Yup, that's more or less it exactly. I find that his work in general is created with a very deft understanding of feeling, particularly paradoxical feeling or a kind of existential irony, which I think is why I like it so much. For example with his concept album Fordlandia, the theme suffusing the whole thing is that of failed, foolhardy, or even morally wrong - ambition, yet it ends on a note that's
painfully optimistic. I listened to it during a particularly low period of my life, and it was the most healing thing I can remember from that period. Then those themes are repeated in The Miners' Hymns, which is even more
melancholic,
arrested and distant (somehow something
less than melancholy), and ending in that strange kind of
triumph the 'survivors' somehow allow themselves. Everything he does is like some contradiction that the heart seems to naturally know or understand, it's so bold and so fragile at the same time.
Sorry, I just geeked the fuck out so hard. I don't actually expect you to listen to all of that. It's long, slow building, and sometimes there isn't much to grab onto. I just think his stuff is like a balm for your soul. It's deeply imbued with feeling, but devoid of sentimentality, it's complex and painful but in a way that tries to mirror reality exactly and by consequence find a kind of true or realistic optimism, so in the end it's strangely healing.
