Damien Rice – “It Takes A Lot To Know A Man”

“If Damien Rice told me that the reason it took him eight years to release a new album was because it took him six years to write ‘It Takes A Lot To Know A Man’, I’d probably be okay with it.” -Me, in my 2014 review of My Favourite Faded Fantasy

There are some songs that just naturally belong on a decade list.  They’re the kind of songs that you remember years later, even if you haven’t revisited the albums from whence they came nearly as often as you’d like.  They combine winding, epic progressions with the length to accommodate such a journey.  They reach new artistic levels, touching the soul while objectively mastering the style they target.  If I were to bottle these traits and provide an example of what it means to define a decade, I might propose Damien Rice’s “It Takes A Lot To Know A Man” – a track that feels like it probably took longer to conceive and create than some other artists’ entire albums.

I still feel that the above quote is true.  “It Takes A Lot To Know A Man” doesn’t feel like just another song that Rice composed as a part of an album.  Even to call it a centerpiece feels like cheapening its worth.  The song is so emotionally powerful and melodically sweeping that it feels like its own entity, this nine minute epic that shifts from downtempo piano ballad to sullen “post-folk” (credit: neekafat), to a dynamically string-laden, classically composed tour de force.  The song lives and breathes, exhaling at times to catch its breath before it launches itself in another equally captivating direction – such as at the 4:40 mark, where it quiets itself for over a minute with distant and sparse piano keys until it recaptures its energy with a jaw-dropping orchestral outro that spans the entire second half of the song.  Rice’s eerie falsetto wails nearly blend in with the siren pitch of the strings, and it’s as haunting as it is downright depressing.  There hasn’t been a time I’ve listened to this song and not physically felt myself gasping for air; I seem to hold my breath in anticipation every time, inhaling as the song gathers steam and exhaling in sync with its gradual, graceful falls.

Damien Rice has put out three albums in two decades.  Normally that wouldn’t be a recipe for continued relevance, but when you pour as much of yourself into your work as he does, the passion on display speaks for itself.  This song is his crowning achievement among a plethora of lauded moments, so it says a lot about “It Takes A Lot To Know A Man” that it’s the one song I’d tag as his very best – and the only one I’d propose for Rice’s decade enshrinement.

Read more from this decade at my homepage for Sowing’s Songs of the Decade.

https://open.spotify.com/playlist/5JjmQsvmmmOBFnUjP7FLu4