"To Speak Is a Sin" (1993)

[listen]

I put this song on a mixtape once for a woman I liked. Yes, I did. It's my favorite on the album (or more accurately competes with "Liberation" and "Dreaming of the Queen" for the honor). She said it reminded her of Al Stewart, which I hadn't noticed before but she was right. Lucky for me I count him and "Year of the Cat" and Past, Present and Future as good things. I understand this song is often interpreted as the PSBs' AIDS era statement song, and I certainly can hear that when I listen closely to the words. "I always thought it was about sad old lonely homosexuals not daring to talk to anyone attractive in a bar," Chris Lowe said in conversation for notes to the Further Listening edition of Very. Tennant: "Yes, that's pretty much it. And also, when you go into a gay bar ... it's all done by looks and gestures.... We always used to like tragic gay bars." Lowe: "Everyone's too flaming happy now. Obviously it's great that people are happy, but a whole culture has kind of disappeared." I can't speak to any of that. I have never connected to this song exactly that way. To me it's just exquisitely sad, full of nameless regrets and longing, opening at will into appallingly beautiful spaces. It can melt me. Tennant remembers it as "a very slight song" and it is actually one of their first, written in the early '80s. "To Speak Is a Sin" may be simple but it is potent. It seems to be always falling down a little, slipping away, relinquishing. There's a sense of letting go but a much keener one of loss. It feels like you have descended into a place that is at once both comforting and frightening. The burden here is sadness and it is a heavy load. I bear it but it's the one song on the album it took me longest to feel so deeply. It sneaked up on me instead of clobbering me the way "Liberation" and "Dreaming of the Queen" did. In the totality of the album, here at the proximate midpoint of the whole Very Relentless package, "To Speak Is a Sin" serves as a bittersweet respite, a slowing down, a meditation. It details the textures of Very in another way, this swirling dreamboat parade float moving down the line. The way Al Stewart did it too, though perhaps never quite with all this lush depth.