Music & Cities: The Cure’s ‘Songs of a Lost World’ in New York City

In this special column for Atwood Magazine, I explore the impact of one artist and album across the range of my experience in one city or across several cities. The aspiration is that you will resonate with my experiences and how they might intersect with your own life in deepening our understanding and reflection on a particular artist and album in our contemporary world.

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The Cure’s ‘Songs of a Lost World’ is an incredible lived testament of a vision to change how you live and think — as they show us that it is possible to live this life at the margins while always bursting the bubble of the mainstream, and when you do so in the streets of New York City, that is true magic.

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Stream: ‘Songs of a Lost World’ – The Cure

It was a convening of two lost lovers of decades past and mutual souls that lived and breathed as one person,

marking one of those landmark birthdays as they roamed the streets of NYC in a quest for nothing other than to intensely relish the moment with each other in a private frame of experience which had unfortunately become far too fleeting within the distance and eclipses of life. The evening began with an ice-chilled glass of Prosecco on the wonderful rooftop at the Library Hotel as we then sauntered the streets from shops to hidden basement bars until becoming ensconced for dinner at an intimate and delightful French bistro.

Upon my arrival in the previous night, we had deeply descended into The Cure’s Songs of a Lost World as this particularly poignant LP not only refracted the prism of their youth when they had danced and discovered their own beings and existence through the life-altering albums of Pornography, The Head on the Door, and Disintegration — and this most recent album was the soundtrack of the most significant existential questions that can be asked at the latter points in one’s life.

It is a feeling of bitter jouissance to reside within the brilliance of all that is Songs of a Lost World wherein Robert Smith reveals the inevitable oncoming sense of decrepitude and death that all of us will fall victim. Yet, simultaneously he invites us to revel within the joy and triumph of a beautiful life as is so evocatively expressed in “And Nothing Is Forever.”

I had been enveloped in this song for months at end, and in reuniting with my life-long best friend in NYC, we were captivated in the beautiful simplicity of this song as we soared in the sunlight and plunged into the depths of night in NYC that was capped with the most splendid glass of Châteauneuf-du-Pape at Benoit on West 55th.

To simply sit in each other’s presence in that moment and in that evening was a remarkable gift of being in feeling and sensing the textures of sharing a night that imprint their own tattoos on how we inhabit each other and the world. In that song, The Cure inspire us to live with greater degrees of wonder in capturing the marvel of human relationships as we create the memories that last a lifetime within the traces of being that make our lives so very significant. As The Cure profoundly remind us, this life is so very fleeting and in that night we intensely grasped all that was possible.

Decades earlier, The Cure’s LP The Head on the Door provided the indelible soundtrack of our generation through a kaleidoscope of work in music that accompanied us throughout many a late night and into the crisp dawn of day. The transcendent opening track “In Between Days” captures the chrysalis of our youth in the fragility of love while dreaming of the promise of all that we could become together. Our memory of this immortal song remains entwined within those candlelit late autumn nights in upstate NY as we immersed ourselves in our own design at Stadium apartments amidst the solace of swirling foliage and desperate winds as we held each other so very close, within a future that was not yet written. The imprints of this song held different sages, and its feeling is well within how we hold each other in the beauty of our relationship, between the transient corridors of our lives in the weighted shadows of yesterday and in our present-day life.

In the midst of those treasured and revolutionary times in the late ’80s and early ’90s we would often become immersed in the East Village in NYC where the music of The Cure was echoing throughout the streets in inspiring us to breath more freely and think with greater degrees of profundity. Somehow, the lyricism of Robert Smith always found a way to provide us with an alternative perspective which enabled us to live more lucidly. From the teenage life where we thought we could live forever and onto the angst and simultaneous tranquility of latter years in life, Robert Smith and The Cure have captured our frailty and beauty. Their timelessness emboldens us to live beyond our own capacity in living more freely in the world.

This is a definitive landmark LP that must be listened to intensely and forcefully in coming to terms with one’s own finitude.

The Cure pose a brilliant examination of life in Songs of a Lost World which inspires us to acutely consider the passage of time and what this means in reflecting on the most significant eras of existence in our lives with our most meaningful others.

For myself, I will always remain waiting for my friend to arrive at that same bar so that we can reimagine and revisit the most precious moments of a beautiful life that was always inspired in some way by the remarkable artistry and vision of Robert Smith and The Cure. In turn, they also intensely compel us to chart new dreams and aspirations of what is possible in this world in surpassing the ordinary and in thinking otherwise in ways that dramatically alter perceptions on human experience and the world. For us that is always of the most singular significance.

The Cure’s Songs of a Lost World is an incredible lived testament of a vision to change how you live and think — as they show us that it is possible to live this life at the margins while always bursting the bubble of the mainstream and when you do so in the streets of New York City that is true magic.

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:: read more on The Cure here ::

:: stream/purchase Songs of a Lost World here ::

:: connect with The Cure here ::

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 © Sam Rockman

Songs of a Lost World

an album by The Cure