Track-Flayer, Episode I, Part II: The Dismemberment Plan's "Ellen and Ben."

Okay, finally, I'm ready to try to do justice to the un-justice-doable end of this song. To wit:

Just before the end of the song, the music slows to a near-halt; we're sensing that the pressure built up throughout the song, between the story and the narrator's own feelings, has come to a head (not to mention that the story itself is peaking). That halt is resolved with what is one of the most beautiful shifts in music that I've heard:

"I'm doing fine..."

The musical and vocal irony suddenly ceases, and the music becomes downright earnest, open, releasing itself, like a tired sprinter, into a relaxed trot. Simultaneously, there's a dizzying narrative shift to an I-and-you relationship that has only been slightly hinted at earlier in the song. "I'm doing fine" responds to a silent, implied interruption, from a newly-present-and-insistent "you," a person who is ostensibly listening to the narrator's story (and is, perhaps, tired of him not getting to the real point). The "you" might be us as listeners (who are wondering much the same thing), or might be someone separate from us; Morrison lets that distinction hang in the air, a pleasing ambiguity. The shift from Ellen-and-Ben to you-and-I, the collapse of any seemingly disinterested narrative structure, and the replacement of that by a frank, friendly conversation, is so winsome, and carried off both naturally and surprisingly.

Anyway, the implied question is something like "But how are you doing?", and instantly moves the whole focus of the song away from the story, which is interesting, but not world-shaking, to the narrator himself. It goes further than that, though: we realize that even the story itself has been about the narrator. Our minds are instantly forced to re-envision the whole narrative in terms of the speaker. Ellen and Ben, though he obviously cares for them, are just a subject that is on his mind because of his current emotional state. Which is all to say that this shift is FUCKING BRILLIANT.

Musically, too, we now finally see the import of the whining synthesizers, which didn't seem appropriate to such a simple, tossed-off story--they were the representation of the narrator's emotional pangs, that were hiding behind the story all the time.

So what exactly is the narrator's state? I don't think it's "fine," though I don't think it's awful, either. The trite everydayness of "I'm doing fine" seems to mask a bit of uncomfortableness, which comes out further in the next lines, "I'm staying busy hanging with my nephew / and trying to keep my eyes on the prize." Not exactly a resoundingly happy summary of the narrator's life; he's just "staying busy," which implies that the narrator is simply doing something to occupy himself, rather than enjoying any kind of fulfillment. And trying to keep one's eyes on the prize contains the suggestion of one's straying away from "the prize," whatever life goal one has. (How much more effective these understated lines are than standard rock lyrics, where singers complain directly and plaintively about their problems.) But these last lines are so sunny we can't help but think things aren't really so bad, after all, for the narrator and for us, slogging along in a relatively pleasant stage of history.

In the final lines:

You know how it goes
And so do I so call me when you can now
You know I would love a surprise

the narrator formalizes the already implicit shift to a personal I-you conversation, though still the "you," when it appears vocally for the first time, is quite a surprise. This is no omniscient narrator; it's someone deeply involved with both the story he's telling and with "you," either his listener or a specific person whom the song is addressed to.

Then "Call me when you can" pushes it, subtly, even further: we learn that this is not the generic "you" of "you know how it goes," but a specific person he's talking to. He's now a guy sending someone an e-mail or leaving a rambling message on an answering machine. Which is even better than him talking to us as listeners: any singer-listener closeness would be strained or false, but a closeness with a "you" who isn't us, a separate person who actually knows Morrison, feels earned and natural. We're just eavesdroppers.

These final, gradual, masterful shifts to a) ambiguous I-you intimacy and b) specific I-you intimacy are really fetching, and put the song firmly into the "classic" category for me.

It also gives us the best summary we get in this song of what's going on with the speaker, though one of the best parts about the song is that he never gets too specific about what exactly is eating at him. He's lonely (as evidenced by his asking his friend to call him), and thinking about people who mean something to each other--and, one can assume, him--but drift apart over the years. He's resigned but hopeful. The tentative conclusion to the silent plot of the song is in the operatic fullness in the way Morrison sings "surprise"; he holds on to the word so voraciously that we have to think it's important. Life is full of trying and failing, staying busy, doing fine, the song suggests, but we're still aching for the surprises that it used to hold, and almost never does, and might not again, as our torrid pasts fade, and we fall into humdrum, separate lives.

All of that could be said in the prosaic way I just said it, but it comes off so much more effectively in the modulated, nuanced answering-machine message of those final lines.

Anyway, enough. Does that sum it up? Now that I'm done with this beast of a two-part post, I'd be happy to hear what those of you who have heard the song think.