Hospital Hymns
Hospital Hymns I wrote because I was working in a Hospital stockroom for a stint and there was this little closet-sized “chapel” that was just off of ICU. It was the only carpeted area besides an office in Women’s Care, and I thought it was strange to have this little haven for the religious in the midst of all this science and sterility. It seemed thoroughly disproportionate to the amount of emotional events that were filling up the halls everywhere else in the building. And there were heavy debates about spirituality and religion coursing through my family at the time, so I wanted to design a character that would polarize my listeners, and maybe have them assess where they lie on that spiritual graph, so to speak.
- Gavin Castleton
Hospital Hymns is narrated by a 76-year-old orderly at a hospital. The narrator describes his interactions with co-workers and patients as he goes about his work day, specifically focusing on the man’s religious beliefs. The EP is more of a character sketch than a story, since the listener’s perception of the narrator changes as he or she learns more about the character, but he doesn’t change significantly himself.
Sympathy for the narrator is developed in a number of ways. In the opening song, “Hymn 1: Maternity in G Major,” the hospital is described, and the man pauses for a moment to appreciate the sunlight, which he doesn’t see often during the course of his workday:
There,
reaching out
to touch my nose
and make me sneeze,
the Lord gave his sun to me.
This song introduces the setting and the narrator’s religious beliefs, and also develops sympathy for the narrator as he takes a moment during his workday to appreciate the warmth of sunlight on his face.
In “Women’s Care in E Flat Minor,” the second song, the elderly man’s personality is revealed through humor:
When I took the elevator down it was all by myself.
So I sang that Usher song,
but I got the words all wrong.
But I always say when you’re alone you can make up the words yourself.
And then by introducing the man’s forgiving nature and describing his religious beliefs:
Jessica snapped at me,
but I know the Lord tells us we should turn the other cheek,
and Lord knows that Jess has had an awful week,
so I dropped two crates and turned around to leave.
Jessica’s reaction to the narrator introduces conflict. She doesn’t appreciate him, and she’s not the only one who’s inconsiderate toward him. At the end of the song, a doctor the narrator shares the elevator with won’t speak to him, even after he says hello. In fact, the doctor “let[s] out a massive sigh/like he couldn’t breath from the same air as I did.” The narrator is unperturbed, however, and ends the song by saying, “I tried to love them all.”
The narrator’s mistreatment by his co-workers creates tension because no reason is given for his co-workers to be disgusted or frustrated with him. The doctor’s reaction, in particular, seems to be based on the gap between social status that exists between an orderly and a doctor. Though the listener learns more about the narrator, and may develop similar feelings about him for different reasons, there’s no indication that his co-workers know anything about him.
It’s interesting that the conflict revealed in “Women’s Care in E Flat Minor,” presumably based on the social hierarchy of the hospital, isn’t specifically explored as the album continues, but the tension created from that conflict is transferred to listeners as they begin to learn more about the narrator. The initial social tension lets listeners know that everything isn’t going to be sunbeams and Usher songs, so they aren’t jarred when the narrator behaves strangely.
The perception of the narrator changes dramatically when he tries to help two patients, forcing listeners to question their trust in the elderly man. The first is a sick, little boy with “a tube in each limb/I could see through his skin.” The boy’s parents are present, but he’s still scared, so the narrator tries to comfort him by saying, “God wants you back.” This may seem like a perfectly lovely thing to say from the narrator’s perspective, but a child with a serious illness probably doesn’t need to be reminded about the possibility of death by a stranger. The narrator’s implacable faith seems to disrupt his ability to see the effect his actions have on others.
When the narrator tries to help a second patient, the results are immediate and serious. In the last song, “Hymn 5: E.R. in E Flat Major,” the elderly man enters the emergency room after a “pile-up on 95.” A woman calls out to him in a hallway, asking for an end to her suffering:
“Please stop this pain.
We are all alone, just the three of us again.and as I pulled the tube from her mouth,
she drifted off to sleep,
singing to the sky,
and scrunching up the sheets.“Oh God
Oh Lord
I’m home.”
The woman asks for her pain to stop, and references “the three of us,” herself, the orderly, and God, also an allusion to the Trinity, so the narrator kills her. There’s no consideration of whether killing the woman is the right thing to do. He doesn’t even recognize that it’s not his responsibility to make a life or death decision for another person at all.
