Feeds:
Posts
Comments

Posts Tagged ‘family / friends / personal’

May Feeling, Maybe?

Posted in Music, My Life's Rich Pageant, tagged , , , , on June 6, 2023| Leave a Comment »

Early May in recent years has been subject to the feeling in one of my posts, namely this one and this one. That sadness is coupled with another, more invigorating feeling, in mid- to late May. As I sit in early June listening to a lovely piano concerto by Saint-Saëns, I thought I’d turn to it for a moment, if I may.

I’ve long had a vague notion that back in 2008, a certain love was developing rapidly in late spring, so since then my music-playing in May has been Bic Runga and The Go-Betweens—music from Down Under. I’d already listened to the Go-Betweens and their catalogue full of associations, so this year it turned into a season of Crowded House, with some Split Enz thrown in at the end—more music from Down Under.

May 11. Little did I suspect that May would be a month of my own shadows, a subject that seldom shows up in my pictures.

Long-neglected World Party also crept in as did The Red Hot Chili Peppers. These two groups, and the tones of regret and nostalgia and loneliness they strike at favorite moments, fit into the general spell. For, not only was it May 2008 that I was in this mood, but I’ve come to realize it was also this way in 1997: both are years that love really struck me.

I wasn’t listening to some of this music back in those days, in media res, but gradually this music came to sum up everything—the feeling then as well as the place the romance holds in my psyche now.

May 26. The month really did seem to last a long while, and its Wonderland was indeed full of trees and grass for me as well as these feelings and songs.

So, what exactly is this feeling, and where are the songs? The songs first. I listened to most of my Crowded House music, with “Sacred Cow,” “I Love You Dawn,” “World Where You Live,” and “People Are Like Suns,” bringing back a lot of that 2008 feeling. World Party chimed in: “I Fell Back Alone,” “She’s The One,” “Is It Like Today?” bridging back to the ’90s more so than the ’00s.

Love was growing in those Mays, and two songs really do capture what came of it all. For 2008, it’s “Poor Boy” by Split Enz. That year, the impetus to give it a go gathered serious steam with someone I’d known for years when she re-appeared in my life. Back when we had first met, it was she pursuing me from about as “afar” as you can get on this planet:

My love is alien, I picked her up by chance
She speaks to me with ultra-high frequency
A radio band of gold
Gonna listen ’til I grow old

For 1997, it’s “Dosed” by the RHCPs. I had just met her in 1997, but this song speaks to how it all turned out in the short and long term:

I got dosed by you and
Closer than most to you and
What am I supposed to do?
Take it away I never had it anyway
Take it away and everything will be okay

Rather than provide the details, I’ll let the lyrics hint at them. The impact of those times will never change, I suspect. For all the pain and sadness, there’s deep pleasure in those loves and what they brought me.

It’s amazing what a few words and bits of music can do. And there you have it, along with one more shadow photo.

May 31. But is any of it art? Actually, that’s about as “Who cares?!” a question as you can pose.

Read Full Post »

Remembering

Posted in My Life's Rich Pageant, tagged , on May 8, 2022| 1 Comment »

Just over a year ago, he was sick and just lying around; finding food he’d want to eat was not easy. He kept going, though, and we even thought he might recover and keep living in his senior state for a good while longer. It didn’t happen, though, and I came home a year and a day ago for his final moments.

This is one of the songs I was listening to yesterday, one that I was listening to a year ago. It’s all out of context from their original intention, but the lyrics here still make me think of him lying there, and thinking he might turn around. I hadn’t said goodbye, but the pain and doubt and wondering if this was the end or if he’d recover made me feel these words:

Don’t even say you’re turning around again
Don’t try to walk back into my life
I fall for it every time, I fall for it every time

I lose my will
I turn toward you still
It’s a bad dream where I
Can’t raise my hand to wave goodbye

Don’t even say you’re turning around again
Don’t try to walk back into my life
I fall for it every time, I fall for it every time

Springtime Carnivore, “Bad Dream Baby”

Yes, it makes little sense, but what really does?

Beamheart

Read Full Post »

52 for 52 (TV)

Posted in My Life's Rich Pageant, Non-Music, tagged , on March 26, 2022| 1 Comment »

Applying my movie list idea to TV shows before the movie list is even released! One show for each year of my life. Unlike movies, there have only been a few years of my life sans much television. Those busy times were great, and so were the dinners mixed with TV and bits of family conversation from the 70s to present. Here, a nod to different program genres so as not to overwhelm or monotonize the brain. Roughly, the first twenty-five were viewed in my younger years, the second group viewed in my older, more adult years.

