ELEMENTARY LOVE: Telling THROUGH WATER

Stephanie Zundel
Sep 27, 2022
7 min read

(Still, Summers-Valli, "My Love Was Like The Rain" by Låpsley)

The majority of impacts will be felt through water

Through water

Next ten years

For the next ten years

This is followed by the failure of litigation and adaptation

Adaptation, litigation

Adapt–, adapt–, adapt–, adapt–

Litigation and adaptation

(Låpsley, "Through Water")

The first and title track of Låpsley's 2020 album Through Water opens with spoken word and sets the themes: Water, adaptation – element, change. The fact that the artist is reading sections of a talk by her father, a sustainable-development and water engineer, contextualizes the word "litigation" and reveals the album's overarching theme of climate change and environmental catastrophe. (Beaumont-Thomas, St. Asaph)

My Love Was Like The Rain is the second track and second single of the album and was the opening track of Låpsley's 2019 four-track EP These Elements. The video was realized by Camille Summers-Valli, it features water and weather as a force of nature, cloudy skies, lightning. The lyrics talk of water, of the elements, of love in the imagery of these elements.

(Still, Summers-Valli, "My Love Was Like The Rain" by Låpsley)

What is a love that is like rain like? Is it a "hard rain" taking you by surprise? Is it a friendly tickle on your skin? A much-needed watering of your roots, supporting your growth? Or is it rather a love which clouds your days, traps you inside and keeps you from enjoying the lightness of your being in the sun?

Telling

'I' talks to 'you' and remembers ways in which the 'you' described the 'I' and their love. The elements, especially water in different states, are used to qualify the 'I' and how their love was perceived and received in a relationship which now lies in the past.

They say their love was like rain, "not the sweet sound after the drought, but the pain of it hard on your back in a storm". It was "like the sea, not a big pool in a tropical". Working with contrasts, negating the first associations that arrive with an image, the meanings of the metaphors are specified, at times with a light and other times with a heavy, gloomier twist. In the first two verses as in: Not a long-awaited rain, a love that brings relief, but one that hits you hard; not a contained, safe pool but a vast natural body of water.

After the images of rain and ocean, water in its solid state of aggregation: "You said I had the arctic inside of me" – they say to the 'I': You are cold, there is something hard, frozen, unattainable within you.

In the third verse they compare their love to a rose, a rather overused image, but representing in my eyes the element of earth: "Not the sweet bloom, but the pain as it scratches your hand". Air follows: The love is like the sky, "not the big blue, but the unknown black", in the fourth verse. It is hurtful, it is dark, wide, overarching. The unknown – frightening or tempting?

The 'I' "embodied these elements" and wears them "like a fragrance", as expressed in the chorus or hook. They are then further qualified, through the element of fire. "I'm a wildfire in the wind, not the hot coals in December": This is not much of a contrast to initial fiery associations – uncontained, eating everything, hot, dangerous, passionate. Then another flower image: The 'I' is named "a lily in the spring, so sad, but so beautiful".

Before another chorus and the culmination of the song, the image of love like rain, "the pain of it hard on your back in a storm" is reinforced and echoed.

Pain – hard on your back – in a storm: The threefold repetition of this line makes it the central image to describe both the person and their love. You are pain, on my back, in a storm – this separates.

The 'I' is much. Was the 'you' overwhelmed? There seems to be both fascination and fear in the descriptions which hold hurt, upheaval, boundless-ness, beauty, mystery. The lyrics recollect all of the qualities externally attributed to the 'I', who they were mirrored as. There is no defense, not clarification, no self-description, yet an embrace: "So I embodied these elements". Yes, I am all of this. Yes, I am all of these (elements) – "I wear them like a fragrance."

(Still, Summers-Valli, "My Love Was Like The Rain" by Låpsley)

Showing

My Love Was Like The Rain lives of imagery lyrically and Summers-Valli beautifully picked this up in the music video while at the same time embedding the song visually in the overall theme of the album. While water is the main focus and all-present, the weather as a force of nature, a build up to catastrophe and the playing with time via rewinding and looping manage to visualize parallelly the topic of breaking-up and reflecting on a relationship which crashed as well as our collective crashing of the climate and threatening weather escalations.

