HEARTBEAT AND SAILS by AUGIE MARCH. Story by Stella Griffiths.

Merri Creek, Melbourne. Riding to work. 2024.

“Scoop my brains and let my heart have action,” sings Glenn Richards as the banjo plucks its mournful strings behind him. I am cycling through the suburban streets, having just left my child at childcare and getting ready to turn into a working professional in the short half-hour ride to my desk. The trees are barren of leaves; their brown carcasses lie in the garden beds of front lawns. The pigeons outside the church are grey and white, plumped from all the bread they are fed. They fly up in my face as I ride to the roundabout, take the right turn, and pedal towards work.

My cadence as I ride links into the four-four prangs of that heart-wrenching banjo as the intro reiterates itself, softly folding its message into my head.

I wait for the cars on a four-lane road, waiting for that perfect moment when there is distance enough on both sides of the incoming traffic to leg it across. I see the gap coming up ahead, and the tension grows as Richards sings with urgency:

Has it borne me down
Has it run me through
If I give it a name, do I contract it too?
More likely this thing has been growing in me,
Like I have grown in you.

I take off and cross the road. The waa-waa synth-like drop begins, and the drums kick in as I, too, drop onto the Merri Creek path, a petite valley sectioning the northern suburbs of Melbourne. I slide down the ramp that joins with the gravel path, the sky is gloomy from the rainy night, and the creek is glassy with power as it moves through its shallow bed.

Not money, not flesh, not happiness,
But this, which makes me sing.

My heart sails as I pedal through the gravel and onto the concrete path. I am touched by the way my stomach floats with the joy of it all — the letting go, the giving in, to all that makes you sing. I am suspended in the feeling of being in love without yet knowing if it has been returned. But even without the contract of love, it is enough. This sailing heartbeat, intangible in the fleeting moments when it rears its head. I feel it all in that moment of music as the words swing through me.

As I pedal, my mind wanders, following the song. I’ve always loved Augie March for the lyrics and their offset kind of sounds behind. The clunk and monotony of this song seems intricately linked to me in this moment of the clunk of shifting gears as I ride, the click of pedals masked by the clacking of what sounds like a piano falling apart at times.

“A patchwork,” Glenn Richards calls it in his reflective Double J interview. The whole album was written in nine different recording studios. This song seems to be the culmination of all those studios. There are off-key piano clunks as the song comes to an end. My heart settles and I continue my ride to work.

Stereo Story #818