea. But if and when it all comes to an end, and the strange, exciting, extraterrestrial world is shed for the real one, it really does feel like you’ve lost something unrecoverable, and even a part of yourself.

The album should be listened to in its entirety, all at once, and yes, it should be listened to. And dear reader, even if you’re not going through a breakup yourself (I certainly am not), I think you might find this meditative, melancholic album has a lot to share about love in a much more honest and vulnerable way than we’re used to with our mainstream songs about the subject. And I certainly didn't represent it justly in this post, so go see for yourself what it wants to tell you.