“In everything any man wrote... is contained... the allegorical idea of his own future life, as the acorn contains the oak.” – Arthur Rimbaud

Strange but apparently true: songs can be predictive. They process the hidden impulses and undercurrents at work in a songwriter’s life, sort through the evidence, and make eerily accurate prognoses of what will come to pass. Perhaps the creative side of the brain, the night-side, knows what is before us, even as our waking consciousness cannot or will not acknowledge portents of the catastrophes ahead.
“Sometimes songs are postcards from the future,” Rosanne Cash wrote in a blog for the New York Times last May. “Often I have found that a song reveals something subtle but important about my own life that I was only vaguely aware of while writing, but that became clear as time went on. I wrote ‘Black Cadillac’ six weeks before a rash of deaths began in my family. The day I finished writing it, I played the completed song to myself, as a kind of last run-through to check for rhyme scheme errors and syllable scanning, and a tidal wave of anxiety started rising in my gut. I knew I had given myself a message.
“I don’t consider these postcard songs prescient as much as just coming from a source of creativity outside linear time. I am certainly not the first to notice this phenomenon in creative work. Thornton Wilder, for one, wrote, ‘It is only in appearance that time is a river. It is rather a vast landscape and it is the eye of the beholder that moves.’”
In Nick Cave’s 1998 lecture The Secret Life Of The Love Song, the singer described how the writing of ‘Far From Me’ from The Boatman’s Call didn’t just document the glorious beginnings of the love affair that inspired it, but also predicted – if not orchestrated – its inglorious decline.
“As I wrote the final verse of ‘Far From Me’ it became clear that my life was being dictated by the largely destructive ordinance of the song itself, which had its own inbuilt destiny, over which I had no control,” he said. “In fact, I was an afterthought, a bit-player in its sly, mischievous and finally malicious vision of how the world should be.”
And perhaps music presages not just the personal but also the socio-political. Earlier this year we speculated that just as Nirvana’s Nevermind telegraphed the Democrats’ ascension to the throne, perhaps Arcade Fire’s Neon Bible might, just might, augur well for Obama.
This is not the same as prophesy, which, as Greil Marcus observed in his book The Shape Of Things To Come, is as much about the past as the future, just as most future-dystopian novels – Orwell’s Eastern Bloc parable 1984 comes to mind – are about the time they’re written in rather than a time foreseen. No, songs are more psychological. They emanate from the murky realms of Freud ‘n’ Jung. A songwriter unwittingly composes the source code for his or her imminent future.
So be careful what you wish for, but be doubly mindful of what you write.