“She left on a Monday
She's a siren down the road
In your herringbone overcoat
That you don't expect to get back
And it's an ordinary sky
Today's like any other day
When all of the aeroplanes
Write her name in the clouds.”
There are many Monday songs more famous than this – happy, angry, melancholic, and of course blue – but why go for the obvious? This elegiac number from New Zealand singer Bic Runga, from her second studio album in 2002, Beautiful Collisions, throws an unusual perspective on the breakup scenario, from an outsider telling the guy to do something to get his lover back ("Go to her foolish man. What's the use in having pride if you don't have her?"). The man keeps pondering to the Monday she left, and now a week as almost gone by.
Runga at first sounds like a conventional guitar singer-songwriter, but she has a unusual, and rather beautiful tendency to hang her melody against the direction of underlying chords to create moments of brief dissonance that match the discomfort of the subject. Her background also makes her unusual too, born of a Maori father and her mother, Sophia Tang, was a Chinese Malaysian lounge singer.
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