#108, “The Small Song,” Geraldine Fibbers (1995)

150 Favorite Songs, #108, “The Small Song,” Geraldine Fibbers (1995)

Carla Bozulich is one of the most intense performers ever to put her voice on a record. Either you agree, or you don’t know who Carla Bozulich is.

If it’s the latter, that’s fair—most people don’t. Even at the height of her career, which is roughly around the time “The Small Song” was released, she was hardly famous. I was a music-obsessed teen desperate to find things that sounded like this when it came out, and I didn’t learn who she was until seven or eight years later. The potential audience for the Geraldine Fibbers, and especially for its lead singer, is just inherently limited. Do you want someone shrieking in your ears about how she’s lost somewhere between the earth and her home, her voice shredding against thumping drums and a frantic bassline and, somehow, also a violin? If so, do not skip pressing play up there. If not, I understand. She’s not for everyone.

I like all of that stuff very much, but what I also like is that there’s a tension to “The Small Song” that absolutely captivates me. The song’s refrain is Bozulich singing the line that the album on which “The Small Song” appears is named for—Lost Somewhere Between the Earth and My Home—and it’s entirely plausible that singers like Bozulich don’t come from this planet. Honestly, it kind of makes more sense than the alternative.

There are all these nods to normalcy on “The Small Song,” despite the fact that the song is a swirling mess of chaos. The song opens with an eight bar verse that lasts about twenty-five seconds, where Bozulich sings about feeling confined and lost. “The last thing I checked / this old boat was getting hot / but my boyfriend was not,” she sings, and that line always jolts me when I hear it—everything going on in this song is far too weird and chaotic and aggressive to drop a concept as prosaic as “boyfriend” into it. Once you get past those thirty seconds, you’re in for almost a full minute of discordant noise, a muted rhythm track over meandering, finger-picked electric guitar notes that slowly picks back up so Bozulich can repeat that chorus four times, which is just the words “lost somewhere between the earth and my home,” screamed with increasing intensity. Things drop back down after that for a bridge in which Bozulich excoriates her—I guess—her boyfriend for nothing specific, mostly just for being there, for not understanding her, for not being what she needs.

And that tracks, because she’s not from around here. There’s something I find really beautiful about “The Small Song,” where this woman who is constantly frustrated, on the edge of rage, ready to explode the second the drums come back in, also wants something normal—something like a boyfriend. Of course she would. We all want that. The character she plays on a record can’t possibly have it, though, which makes the explosion of “The Small Song” the only reasonable conclusion here. What good is a boyfriend when you’re lost somewhere between the earth and your home, after all?

When I found “The Small Song,” I was not too far out from a breakup in which I felt a bit like the boyfriend in the song. I don’t think I did much wrong, per se, but I wasn’t in a position to do much right, either. Her story is hers to tell, but the circumstances leading up to the time we were together were very difficult, intense enough that if I were to type them here, you’d think I was making them up. She needed a lot of different things at that point in her life, but a boyfriend was not one of them. All of that made it a really tough breakup for me—but I think finding “The Small Song” gave me some distance from my own perspective on it. It is not much fun to be the boyfriend in this story, but hearing Carla Bozulich at her most intense still sing about having one was weirdly comforting to me—everyone wants to love and be loved, even people whose calling at the moment is to try to find their way home in a world that feels alien to them. Most of the time, that’s not going to work out.

It’s funny; I wasn’t really thinking about the time in my life during which I found “The Small Song” when I started typing this one. I just knew that line stood out. I remember writing about this song shortly after I found it, twenty-plus years ago, on my ancient LiveJournal, and noticing that the line bumped for me then, too, but I don’t think that I had the necessary perspective to understand why. All I knew was that it was a song where I was very much not the main character, and the woman who was was someone it was difficult to make sense of, and I loved the intensity of it. In hindsight, though, it’s all right there: She was lost somewhere between the earth and her home. That’s the sort of crisis you can’t help much with.

Carla Bozulich has gone on to do many different things with her music, which makes sense to me, too. The Geraldine Fibbers broke up a few years after this album came out, and I discovered the band when I found her, around the time she released an album covering Willie Nelson’s Red Headed Stranger in full. That’s not as odd a connection as it may seem—somehow, the Geraldine Fibbers were tagged as an alt-country band, which is baffling to me, but I guess is because among the cacophony of instruments you can hear in “The Small Song” there’s a violin, and because Bozulich would sometimes be photographed in a cowboy hat. (They also sometimes covered country standards—here’s “Jolene” and here’s “Fancy.”) The last time I really made friends with her music, she had released an album called Evangelista where the members of Godspeed You! Black Emperor served as the band, which—if you know anything about that band—befits a singer as intense as Bozulich. Her last album, released in 2018, is called Quieter, and it is that, but it’s no less intense. I hope she found her way between the earth and her home.