A person stands on the edge of a roof, before the skyline and heavy, beautiful clouds and lightning. They take the fall, by simply leaning forward – a hard cut shows somebody landing, immersing in a pool, underwater. Air to water, this landing was unexpectedly safe. Later the fall is rewound, the person is back on the roof, with a storm building up in the backdrop.

Several underwater scenes show young men, holding their breath, swimming in synchronicity, exerting controlled movements in this element which is not their natural one, but which they collectively embrace. A sense of oppression, as they hold in air, under pressure. Here, too, some movements are rewound.

Another set of images: A young girl at the swimming pool premises, in a swimsuit, wet, but not in water, not immersed, outside of it, serious, contemplating. A glass full of water falls, the content escapes.

More people, dancing, hands waving in the air, together forming an ocean of waves. Låpsley is among them, moving freely. Later, we also see the girl smiling and dancing expressively.

All the while again and again, heading down a street, at dusk or dawn, lightning in the dark sky, fields in the fog. As we arrive: A crashed car. Catastrophe.

We can easily read the little girl as a young Låpsley or her inner child, at first standing offside and later participating, alive and unrestricted. As sung in the chorus, she embodies it all and steps into all her elements fully.

The visual back and forth of rewind show both a question and desire, and its impossibility: Can we go back? To us? Can we rewind the damage already done to the planet? Water once spilt does not go back into the glass, a fall is a fall, crash is crash. We are then left to deal with what is.

(Still, Summers-Valli, "My Love Was Like The Rain" by Låpsley)

Falling

You can fall in love, just as you can fall into water. You can give in to the fall, jump even, headfirst. There is lightness first, you leave the solid ground, are up in the air. Then, gravity, still, and maybe a little bit of a shock at first, as you meet with the surface tension of this different thing, which breaks immediately and lets you in. All of a sudden, you are fully immersed, submerged at first. Soon, you rise to the surface again, you have to, you need to breathe. Then, you swim in it, dive in it, float. Or, you climb out. Rewind? Impossible.

(Still, Summers-Valli, "My Love Was Like The Rain" by Låpsley)

The phrase 'to fall in love', 'tomber amoureuse' in French, does not exist in German. We say 'sich verlieben'. Ich habe mich in dich verliebt. The verb shares its prefix 'ver-' with words such as 'vergessen', 'to forget', 'verlieren', 'to lose', 'sich verirren', 'to get lost'. If you 'ver-something', it often means something happened both unintentionally and is rather un-wished for, too. It is accidental – as love can be. Yet while the German phrase keeps the aspect of being out of control, it does not quite equally encompass the possibility of succumbing, of giving in to the process as much as the image of falling does in French and English:

I will fall now, I am falling for you, I will let go. I will fall into your love. I want to know you like water. In all states. "Like waves know shores".

Love Through Water

Låpsley truly beautifully uses water and other elementary metaphors to talk about love and our planet in this song and the album ("Our Love is a Garden"). Examining and explaining the world, our selves and experiences through images of nature is a basic meaning making strategy, we reference what we are all existing in to try and make sense together. Summers-Valli takes up partially the images of the lyrics and the theme of the album by featuring the four elements prominently in the colour scheme of the video, as well as the aspect of falling, of immersion, of impending doom. A storm is coming, a car crashed. We are running earth down, and it is collapsing. As this relationship already did.

The focus on water as a metaphor to visualize connection and elaborate on both love and climate concern is not banal but basic, elementary. We come from water, we and earth are mostly water. The impact of climate change will be felt and seen mostly through water, the solid will melt and flood what is exposed, breaking the balance. Water and love constantly surround us in all states of aggregation, all shapes and forms and temporal phases. In love and break-up and to not break earth, we have to navigate connection and crises.

Adaptation, litigation

Adapt, adapt, adapt, adapt

Litigation and adaptation

Extreme weather events through crises

Through crises

Connected with the water and the water cycle

Connected, connected

( Låpsley, "Through Water")