Mango Wood

I’ve gone through a long stretch of not listening to much music; and I’m happily starting to pick it up again. As I do that, it’s interesting to see which songs I recall fondly. Like the Belle & Sebastian last week, this is a song for which I had gotten the CD, knowing almost nothing about the artist, and had one track immediately jump out at me. My goal in writing these posts is to try to identify .

I’ve described my reaction as, “there’s really something happening here.” Which is not the same as, “this is a perfectly executed (or perfectly constructed) song” (a slightly different pleasure), but the immediate sense of something personal and creative.

The first thing you notice is that it’s clearly recorded live as a first take — with a full band, and a more-or-less call-and-response rhythm between Sparrow and the band. Sparrow is extremely charismatic. The verses are wordy, and there are moments when it feels like he doesn’t have the breath to be able to emphasize words and beats as much as he might want, and it doesn’t take anything away from it. It has swagger and is also deeply earnest.

It is, essentially, a protest song, expressing frustration that he voted for council men who are now ignoring the problems of the voters. Protest songs often have a reputation for being overly didactic and focused on immediate concerns which prevent them from being timeless — there are great protest songs, of course, but there are challenges to the category, which this avoids. Re-listening to it, I find myself drawn to the opening lines and thinking about how they set the tone for the song.

First, it’s a happy song, for all of the frustration expressed, he’s charming and open-hearted. It is a call for uplift not anger. It also plays with a variety of moods. Think about how begins the song, “Listen. Listen carefully. / I am a man that has never been sorry.”

What does it mean for a man to have never been sorry? That could be a positive mental attitude, a threat (and you don’t want to make me sorry), or a sense of stoicism (you do your best and you don’t regret what happens as long as your original motivation was good). The song includes all of those moods. The mango wood is clearly a threat, but his statements to the contrary (“not a threat”) still make clear that this is not a man full of rage. At the same time, he’s making do just like everyone else (“When I can't buy milk, I use sugar and water”) and he’s not grandiose (“I am only a calypsonian / What I say may be very small”), and yet he’s unforgettable.

I am convinced that he is not a man to mess with — not because of his mango wood, but his ability to command attention with his singing.