Their story begins to the notes of a soulless piece, resting on the bar counter of a bar, among the clinking of glassware and the frantic sounds spat from the television above their heads. Between them, that typical college-era familiarity: I caught sight of your dark curls and your square shoulders, I know who you are and you know who I am, but we’ve never really shared something that crossed the corridors of the Berkeley campus.
And then, as soft rock and the white soul of a Hall & Oates song mingle in the air, the relationship between Percy and Joe, the protagonists of Deep Cuts by Holly Brickley, begins to grow with the force of a balloon inflated in a hurry in the last minutes before the start of a party.
Percy e Joe, due vite apparentemente agli antipodi
Percy comes from Indiana, where his family planted roots in the most classic and comforting love of all: a warm home, a smart and protective older brother, a musician mother who stayed on the margins of the revolutions of her generation, and a father who works in a factory, whose chest is so broad that, as a child, it was impossible to be held in a hug.
Joe, on the other hand, plays the guitar and writes songs in response to a past from which he feels haunted: his mother died when he was still just a kid, his father struggles with alcohol, and at home education has never been valued properly. And he has a girlfriend.
Zoe studies political science, has bleached hair, a punk look, and corrects the imbalances of his life, with a love born from the awareness that different sexual orientations cannot set limits on a good that has always existed.
La musica protagonista di un equilibrio perfetto
And thus, as a friendship among the three of them grows that transcends ideas of relationship, jealousy, and propriety, Joe and Percy find their own balance in which music is always, inexorably, the protagonist: Joe writes, Percy edits. Joe brings the initial ideas, then it is Percy who hones them, makes them more palatable without losing quality, and finds the most memorable hook and bridge.
That bond between Percy and Joe cannot be boxed into traditional love-story models. There are no linear developments, there is attraction but not always the courage to listen to it, there is the desire to be part of each other’s lives but the constant fear of not being up to it.
And there is, above all, the fear of breaking a perfect balance grounded in a shared passion that tastes almost ancestral, and the idea of building a family without ever having explored the other’s body.
Leggere Deep Cuts è come ascoltare una playlist
Reading Deep Cuts is like listening to a playlist created by someone who forcefully slips the headphones into our ears, then takes us by the hand at the start of each track and guides us to discover the ultimate essence of every song, sometimes exposing them from their decades-long (and perhaps deceptive) beauty.
It’s true that Leonard Cohen, when he wrote Chelsea Hotel #2, intended to glorify Janis Joplin, and not, rather, to self-celebrate and emphasize his own carnal pleasures? And that Our House by Graham Nash is an ode to their poetic coexistence, and not so much a window into Joni Mitchell’s weariness, painted as a hearth-angel?
True love, that healthy and all-encompassing kind in the best sense of the term, isn’t the love between the two protagonists, but the love for the music itself. The songs of the Beach Boys, Neutral Milk Hotel, No Doubt, and then Nick Cave, Stevie Wonder, Fleetwood Mac, and OutKast punctuate the narration and push toward the discovery of new readings of their meanings.
Come gli eroi per un giorno di Bowie
Percy and Joe seek each other, want each other, push each other away, desire, find each other and then drift apart again, clashing obstacles as the Heroes for a Day Bowie-sung tale does. They mask the sadness of separation with a bitter smile, as if aware that happiness is best sought elsewhere and not there, among them, amid unfinished lyrics and a love that relentlessly tries to find its definition.
Living apart seems the solution. It would truly be, if not for the obsession they nurture for one another that blinds every aspect of their lives.
And even if it may be superfluous to put a label on every relationship, those unfinished lines are worth finishing, while outside the world collapses and panic spreads through the streets of New York. Who knows—could they become the next song of the year…
