Annotated Songs: Leslie Anne Levine
What rhymes with mesallied?
(Note 4/14/22: Some kind of bug prevented this post from going to inboxes, so I’m sending it again with bonus content!)
LESLIE ANNE LEVINE1
from Castaways and Cutouts, Hush Records, 2002
My name is Leslie Anne Levine2
My mother birthed me down a dry ravine
My mother birthed me far too soon
Born at nine and dead at noon3
Fifteen years gone now
I still wander this parapet
And shake my rattle bone4
Fifteen years gone now
I still cling to the petticoats
Of the girl who died with me
On the roofs above the streets
The only love I’ve known’s a chimney sweep5
Lost and lodged inside a flue
Back in 1842
Fifteen years gone now
I still wail from these catacombs
And curse my mother’s name
Fifteen years gone now
Still a wastrel mesallied6
Has brought this fate on me
My name is Leslie Anne Levine
And I’ve got no one left to morn for me
My body lies inside its grave
In a ditch not far away
Fifteen years gone now,7
I still wander this parapet
And shake my rattle bone
Fifteen years gone now
I still cling to the petticoats
Of the girl who died with me8
I wrote this song in the living room of my first Portland house, on NE 53rd and Halsey. It was fall of 1999, and I had just moved from Missoula, MT. I was living with my girlfriend at the time and was working at a scene shop, building set pieces for commercials and local theater.
PJ Harvey’s record Is This Desire had come out the year before. I remember putting it on for the first time, in that living room on NE Halsey, and hearing the first line of the first song “My first name Angelene / Prettiest mess you ever seen” and immediately having to stop the record and pick up a guitar. I wanted to write one of those songs, a song where the narrator introduces themselves at the very beginning and tells their story. Like Angelene, Leslie Anne Levine is a bit of a mess. She’s dead. Listening to PJ’s song now, I realize that I stole more than the assonance of the name; I certainly borrowed the loping 4/4 feel.
I got this line, or some version of it, from a play I’d seen in Portland, but now I can’t remember the name of it.
I don’t know what a rattle bone is, I may have just made it up. Some amalgam of the Smiths’ line, “Rattle my bones all over the stones / I’m only a beggar man whom nobody owns.” Which turns out to be a line from Joyce’s Ulysses, which Joyce got from the 19th century poem “The Pauper’s Funeral,” though Morrissey seems to have got it from Shelagh Delaney. This is a bit discursive, even for a footnote, but it reminds one that everyone is always borrowing from someone else.
Ah, 1999. The first blush of my love for chimney sweeps. This was also a time when I was immersed in reading and re-reading Dylan Thomas’s Under Milkwood, which has a fantastic song about chimney sweeps – or chimbley sweeps, as he would have it. But my cadging of that particular song would come later, in our second record. I’ve since grown accustomed to swapping “chimney” for “chimbley” when we do this live – I like the idea that there is some through line here, some connection between Leslie’s true love and the libidinous chimbley sweep from Her Majesty The Decemberists.
I fell on this word because it felt good singing it, in this song’s rhythm and meter. I may have actually chosen the word, and then fit the circumstances around it. “Hmmm, mesallied,” I thought, “That fits well. What does it mean?” Of course, the definition is rife with all sorts of drama — a couple mismatched for one reason or another — and I ran with it. I’ve gone on to suggest that this couple, Leslie’s doomed mother and father, are, in fact, the couple we meet in “We Both Go Down Together.” This implies that the woman survives the man (hooray!) and goes on to die in childbirth in a ditch (ohhhhhh).
Clearly, judging from the written lyrics (attached above) I had meant to have this last chorus be distinct from the previous ones, with new words, but must’ve A) lost steam or B) decided, one line in, that a repeat of the first chorus just made more sense. I think it’s B, to be honest. A repeated chorus is a strange and peculiar thing — it satisfies something in our minds, to hear those repeated phrases, that repeated melody circle around again. This is particular to pop songwriting, I think. In writing for musicals, for example, I’ve learned that a repeated chorus is a rarity — because you’re constantly looking for ways to propel the story forward, to provide more information to the listener about the character.
We recorded this song during the Castaways And Cutouts sessions at Simon Widdowson’s Are You Listening studio, which no longer exists. I played it on my uncle’s twelve-string guitar, which I had borrowed for the occasion. The accordion line, which Jenny plays, really brings it all together. Poor Leslie.
This is EXACTLY the kind of thing I signed up for. I'd buy a book of annotated Decemberists lyrics like this in a heartbeat. Colin, thank you so much!
That note about suggesting Leslie's parents are the ill-fated duo from WBGDT got me wondering - what other Decemberists characters have relations to one another?
PS my sourdough starter is Leslie Anne Levain, though her fate has been far more prosperous than her namesake's.