What Charles Is Playing

Every morning starts here. Before the coffee, before Nero demands his walk, before I remember what century I am supposed to be writing for. Jobim understood something that most modern producers have forgotten: silence is an instrument. The spaces between the notes on Stone Flower are as deliberate as the notes themselves. I have owned four copies of this record. Not because I wear them out. Because I keep giving them to people who need them more than they know.

The greatest album ever made. I will not debate this. I have left rooms over it. I have ended conversations. I once left a dinner party in Hampstead because a man in a linen shirt said he preferred the Jeff Buckley covers album. There is Grace, and there is everything else. The vinyl pressing I own was a gift from a woman whose name I will not share, given on an evening I will not describe, in a city I visit less often than I should.

I met Nick Cave once, briefly, at a German airport during an Emirates layover. He was reading. I was pretending not to stare. We exchanged approximately eleven words. I will not share them because they were ordinary, and ordinary words from extraordinary men deserve to remain private. Push the Sky Away is the album where Cave stopped shouting and started whispering. The whispering is more terrifying. The man is exactly as you'd imagine. Which is to say, more than you'd imagine.

She is my modern Callas. If you think that comparison is absurd, you haven't listened to either of them properly. NFR is not a pop album. It is a novel set to music, written by a woman who understands melancholy the way the Italians understand lunch — as something to be savoured, not rushed. I listen to this album more than I should. I listen to it in the evening, with the windows open and Madeira disappearing into the Atlantic dark. I am not ashamed.

The Portuguese Brahms, except the Portuguese don't need to compare themselves to anyone. Freitas Branco wrote this symphony at a time when Portugal was looking inward and the world was not looking at Portugal at all. It is sweeping, unapologetic, romantic in the way that only music written without an audience can be. I played in an orchestra for years — a detail I rarely share and will not elaborate on here — and this symphony was the piece that made me understand why people devote their lives to an instrument.