Little Systems

From the very beginning of “Girl, Weeping,” the latest lit-pop release from Nashville-based duo Little Systems, songwriters Berit Goetz and Jamie Dougherty make it clear that their listeners are entering a world. Derived from text by T.S. Eliot, a complicated titan of twentieth-century Modernism, “Girl, Weeping” transports listeners like a reverie, removing us from Eliot’s sunlit stair of remembered young love to an unknown, maturing shore.

Beneath a spare, barely-oscillating shine of synth, the song opens with an organic rhythm of crashing waves. This wet bed of diagetic sound locates us, and persists beneath the song, even as Dougherty’s pattern of plucked guitar and Goetz’s alto voice carry us into a revised, distilled, updated version of “La Figlia che Piange.” We know we’re at an edge, at a threshold, the shoreline of something large, something moving, something that could overwhelm us if disturbed. But as it is, the music, like the waves, are breaking gently.

Like the original poem, the song centers on a moment between two people in which the speaker addresses a beloved other (in a new light? in memory? in imagination?) in a litany of instructions— “stand on the highest pavement of the stair,” “weave the sunlight in your hair,” “clasp your flowers to you.” The instructions stack until, as if surprised, the speaker arrives at their instruction for the beloved to leave. This surprise is undergirded by the energetic introduction of percussion, which just as quickly drops out again as the song begins its final climactic ascent. The speaker escalates their reverie into full awareness, zeroing in again on the image of the beloved’s arms, catching sunlight, full of flowers. “And I wonder how they should have been together!” Like the speaker, we’re invited to consider the serendipity of the situation: the statistical improbability of the beloved standing there at all, let alone holding flowers in their arms—the unlikelihood of the world itself, and the certainty, from birth, that we will leave it. One realizes the use of imperatives belies the speaker’s utter vulnerability, their powerlessness to change the ending of the story.

Where Eliot hurries past this moment, with its exquisite synthesis of Eros and Thanatos, Little Systems savvily linger. Goetz’s voice ushers us into an extended instrumental break, which soars with layers of horns, warbling synths, sparkling guitars, and an artful use of vocoder. As the wave crests, you’re left to remember the last line of the poem again in silence, shocked at the economy of feeling that’s pierced you. “Girl, Weeping” ends itself in the moment before you look up from the page, just as the change a poem’s made in you sets in, like dye into fabric.

The world Little Systems have made in this release, as in their previous work, is one in which poetry and pop music are eager bedfellows. And what’s more, they do so in ways rarely tested in the current pop musical landscape. Artists as culture-making as Taylor Swift and Beyoncé have incorporated poetry, or at least literary aesthetics, into their personas. Swift’s most recent album, The Tortured Poets Department, bills itself as an anthology of collected poems, and her lyrics, from the beginnings of her career to now, have drawn on poetic references ranging from English Romanticism to Shakespeare to Dylan Thomas and Patti Smith. Beyoncé, for her part, has collaborated with the Nigerian writer Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie as as featured artist on her 2013 track “***Flawless,” and credited Somali British poet Warsan Shire for her influence over her 2016 visual album Lemonade. Still, for Taylor Swift and Beyoncé, it remains that as much as poetry is in the mix, the songs on their records are more pop than poetry, more torqued than tortured. They are writing under poetry’s influence, but not sending drafts out in Submittable.

Just as allusions to Scottish moors do not, on their own, a poem make, merely singing poetry doesn’t transform its language into pop music. Other alchemies are afoot. The conventions of song form pose a challenge for musicians trying to bring the tortured poetry of the literary canon to a musical mass audience. Popular music’s sophisticated patterning of verses, choruses, pre-choruses, post-choruses, and vamps stitch density of repetition into satisfaction. The catch-and-release of familiarity and tension are instrumental in making a song impossible to resist looping. To put it reductively: if you stick enough hooks into an earworm, hopefully everyone will bite. The conventions of poetry, especially contemporary poetry, tend to eschew end rhyme and refrains. One might be able to imagine writing a pop song without a rhyme. But without a chorus? Without a hook?

None of this is meant to disparage the incredible ingenuity of pop songwriting. I’m a Poptimist through and through. Pop music is as much an art as poetry. I don’t experience loving popular music as being at odds in any way with my habit to moonlight as a poet. I have seen the tender underbelly of poets in workshop assuaged by a timely Florence + The Machine album drop. I have survived a badly considered poem being ill-received and sung out my feelings to Rina Sawayama. I have been greeted by the cold face of yet another rejection email to this or that journal and come out the other side bopping to Dua Lipa.

What moves me, though, uniquely, in “Girl, Weeping,” and in Little Systems’ work up to now, is the way Goetz and Dougherty showcase a different way of living into that utterly pop sensibility of tension and release—one that adheres closer to the experience of reading a poem than listening to a pop song, while still creating a song anyone could playlist. “Girl, Weeping” is literary pop for people who know that Ezra Pound made T.S. Eliot’s “The Wasteland” better by cutting it in half, a move Little Systems in fact adopt with Eliot as well. “Girl, Weeping” cuts his fluff (and gendered language) and in doing so, breathes contemporary urgency into a poem that’s a century old until the language, with music at its side, stands upright, fully grown, a mature, poignant, and knowing song. By making the right changes to T.S. Eliot’s text—writing with an eye towards distilling and exposing the latent narrative possibilities embedded in the poem, rather than impose a form alien to it—Little Systems achieves music that bears repeating.

“Girl, Weeping” is out now on all major streaming platforms.

-Luke Scott Stringer