OK, kids, one of those “now YOU take over” sorta days, since I’m fairly in a daze. Jumped neck-deep back into the work waters Tuesday. NYC feels like a very long time ago. This week has consisted of “work work work work grab a drink while exhausted and pray for the immortal soul of the REDSOX”. Have emails sitting there to be answered, and phone calls to return. Yet I have to work, so there they shall sit for the time being.
Dug through my bag to find some CDs to entertain me throughout the day. Found all the ones I picked for the bus ride last week. Interesting to look at them all laid out on my desk, roughly 10 of them. Jesum, these are depressing CDs, by and large. The Cure’s “Wish”. Dylan’s “Tangled Up In Blue”. Pink Floyd’s “Wish You Were Here”. What was I thinking?
Then again, I found some others with threads of hope in all the pain. The Who’s “Quadrophenia”. The “Hedwig and the Angry Inch” original cast recording. Matthew Sweet’s “In Reverse”. Lucinda Williams’ “Cars Wheels on a Gravel Road”. Bittersweet stuff, in that you have to move through the bitter to get to the sweet.
So I’m just gonna leave a few quotes from the latter records with you today. Summations of well-earned emotional respite. Clarion calls of hearts bursting not with pain, but hope. Not in the absence of pain, but in its willful negation, even for a brief moment.
Wish I could play the chords to go along with the words, but I can only do so much. Feel free to add your own favorite lyrics, stuff that lifts you up, makes you feel cool, spoons with you in the middle of the night.
But I could swear by your expression
That the pain down in your soul
Was the same as the one down in mine…
“The Origin of Love”, from “Hedwig”
The way you move, it’s right in time
It’s right in time with me
“Right in Time”, Lucinda Williams
On the dry and dusty road
The nights we spend apart alone
I need to get back home to cool cool rain.
The nights are hot and black as ink
I can't sleep and I lay and I think
Oh God, I need a drink of cool cool rain.
---“Love, Reign O’er Me”, The Who
Deep inside I’m tired of running
I don’t mind that the rain is coming
---“Thunderstorm”, Matthew Sweet
Quick thought: You know, I’m looking at these words, and as black type against a white background, they don’t seem to have much power. Don’t seem to be terribly deep. Still, when coupled with the singer’s voice, the music surrounding the voice…just sublime. The last quote from Matthew Sweet is one of the more “earned” sentiments I’ve ever heard. Comes during the last 30 seconds of an album which is a meditation on lost love, picking up the pieces, and moving on. And musically, it’s all there. Lyrically, it’s all there. 30 seconds down Springsteen’s Thunder Road by way of Phil Spector’s Wall of Sound. Perfect.
These songs leapfrog the intellect and land straight in your gut. They can push you that extra inch/yard/mile closer to fine, to crib from the Indigo Girls. At one point last weekend, in an Irish pub, “The Scientist” by Coldplay came on the speakers, and my dinner partner and I instinctively sighed simultaneously. Pavlovian, really. Not even about the words, which are great and all, but the emotive force behind them. The gorgeous piano.
“Nobody said it was easy…no one ever said it would be this hard.”
And we both opened our eyes again, having both closed them to sing softly.
Good times.