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Stay, Beautiful
a prose music video by Simon Drax | late winter 2013
Fade in:
A lone man in workboots and factory overalls struggles through a snow-covered apocalyptic wasteland, dropping his tools and bags as he trudges to the top of a hill which he reaches with terrible effort; he gasps for air as he is bathed in the light of the full Moon, a perfect and bright world of craters and mountains and dead black seas, cradled in a wide and open and star-filled sky. The man drops a hammer, then swings out his last tool, a guitar. We see now he is the sad and wizened and risen revenant of Stuart Adamson, late of the band Big Country and late of this plane for more than eleven years now. His hand slashes the strings of his guitar and the risen dead Stuart Adamson sings to the Moon:
We knew the Moon would leave us soon
We knew the Earth had grown too cold
We knew the ice would fill the scars we’d sown
[preemptive blast of rapid fire Adamson guitar]
We knew all this with frozen hearts and heads of stone
[2nd big blast of Adamson guitar, ending with a flourish, then a steady tick-tick-tick]:
Yet still we prayed and still we sang
For the grey hills of our dreams
For She may forgive and love us still
And we may glow and burn again
In the sky, lips to hips and hand to hand,
oh Stay oh
Staaaaay—
[Big rip of the guitar]
And as the dead Stuart Adamson sings to the Moon She swells in the sky, coming closer, and then a lovely woman’s face is superimposed over the valleys and crags of the now-huge Moon, and she gazes down at Dead Stuart as he sings his song. A story is visually told—two lovers, two worlds, once in love, but now one world has lost its way and has begun to resemble too-closely the stark and bleak features of the loving but fickle Muse/Moon; She has loved the Earth for centuries, but she will be leaving, now. And She will not be coming back.
BUT as the story is told and the song is sung, the beautiful woman in the Moon is not entirely unswayed; her eyes pool with compassion as Dead Stuart blasts out the last of his plea:
We knew we’d kill our own green hills
But we can make it right again, I know
I will die again (and then) and when my blood
Has spilled
[big descending scale]
And we may glow and burn again
In the sky, lips to hips and hand to hand,
oh Stay oh
Staaaaay—
[Big final blast of the guitar]
Dead Stuart falls to his knees, gazes up. The Moon looks down at him, eyes full of pity, even love—and slowly, sadly, she shakes her head
No.
And she zooms away like the receding eye of a tunnel, and is gone from the brittle and cold sky.
Dead Stuart falls backward, then moves no more.
The motes swirl above the barren landscape and we
FADE OUT
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— Notes —
• I completely did not listen to a stitch of Big Country while writing this.
• The lyrics could loosely be read to the beat of “Wonderland” or “Remembrance Day” or “The Teacher.”
• For the first half of writing this, I listened to this.
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