#46, “New Dawn Fades,” Joy Division (1979)

150 Favorite Songs: #46, “New Dawn Fades,” Joy Division (1979)

I always expected that I'd outgrow Joy Division one day. It hasn't happened yet.

In fact, I find more to appreciate about the band as I get older. There's so much to the band's music that I hadn't fully appreciated when I first discovered the band, as a kinda-gothy 14 year old who wanted to hear more from the band that Nine Inch Nails covered on The Crow soundtrack. Back then, I bought a copy of the Permanant compilation from Music X-Press in downtown Highland, Indiana, and I would usually listen to "Dead Souls" and "Shadowplay," and snicker at Ian Curtis' voice on "Atmosphere," which is actually still pretty funny. “New “Dawn Fades” isn't even on Permanent.

But I was a nerd then, just like I'm a nerd now, and I would take trips into Chicago with my friends and buy copies of the band's albums on vinyl at used record shops. Which 14 year old in the 90's had two thumbs and early pressings of Unknown Pleasures and Closer? This guy. (They, and a copy of Boys for Pele by Tori Amos, might be the only things I bought back then that I still have, too.)

“New Dawn Fades” is the climax of Unknown Pleasures, the final song on side one of the album, and really probably the climax of the band’s very brief career, too. It’s still strange to think that a band that mattered so much really only existed in a recognizable form from June 1978 to May 1980, from the time they released An Ideal for Living until Ian Curtis hung himself in his kitchen, a few months before his twenty-fourth birthday.

The song is pretty explicitly a cry for help, although it’s easier to say that in hindsight than I’m sure it was when Ian Curtis was a living, breathing person that those around him played music with or were married to. It’s also so stylish and moody in ways that have nothing to do with Ian Curtis—Peter Hook’s descending bass riff interplays so wonderfully with Bernard Sumner’s ascending guitar riff, Stephen Morris’s stomping drums strives for the epic, sounding a little bit like Black Sabbath filtered through the weird German shit these dudes were into—that it might be a mistake to read too much into it, or at least that it must have been easy to talk yourself out of doing that if you were around Ian Curtis at the time he wrote the lyrics to the song. Was he contemplating suicide when he sang a loaded gun won’t set you free / so you say and i’ll give you everything and more / the strain’s too much, can’t take much more or was he trying to summon a sentiment that matched the the intensity of Sumner’s guitar tone and the bombast of Morris’s drumming? Can you even separate those things?

It’s funny. When you discover a band like Joy Division at a young age—or maybe just when you discover Joy Division, there really aren’t many bands like them—they seem almost mythological, especially the tragedy of their ending. I was fourteen when I first heard “New Dawn Fades.” Ian Curtis died a few days after I was born, at twenty-three, which when you’re fourteen seems impossibly grown up. And I devoured everything I could about the band, tracked down every compilation CD that had a song I hadn’t yet heard, dreamed of finding a copy of An Ideal For Living at a record store in Chicago (it would have cost a thousand dollars, even back then, but I thought maybe they just wouldn’t know). I read Deborah Curtis’s Touching From a Distance, the book she wrote in her late thirties about her marriage to Ian, and tried to make sense of what his songs meant, what wisdom could be found in them. It felt like hidden, secret knowledge, and Ian Curtis—maybe because of how he died, and how easy that death is to romanticize when you find the clues in a song like “New Dawn Fades”—loomed impossibly large in my imagination, like he was Darth Vader or something.

But now, well, shit. I am old enough to know that twenty-three is so unbelievably young, and Ian Curtis wasn’t a figure out of mythology. He was a mixed-up kid who got married way too young, and who maybe knew how to use his music as a little bit of a cry for help, and to use those cries for help as a way to make his music more compelling, to seem as big and grand and emotional as it could be. Ultimately, as far as anyone can tell, Ian Curtis killed himself because he got married at nineteen and his wife got pregnant just as he saw his life opening up before him and he realized that maybe he didn’t want to be with a girl he met when he was sixteen, and he had a crush on someone else and felt so trapped that he decided that the best way out was to kill himself. There’s always more to it than that, epilepsy and depression playing a part in all of it, but the line between a real person and a voice in a song is always muddy, whether or not you believe the mythology. The truth is that Ian Curtis put the part of himself that would hang himself in his kitchen at twenty-three into his songs, and that makes those songs feel very important.

“New Dawn Fades” is an artifact, a sentiment that captures both the real and performative pain of someone who clearly felt a lot of both, if there’s even a difference. It’s also a sweeping, almost anthemic, rock song played by young men who found something special in what they made, who would go on to keep playing music together as New Order after Ian’s death. Whether Ian Curtis pored himself into “New Dawn Fades” to make it what it is, or if “New Dawn Fades” gave him a vessel to pore himself into, it doesn’t really matter. All that’s left is the song now, anyway.