Do you know that too: those songs that you never think of when it comes to favorite songs, but that you are always very happy about when the random playlist spits them out? This has been the case for me quite often over the last twenty years with a piece by Passenger – and he has just celebrated (a little too late) his most successful album with an anniversary edition, so I congratulate you with the confession: I like Passenger.
“That’s worse than Ed Sheeran,” I hear some people say, “that squawking Monchhichi!” But the wussle knows how important dreams are! And it just so happens that we agree on that – including Bono, by the way. U2’s latest song, “Atomic City,” features the beautiful line (borrowed from Ellen Johnson Sirleaf) “If your dreams don’t scare you, they are not big enough!”
Big dreams are not dependent on reality. Things didn’t look so rosy for Passenger in 2012. “All The Little Lights” was the fourth LP by the British songwriter, whose real name is Mike Rosenberg, who was 28 at the time and living in Australia. Far off. A world career was probably not something that seemed realistic to him. He had great melodies, but his sound was as reserved, even inconspicuous as himself. Street music. Who would realize how much heart she has and buy that?
Passenger sings of love and adventure
“Let Her Go” was number one in almost twenty countries and the ballad was streamed more than a billion times on Spotify. Passenger’s themes are immediately understandable, it’s mostly about love and adventure – whether in “The Wrong Direction” or “Life’s For The Living”, which now features Foy Vance singing along. All of the pieces are also available in acoustic versions for the anniversary – that’s how they still sound best, they don’t need any strings or fanfare. It’s almost fitting that “Let Her Go” now features Ed Sheeran – the two have had the most unlikely careers of the last twenty years.
However, the one Passenger song that gets me every time is “Things That Stop You Dreaming.” As he modestly and yet firmly sings: “Not a lot to show but this book full of sonnets/ And my liver may be fucked, but my heart is honest.” What to do with it, where to put all the feelings? When we can’t get what we love, we just learn to love the things we have, he says. And when we can’t get what we need, we learn to need the things that stop us from dreaming… But then that’s exactly what this man didn’t do. He kept dreaming, dreaming big.
Two years later, Rosenberg briefly summarized his life in “27” as follows: only 600 songs written
12 of them are heard, 87,000 cigars are smoked and each one is regretted, slept for eight years and always
still tired, “a whole year of eating and I still lost weight, fuck!”, five girlfriends and five breakups… and so on. “Thirty thousand quid just so I could have a few beers/ Ever-dying old hopes, ever-growing new fears …/ I don’t know where I’m running, but I know how to run/ ‘Cause running’s the thing I’ve always done.”
More from Birgit Fuss
And that’s what it’s all about: not standing still, but running towards your dreams. Or at least sneak. Passenger is now 39. He will always be seven years older than Ed Sheeran and probably never as successful. But he has his heart.