I’ll add a new one every year and maybe tinker by adding links and other stuff as the weeks pass.

(more…)

Read Full Post »

I may never see your face again

Posted in My Life's Rich Pageant, tagged , , , on May 5, 2021| 6 Comments »

Caroline Crawley, Beamheart

“Crawley recalls how during recording of the plaintive ‘I May Never,’ she burst into tears during one take, while during the second one the studio engineer did exactly the same.” A quote from an affectionate article in The Guardian on Shelleyan Orphan, the undertones (overtones? both?) of my musical back and forths between the city and suburbs, each of their four albums accompanying me for their assigned seasonal three-month span each year. My sister and I both played reed instruments, and the oboe and bassoon add the right touches to Shelleyan Orphan songs, especially here.

The song perfectly encapsulates the heaven-sent and now to-heaven-returned voice of Caroline Crawley.

I may never see your face again
Rabbit’s down a hole, he’s already gone
Life came between us and just for a day
You’re the one who was standing in the door
I will love you, no matter even what you say or do
I will call your name out loud
I will love you, no matter even what you say or do
I will call your name.

So, this morning is the last I might see him. Yesterday I knelt by his big bed as he half-dozed, luxuriating in a head and ear rub while I cradled his tiny, scraggled head in my palm. This morning he was cleaning his paws sputtering a little as he did so, cheeks puffing out, then walking a little, went out and made the perfect poop, even ate half a carrot stick. Every snort and snore from him reminds me of all his little ways, many so lost now.

“I May Never” followed by “Beamheart,” the perfect finish to a career, perfect tones for a finish to a life that I can keep in my head while I think over the seventeen years of wonderful memories.

Read Full Post »

with a Hip

Posted in Music, My Life's Rich Pageant, tagged , on January 22, 2021| Leave a Comment »

Arrowhead

Bits of Echo & The Bunnymen’s “My Kingdom” looping in my mind while a sequence of overbearing buzzes, alarms, whirrs, and beeps, reminiscent of 1980s Atari games—the Combat cartridge springs to mind—take their turn. It ends with mighty, stabbed organ chords that are really impressive and appealing. It’s my right hip MRI, the quest for diagnosis making headway.

Afterwards, I played the rest of the Cure tape my sister had given me long ago by way of introduction to the group, over 30 years ago, driving down Ogden past vacant stores now torn down replaced by vacant lots bringing who knows what. It’s much-changed, even Ogden Avenue. Other than the familiar looping of the street, parts are becoming unrecognizable even though I traverse it often. At least I know where I am going even if there’s few places I want to stop along the way.

I head directly to the snowscape of Arrowhead Park, home to park district soccer games as a kid. I park with windows all down slightly to hear any birds. No sound, just the empty snowy field and hill and creek, with what looks like a raft of flood ice in the distance. Now I see it’s traversed by two sleek, bundled up figures. No sound, but my head pictures my sister and her best friend as those two out on the icy snowfield. The latter lived a block away from this park, and she’s the reason my sister can’t return here when I want to walk it for bird and nostalgia. How has 30 years passed? The breeze blows into the rolled-down window, I view the field through a snag of hair the color of the gray sky and think of that time, their friendship, what they might have been talking about. I drive home to “The Perfect Girl.”

A week later, back for the left hip MRI, this time spent singing the guitar lines of Will Sergeant and insistent, urgent, defiant choruses of Ian McCulloch in my head—”Over The Wall,” “Show of Strength”—thinking of just re-viewed Donnie Darko and a more than pleasant dream I had of a friend. And back to Arrowhead, with one finch sweetly singing somewhere in the trees behind where I parked, the ones you see below.

But this blog is called Music and More, so I will get back to music soon. More music, less more: A Promise.

Arrowhead: A Week Later

Read Full Post »

This array

Posted in My Life's Rich Pageant, tagged on January 9, 2021| Leave a Comment »

Well, the year didn’t start as I’d hoped, but started it did, and I got some of what I’d hoped to done, some left undone thanks to ill health and what became of my Epiphany plans. Closer to the first of the year, I chatted with a long lost acquaintance, and with an old friend, but when it came to my little projects or reading my books, less than planned. Volunteer commitments for the group I’m leading always crop up, so some of those needed tending, leaving longer-term ones undone. My shedding of a title from another organization has not been forthcoming, so that threw off my mindset. Some decluttering decisions, a study of sparrows with a buddy of mine, revamping a profile, set aside for now.

There was just not the appropriate air of renewal over the year’s start, however much our calendars and minds try to tell us to make it so. I managed a quiet celebration on the morning of January 7, but that was more a sense of relief from what had happened the day previous. But on the morning of the 9th, still asleep, some magic came to me.

