At first glance, one might get the impression that “The Motor Song” is a song about fossil fuels, natural disasters, climate change, and the fact that an alarmingly large number of people – particularly those with plenty of children – couldn’t give a damn about the scientifically proven links between all these things.
In reality, however, “The Motor Song” is one of the most personal songs I’ve written for this album – and one that is very, very important to me, because it sums up a very difficult time in my life.
Five years ago, a chain of unfortunate coincidences led to Mrs K. and I moving to a place in the immediate vicinity of what had recently developed into an unofficial meeting place for young people enthusiastic about combustion engines. In other words: teenagers for whom the greatest thing in the world was to stick a ‘Fuck You, Greta’ sticker on their mopeds and terrorise humanity with them would regularly gather outside our house in the evenings.
Readers who love nature may be familiar with that very particular and unsettling feeling of arriving at a beautiful spot in search of peace and quiet, only for engines to suddenly roar in the distance, backfires to crackle through the air, and you find yourself thinking, “Oh, come on, just drive on.” Well, that’s pretty much how it was for us – except that we could be sure they weren’t driving on, but that the nonsense was getting closer, only to then gather right opposite our house.
Fighting back was a long and arduous process, and in the process we gazed into human abysses we’d always thought only existed in bad TV films. I could tell you things here about parents, children and the social fabric of a village that are so incredibly cringe-worthy you could build an entire influencer career on them. But I don’t want to do that at all. Suffice it to say that we were suddenly forced to deal with a type of person who lived in a completely different reality to us, and whom I believed to have banished from my life a very long time ago.
The first line of the “Motor Song” is actually a real-life conversation we had in our second year here, translated into English:
It was 9 pm and the bedroom was shaking, partly because the sports exhaust was roaring away again and partly because the subwoofer was thumping. The car causing the noise was parked right in the middle of the dirt track in front of my house. So, as I felt another stomach ulcer forming, I went outside and asked the young man responsible why I had to listen to his engine in the middle of the night.
His reply was: “Yeah, er, the motor was broken, but now it’s good again.”
I pointed out that I couldn’t care less and that I didn’t want to hear his motor. To which he replied (in all seriousness): “Yeah, but where else am I supposed to try it?”
My reply – “Why don’t you try it in front of your mother’s house? I’m sure she’d love that” – actually gave him pause for thought. Suddenly, Kant and the categorical imperative seemed to hover between us in the air, almost like ghosts, and although I don’t think he’d ever heard of either, I could see that something was stirring within him; he was seriously pondering the question of right and wrong. And all of a sudden, for a brief moment, I could see what was actually there: a poor, confused young man whose children and grandchildren will suffer terribly because we live in a time when more and more people are losing their moral compass.
And so ‘Motor Song’ is not just a song about combustion engines, climate change and rampant petromasculinity, but it is also a song about the oppressive feeling of sharing the same street, the same time and the same planet with some people – yet no longer the same reality.
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