Passenger: The laureate of the lost and broken-hearted

Someone once told me: ‘Don’t ask the way of those who know it, you might not get lost — Walter Salles

“You only know you love her when you let her go” was one of other similar lines that made Passenger’s 2012 hit song; Let her go. The immediate appeal of the line was its paradoxical feel. It was then belted out till it became as flat as the already cliché “You don’t know what you have until you lose it”. To many fans, Let her go was a stain on Passenger’s long-running relative obscurity and many Passenger lovers must be relieved that no other song from him has gone that mainstream since. They return daily, in secret, to the lyrics of Passenger, sung in a raspy voice over similar guitar tunes. Lyrics they feel would lose meaning if they became widespread knowledge. Watching people rave about Ed Sheeran and other musicians they consider inferior versions of Passenger, they console themselves with the knowledge that the most earth-shattering truths are known only to the few. The #PassengerHive seem like conspiracy theorists from without. But what do I know about “they” anyway? I assume that with Passenger, as with other artistes, each ardent listener has a different relationship with the music. So, I’ll talk about myself.

For me, it’s this simple: every new Passenger song is an additional verse to the soundtrack of my life, which is (thank you for asking) a large sea of examples about the inconsistency of love, its brittleness, its impossibility and its inability to provide respite from the general bleakness of life. Anytime I meet a Passenger fan, my first instinct is to look for fault lines that crying into multiple nights must have paved on their faces. I want to say to them; “we gast jam later, for bar, my room, your room, for bus, anywhere, make we gather cry”. But Passenger is not merely a peddler in sadness, he’s also a purveyor of a kind of truth.

What does it mean to know the truth? I felt certain that my obsession with the lyrical postulations of Passenger was about to die an early death one afternoon when I received a call from Olu. I was trekking past the Senate building to either the school gate, to use the ATM or the faculty, to read. The details are a blur. Olu sounded downcast after the automatic pleasantries had been exchanged. He had called to tell me that Passenger, our prophet, was a fraud. That his songs were written by a man by the name Mike Rosenberg and that he saw this on no less a verifiable source than iTunes. The feeling was comparable to that of a Christian stumbling on information that the Bible was ghostwritten by an ancient freelancer. Further investigation showed that Mike Rosenberg and Passenger are one and the same. Who names their child Passenger anyway? False alarm. But what does it mean to know the truth? For one to lay claim to being a musical voice for a special version of the truth, it must be original to them. And the more spontaneously they can produce it, the more profound they seem. To know the truth is to be able to spit it as soon as the beat drops (after the customary hmmm or yeah), to be able to freestyle, and, most importantly, to have no Quentin Millers. Passenger was clean. The faithful were relieved.

Most of the gospel of Passenger, like other popular gospels, is based on love: lost love, found love and all the loves in-between. I was twenty or so, closing in on my final year of University, a Passenger addict, listening every night to songs about love, when I met her. Unsurprisingly, It was a Passenger song, Rolling Stone, that brought us together. We’d sing it on the way to the cafeteria and let it play whilst we ate. It wasn’t a conventional love song but it featured two lovers. That connection was enough to kick-start a long thread of emails about “Two dots” (some arcade game) and other voyages around the point. I am reminded now of a line in Tosin Gbogi’s new collection; Locomotifs and other songs where the poet-speaker, a journeyman, at the second station proclaims-

all true love does not begin…

So that I can not say exactly when our love began. Passenger gave words to our disagreements and I’d go “Listen to so and so song to understand how I feel about that”. I imagine this must be similar to how super-religious people conduct their disagreements. But at variance to Tosin’s journeyman who continued the line above thus-

all true love does not begin does not end

this true love ended(?).

An earlier love ended with me drinking myself silly and whoring several miles away from school. That period was my introduction to what has been called adulthood’s most pointless activity: clubbing. Those days were extremely depressing because I could not (still cannot, excepting the start to the shaku-shaku routine) dance and had none of the oshozondian money that could excuse you from that skill in the club. I found myself seated on some sofa-cum-speaker, playing chess against Shredder, an app, many of those nights. On one of those nights, I drew against the 2600 rated Grandmaster level! Through all those nights, Passenger boomed as loud as the speakers in my head-

though you’re in a crowd, doesn’t mean you’re not alone

There was nothing to thank God for on those Fridays when in a sea of bodies, I felt like a drop of oil; excluded. The mornings after paying for company, Passenger was there again-

“you wake up instead…in a stranger’s bed… miles away from home”

That song, Strangers, was particularly haunting. Close to the end of the song, Passenger starts to chorus “you’re not in love” till I’m forced to accept or at least be reminded of it. It had the same feel as Sufjan Steven’s repetition of “We’re all gonna die” in Fourth of July.

Years after, on one of few solitary night outs in Abeokuta, another set of Passenger lines from Whispers-

“Well I spent my money, I lost my friends, I broke my mobile phone, 3am and I’m drunk as hell and I’m dancing on my own. Taxi cabs ain’t stopping and I don’t know my way home”

rung true. But the poet must, occasionally, break off from simply annotating his life with the words of other bards to write the lyrics to the song of his own life. Thankfully, I took along a pen and paper. I decided to write, that night, a long-ish poem I titled Egbassey:

I

I tell a prostitute I want to dance,

and she thinks I mean something else.

I’m a modern poet, I say,

and I always tell it as it is-

I care only about the image

and this loud music filling our eardrums.

A car flashes her over,

the music stops in ten minutes,

I serpentine out of the innards of Stadium,

and after a bikeman’s rebuff,

step into the empty streets-

Egbasseus at Kuto.

II

Oke-Ilewo is sound asleep,

but the ATM lights are a relief-

from the heavy blanket of night.

I stop by one, remove stones from my shoe,

smile for the camera and resume my long dance.

Under the bridge,

a man lay prostrate and unconscious on a makeshift mat.

Moyo! Moyo! Moyo!

rings out the nauseous voice of reason-

How many times did I call you?

Thrice.

What are you doing awake-

at a time lunatics are fast asleep?

I reply that I’m searching for Music.

III

But the music is also dead at Ita-Eko.

Lorianni’s bar is barred and-

Rockzone no longer sends shisha smoke into

our frail ozone.

My search is at an end,

and I am ignorant of the time.

I scan for places to hide my head-

Empty church?

No

Open hospital?

I decide against screaming chemical drug classes

or the less subtle — I’m a pharmacist,

let me in!

They’d think me an inebriate-

I, Egbasseus, inebriate!

IV

Sokori is a temporary Ithaca-

I find a man sitting alone beneath a half tent.

He does not know the time as well,

and is a stranger in these parts.

He says he left his lover’s house,

angry she didn’t give him enough attention.

I tell him I trekked from Kuto,

in search of lost decibels of sound,

he doesn’t know how far that is.

Two stray dogs roam in our direction-

he claims they are the gods-

that make away with the sacrifices we litter crossroads with.

I laugh dryly till we fall-

silent.

Mosquitoes buzz lyrical at my ear,

and I swat away their music.

I remember reciting this poem aloud to Lanre, a lover of the beat poets, in an Abeokuta cab. A performance for the uninterested. Lanre loved it! Maybe not the poem, but the idea of two poets, passengers, at the back of a cab, losing the world and lost to it in return. Passengers. What does it mean to be a passenger? Till this moment, I hadn’t given much thought to Passenger’s choice of a name. To be a passenger is to admit at least one of two things; that one has no knowledge of the way or no means to journey. But what does it mean to be the passenger of a passenger?