Lessons learned from Belle & Sebastian

Virtually all of Belle & Sebastian’s album covers consist of a black-and-white image with an overlaid color. Why? Why not.

A band that I listened to obsessively in my twenties was Belle & Sebastian.

By the time I discovered them, standing mesmerized at a listening station in a Tower Records store in Nashville, the Glaswegian band was already well into their long career. Back then, you had to actually buy the music you wanted to hear; I made a deal with myself that I could buy another Belle & Sebastian album only when I felt really down. For better or worse, I amassed their entire back catalog within two years.

Led by Stuart Murdoch, Belle & Sebastian has a “baroque pop” sound that calls back to artists like the Left Banke, Nick Drake, and the Smiths. Their songs are gorgeously melodic, enriched by cello, violin, trumpet, flute, with lyrics about lovable misfits who just can’t seem to get their lives together or let go of their hangups. There’s the guy in “Take Your Carriage Clock and Shove It” who uses his retirement ceremony as an opportunity to publicly call out each of his colleagues for their flaws; the sexually confused girl (there are lots of sexually confused people in the B&S oeuvre) in “Lazy Line Painter Jane” who apparently wanders the town in a semi-homeless state; and the artist in “It Could Have Been a Brilliant Career” who had a stroke at a young age, leading his ambivalent partner to feel an obligation to care for him even though he had already dumped her.

The combination of perversity and beauty in Belle & Sebastian’s work was irresistible and inspiring to me. To write archly of messy tragedies, embarrassing faux pas, and hopeless situations, and then set these tales to melodies worthy of Brian Wilson or Burt Bacharach? Too good.

Belle & Sebastian actually began as a project for a music business course. Their first album, Tigermilk, was recorded in three days under those circumstances. The amazing part is that, from the very first moment of the very first song, the band is fully-formed and recognizable. The opening track, “The State I Am In” contains some classic one-liners (“And so I gave myself to God/There was a pregnant pause before He said okay,” and all of the musical elements that the band became known for. It is a Belle & Sebastian song, through and through, perfect in its way.

We can look at examples like this and marvel at the artistic vision that must be involved. But that would be only part of the story.

Murdoch and the gang just happened to hit upon something that worked, and they had the guts to stick to it. Their songs were never going to be played beyond college radio, and that suited them just fine. The primary vocalists were not particularly skilled singers, but it wasn’t a big deal. The instruments weren’t always perfectly in tune, the arrangements were often amateurish, and the songs usually didn’t have much in the way of memorable hooks (no “yeah yeahs” or handclaps).

Any one of those elements could have been grounds for someone to say, “this isn’t good enough. This isn’t commercial enough. This isn’t polished enough. This is too weird.” Any one of those flaws could have caused someone to shove the project into a drawer, never to be heard again.

Instead, Belle & Sebastian used that initial record as a blueprint for the ones that would follow, embracing their idiosyncrasies instead of moderating or hiding them. The result is an instantly identifiable sound that works because they made it work.

How many of us are capable of making something great but feel self-conscious about what we create because it has too much of “us” in it? Instead of sanding down the rough edges to make something palatable and blameless, we could follow the Belle & Sebastian example and make our own art with confidence, leaning into the weirdness and awkwardness. Will someone find it memorable and compelling? That’s not up to us. But if your experiments thus far haven’t worked, it might be something to try.