It took me a few seconds to realise I was wrong.
I was listening to my playlist on shuffle. Sixty-three hours practically demand this. A new song came on. The Infanta by The Decemberists. But my brain insisted it was Placebo. Brian Molko’s voice, unmistakable, slightly nasal, brittle at the edges, dramatic without trying.
I was so sure of it that I had to stop what I was doing and look it up. Mostly because I couldn’t remember adding any Placebo songs to my playlist recently, and it definitely wasn’t one of the older ones I used to like. Maybe a collaboration with Brian Molko?
No, it wasn’t him.
It was Colin Meloy.
That moment, that small musical misrecognition, revealed something about the way I listen to music. I don’t just hear songs. I hear ghost echoes. Overlaps. Connections that aren’t necessarily there, except that they are, for me.
Meloy’s voice in The Infanta sharpens, tightens, becomes theatrical in a way that briefly steps out of his usual folk warmth. And in that narrow space, Molko appears. A similar tension in the voice. The same slightly strained upper register. The same insistence in the consonants. A kind of emotional insistence.
Colin Meloy sings slightly lower than Brian Molko ever does, and that’s the strange part. The resemblance isn’t in the pitch. It’s in the placement. The way the voice sits forward in the mouth. The way tension is held rather than released. It’s colour, not register, that connects them. Not a perfect match. Just close enough to open a door.
It’s strange, the way the brain does this. How it pulls threads between artists, decades, genres. How one voice suddenly becomes a door to another. How listening turns into remembering. A song, an artist, sometimes even a film. Even when the memory isn’t quite real. It’s not fake either. It sits in greyscale, somewhere in between.
I often notice these things. A chord progression that reminds me of a song I can’t place. A voice that sounds like someone else’s shadow. I’ve learned that not everyone listens like that. For some, music is linear. For me, it’s layered. It’s a web.
And maybe that’s why music never really ends for me.
It just keeps talking to itself, across years and voices and songs, and I happen to be there, overhearing it.
It’s a bit like an ocean. One wave carries me into the next. Curiosity and an open mind pull me forward. Music never gets boring for me. There is always something to discover. A thread binding two songs or artists together, even if it’s invisible.
So when I thought The Infanta was sung by Brian Molko, it wasn’t really a mistake. It was my listening brain doing what it always does. Finding relationships. Building bridges. Refusing to keep things in neat boxes.
And who likes boxes anyway?
The Decemberists – The Infanta
Placebo – A Song to Say Goodbye
I know it is very subtle, but I cannot unhear the similarities between the voices.
reflections of an unquiet mind 