This scene, the narrative and musical climax of the EP, insists upon a reevaluation of the narrator. It’s interesting that Castleton’s intent is to polarize listeners, because after my first listen I admired the narrator’s unflinching adherence to his faith in the idea that life after death is a wonderful experience that everyone’s invited to. After thinking about it, and listening again, I find the narrator rather horrifying. The description of the emergency room from the elderly man’s perspective decided it for me.
The narrator’s reaction to the victims of the car wreck that fill the E.R. shows a sort of inhumanity caused by his faith in God and the afterlife:
I’d never seen so much color in my life.
How can they be so afraid when the father’s so near?
Doesn’t everybody know that the arm of the Lord is severe?
He has no sympathy for the people around him, though they are in pain and possibly dying. His belief in God’s influence makes it illogical for him to feel anything except confusion about why everyone else is so upset. Since he is unable to empathize with other people’s pain, and cannot recognize perspectives other than his own, the narrator’s behavior seems more sociopathic than devoutly religious.
The conflict in Hospital Hymns is developed around a single viewpoint character. The narrator is sympathetic, though perhaps misguided throughout the first four hymns, but as listeners learn more about the effect the man’s faith has on others and the way he views the world in the fifth and final hymn, his unfailing “kindness” becomes a flaw. The character’s religion becomes delusion.
Castleton has obviously succeeded in polarizing me. I can’t seem to find a valid defense for the character, but I’d be interested in discussing the songs with someone from the other pole, as long as they remain a comfortably safe distance away from me.
Tomorrow we’ll take a look at A Bullet, A Lever, A Key. The character developed over the course of its narrative is more complex than the narrator from Hospital Hymns. Though the EP is less than twenty minutes long, ABALAK covers most of the narrator’s life by focusing on the specific and significant moments that define the character’s arc.
The Music of Gavin Castleton
The older I get, the more tenuous my connection to music seems to grow. In high school and college, the music I listened to and performed were part of how I defined myself, but now I’ll go for weeks without sitting down to listen to an album, or even a single song. When I drive somewhere, more often than not, I’ll turn off the radio and just sit in silence.
Losing that connection, however, makes it that much more exciting to find an artist that makes me want to listen to music as obsessively as I used to. Gavin Castleton, a musician from Providence, Rhode Island, has done just that. I’ve been a fan of his band, Gruvis Malt, for a few years, but his most recent solo material is what has grabbed me and won’t let go.
Castleton’s music is stylistically diverse, and his subject matter is varied: an EP of falsetto pop songs based on hymn structures, another of progressive hip hop describing his life in reverse from his suicide in 2054, and an album about a relationship told through the metaphor of a zombie apocalypse are just a few examples.
I don’t know enough about music to confidently describe why Castleton’s interests me. It’s consistently surprising and reveals itself through repeated listens, but the common thread that runs through “Hospital Hymns,” “A Bullet, A Lever, A Key,” and Home, the two EP’s and an album described above, is the use of narrative. All three tell stories with well-developed characters and conflict, and though they could have been written traditionally, they are enriched by their realization in a form not known for strong narrative.
So what does this have to do with video games? Nothing really; but examining how other forms of art incorporate narrative successfully without sacrificing quality is a worthwhile exercise for both writers and game designers.
I’ve learned a lot as a writer while listening to Castleton’s music by recognizing the methods of storytelling I know in a new context, such as establishing the speaker in dialogue through movement and voice instead of “he said, she said” tags, describing scenes and conflict using concrete details instead of abstractions, developing characters through word choice and sentence structure, and the list goes on.
In my next three posts, I plan to examine “Hospital Hymns,” “A Bullet, A Lever, A Key,” and Home separately and in detail, not only because I listen to them obsessively and want to share them with others, but also because I think there’s something to learn from my attachment to this specific music. Gavin Castleton tells stories effectively in his medium and I want to know how he does it.
For anyone interested in listening to the music before I pick it apart, a track or two from each of the EP’s are available for free on Integers Only, Castleton’s independent label, and buying both in digital format is only 10 bucks. The album, Home, is freely available in its entirety as a stream on Castleton’s website, but I recommend the physical disc because it comes with a lyrics booklet.