The Year In Music: 20th March

The First Days Of Spring, Noah and the Whale (2009)

It's the first day of spring
And my life is starting over again
The trees grow, the river flows…

Some years, I really feel like Spring is in my bones. I feel it flickering in my nervous system, building butterflies in my belly. I’m not quite there yet this year. A lack of blue skies doesn’t help things. Today the view from my office is full of weighty white clouds, a ten-tog blanket hanging from the sky, although the hills opposite are already a bright crayon green. The trees lining them are still brown, though, their little limbs still bare, waiting for the warm clothes of April and May.

I didn’t know this song in 2009. I’ve only really heard it now, fifteen years later, as at the time I think I was deliberately averse to Noah and the Whale. The album that this song begins, which has the same title, is a song cycle inspired by its lead singer, Charlie Fink, being dumped by Laura Marling. (Sidenote: God, how I love Laura Marling. I interviewed her when she had just turned eighteen, for her first major interview for the Guardian and hated the headline the piece was given then and still hate it now (but look under the headline - it’s so sweet - “Watch the video for her song Night Terror in Quicktime, RealPlayer or Windows Media Video”).