Lianne La Havas: Starry Starry Night

Remarks:

This was on the soundtrack of “Loving Vincent” (2017), an animated film about Vincent Van Gogh made out of paintings in the Van Gogh style. In the video you can see still pictures from that film. The man in the yellow jacket is Van Gogh himself.

The song is a cover of Don McLean’s “Vincent”, which went to #9 across the Anglosphere in 1972.

McLean:

“I was sitting on the veranda one morning, reading a biography of Van Gogh, and suddenly I knew I had to write a song arguing that he wasn’t crazy. He had an illness and so did his brother Theo. This makes it different, in my mind, to the garden variety of ‘crazy’ – because he was rejected by a woman. So I sat down with a print of Starry Night and wrote the lyrics out on a paper bag.”

To me it is a song about the tragic beauty of life, with Van Gogh himself as a Christ figure:

Now I think I know
Oh, what you tried to say to me
How you suffered for your sanity
How you tried to set them free
They would not listen, they’re not listening still
Perhaps they never will.

See also:

• songs, the 2010s
• Lianne La Havas: What You Don’t Do
• Evanescence: Bring Me to Life – another song I take in a Christian sense.
• Elton John: Rocket Man – another song from 1972 with a 2017 video retread

Lyrics: 

[Verse 1]
Starry, starry night
Paint your palette blue and gray
Look out on a summer’s day
With eyes that know the darkness in my soul
Shadows on the hills
Sketch the trees and the daffodils
Catch the breeze and the winter chills
In colours on the snowy linen land

[Chorus]
Now I understand
What you tried to say to me
How you suffered for your sanity
How you tried to set them free
They would not listen, they did not know how
Perhaps they’ll listen now

[Verse 2]
Starry, starry night
Flaming flowers that brightly blaze
Swirling clouds in violet haze
Reflect in Vincent’s eyes of China blue
Colours changing hue
Morning fields of amber grain
Weathered faces lined in pain
Are sooth beneath the artist’s loving hand

[Chorus]
Oh, now I understand
What you tried to say to me
How you suffered for your sanity
How you tried to set them free
They would not listen, they did not know how
Perhaps they’ll listen now

[Bridge]
For they could not love you, love you
But still your love was true
And when no hope was left in sight on that starry, starry night
You took your life as lovers often do
But I could have told you, Vincent
This world was never meant for one as beautiful as you

[Verse 3]
Oh, starry, starry night
Portraits hung in empty halls
Frameless heads on nameless walls
With eyes that watch the world and can’t forget
Like the strangers that you’ve met
The ragged men in ragged clothes
The silver thorn of a bloody rose
Lie crushed and broken on the virgin snow

[Chorus]
Now I think I know
Oh, what you tried to say to me
How you suffered for your sanity
How you tried to set them free
They would not listen, they’re not listening still
Perhaps they never will

Source: Genius Lyrics.