I GO! Edition 38 - Unfinished Sympathy

“You’re the book that I have opened
And now I’ve got to know much more…”
Massive Attack, Unfinished Sympathy.

I refuse the tyranny of the niche. Some of us build expertise; others work with meta-skills. Giving language to what we feel but struggle to articulate is my craft. Making sense of complexity. Creating spaces that unlock rather than box people or ideas in. Stretching curiosity. That is what I do for a living - and for a being.

That’s why I GO! is back. I am resurrecting the weekly cadence of my serendipitous newsletter exploring…everything (whilst still working on larger editorial projects). It is a creative compulsion to give in to intro and extrospection to explore the human experience, at a time where everything is accelerating and we need to try to pause and make sense of it all. We are living through a collapse of false certainties, and everything feels suspended - oddly unfinished. And there is a song for it.

Released in 1991, Massive Attack’s “Unfinished Sympathy” is a track that lingers, hovers, that opens a space - an emotional vortex - and leaves you inside it.

I have written a lot in this newsletter about liminality - thresholds, in-between states, that peculiar emotional space where nothing is fixed and everything is possible. This song is that feeling, distilled. A place where time loosens its grip. Where you are forced to be present, but in a suspended way. Floating. A beautiful, achy elsewhere. Something you cannot really name. Not a person, not a moment – potential? A version of life that almost happened. Or maybe never did. Nostalgia for what never was or could be.

“Unfinished Sympathy” has that haunting and enigmatic atmosphere. It is frequently cited as one of the greatest songs of all time, because it resonates on both an intimate level and a grand, symphonic scale. It has that “trippy” melancholic, looping, ‘clickety’ beat (sampled from J.J. Johnson’s “Parade Strut”) that contrasts with the sweeping, emotional, almost cinematic 50-piece string arrangement (recorded at Abbey Road). The strings add a sense of grandeur that elevates the track from a simple dance song to a dramatic, almost classical, composition.

And I feel exactly the same listening to it now than decades ago, with so much of life yet to unfold. The song is a masterpiece of “Trip-hop” – a musical genre born in the 90s precisely at that frontier, between sacred and profane, analogue and digital, soul and machine, flesh and circuitry (explored that and much more in my “Xennials, the Last Analogue Generation” podcast).

Singer Shara Nelson’s voice is the emotional core, ark even, of the song - soulful, exposed, stirring. Her vocals convey intense pain and vulnerability without melodrama. It is absolutely not performative and comes from the guts, she seems to almost inhabit heartbreak.

There is something older in Shara Nelson’s vocals, too that seems to predate the song itself. Each time I listen, I can’t help hearing a soulful lament, this echo of unhealed histories, of longing, pain and grief carried across generations: Black musical expression - songs born of displacement, endurance, unresolved pain mixed with undiminished hope. In that sense, “Unfinished Sympathy” feels connected to a deeper lineage and the ache in Nelson’s voice is not only personal; it feels collective, historical, almost ancestral. A song about the human condition?

As for the production, as mentioned above, it is neither purely electronic nor orchestral. It is unfinished by design: the title nods to Schubert’s Unfinished Symphony. This is a song about unresolved feeling, yearning to be complete.

“Like a soul without a mind
In a body without a heart
I’m missing every part.”

And the video! Deemed very groundbreaking at the time with its use of steadycam: a single, uninterrupted shot of Nelson walking down West Pico Boulevard in Los Angeles amid traffic, chaos, mundanity, and much indifference - life, so much life happening all around her. And her, inside her own interior weather.

And perhaps that is why the song endures.

Because life, too, is unfinished business.

We carry dreams, half-formed loves, unspoken words, parallel lives we almost stepped into. People we might have been. Futures that shimmered briefly, then receded. Promises that may still become.

“Unfinished Sympathy” is a threshold track, to remember something you cannot quite place. And perhaps that is why it still resonates so powerfully now. We live in an unfinished world, in an endless cycle of change: politically, technologically, emotionally. Certainties are dissolving faster than we can allocate meaning. In that context, we need to learn to live with unresolved feelings - to stay present, inside the open loop.

I felt something similar recently walking through Budapest recently

And back in September in Varsaw and Krakow.

Hungary’s capital is a city heavy with history - imperial grandeur, occupation, erasure, reinvention - where the past is layered. Central and Eastern Europe carries this particular weight: borders redrawn, narratives interrupted, empires colliding, futures repeatedly deferred.

In Budapest, you feel history in the architecture, the banks of the Danube, the castles and citadels atop steep hills, in the way beauty and melancholy sit side by side. Unfinished Sympathy’s unresolved ache mirrors cities like this - places shaped not by clean endings, but by memory, and the insistence of life continuing, anyway.

Soulfully yours,

Charlotte