A glimmer

My mind had been in a quiet stir, writing emails to the bird club board in my head, contemplating a friend’s question about “eco-fascism,” which led me to think about environmental justice and corporate fascism, subconscious angst about the DC stuff still being unresolved, the death of Tommy Lasorda, one of the comforting, colorful baseball figures of my youth. Then my ex-gf showed up in a dream for the first time in years. I scribbled this down soon after I woke up:

In a waiting room at a big mall with lots of loud hijinks going on outside this waiting room. Kept forgetting to pull my mask up, wear my mask, but did so some of the time at least. There were a couple of other people I either knew or was at least chatting with a little amid the ridiculousness of seemingly endless waiting. It was all quite a chaotic scene, rich with the more raucous side of mall life. At one point I went to the bathroom and that was a strange scene too. Time and much else didn’t seem to matter.

Anyway, she was there suddenly and we both laughed heartily over an exchange of comments we made, and a bit later she was kind of chatting with a couple of guys in somewhat jocular fashion. I put my right hand to her forearm and said, “I can’t take this anymore. I miss you and wish we were back together” or “think we should be back together.” And I walked away, she following calling after me, “What do you mean? What did you mean by that?” (It gets a little weird to detail after that, but a transmogrification worthy of minor Greek mythology occurred and the discussion continued, hurt but still loving.)

After that it is unclear, I know we exchanged a few more words, me reiterating that we should be together, she not rejecting the idea at least. (More positive than I’d imagined and that it would ever be in real life, unless this world holds more surprises than even I can imagine, but my imagination’s not as exercised as it once was.)

I keep a record of these occurrences, and maybe one happens every other year on average. They have featured this ex, a serious crush, an actor, a singer, a generic someone in a place I’d visited. And “knowing” is the word I describe them with—a warm feeling of love and affection shown in a clever exchange or tender gesture, but not explicitly spoken, like you might see in a wonderful old movie. Although these are not old movies, me viewing a couple of movies I’d missed the first time around that now hold a nostalgia—Romy & Michele’s High School Reunion, Legally Blonde, and the best of the lot, Clueless—maybe these put me in the mood as well for this dream.

A little sad to think how these moments don’t come to me in my waking life; it’s been years since I’ve had these kinds of interactions, that rising of the blood, beating of the heart. Thank goodness for the glimmer though.

Because, otherwise I meet this year with some disappointment at my situation and what continues or transmogrifies into worse in this world. It brings to mind something that came to me in a May dream in 2018. Something with the melody and lyrics of a Smiths song: “I never thought the world could be so sickening, who ever thought the world could be so sickening.”

We’ll see what shakes out as time presses on!

Read Full Post »

Pain’s embrace

Posted in My Life's Rich Pageant, tagged , on January 6, 2021| Leave a Comment »

This past year, for me, has been a year defined by pain: physical pain that has nothing to do with the pandemic. 

I had become used to mental pain, emotional pain, heart pain, and I had like anyone suffered bouts of malady- and injury-induced pain. The pandemic did, with my life compressed in one place, bring concern for scratches and other tiny injuries to occasional hypochondriacal levels, but this year’s claim is seven months of chronic physical pain only speculatively diagnosed, one that would heal some and then lapse, would be treated to no effect, with inconclusive tests, irresolute specialists, and still no resolution—if any resolution is to come.

The mental and emotional pain I feel have been mellowing, numbing maybe, fading, and they are always there, just usually suppressed beyond registering, infrequent in rearing of head. Lost loves, friends, places, times, ambitions. My expectations mostly dashed in that realm as layers of life situations go unchanged. But, as I declared last year at this time, this has only led me to embrace myself and original activities, not dependent on others, and there is much delight in that.

Snowy February
Golden December

And this past year has added the layer of physical pain; I don’t heal like I used to and maybe some of this will never heal. I’ve come to realize that this physical pain is also just part of things, always somewhere. But it can be alleviated and its limiting influences embraced. As my athletic endeavors (such as they were) and ability to lift things for gardening and other household activities have been curtailed, and even walks now have become something I pay for afterwards, I am fortunate when I can push past the pain, look at it, embrace it.

Wisdom in pain.— There is as much wisdom in pain as there is in pleasure: both belong among the factors that contribute the most to the preservation of the species. If pain did not, it would have perished long ago; that it hurts is no argument against it but its essence. (Nietzsche, The Gay Science, 318)

I think of Christina Rossetti in torment, screaming through nights in cancer’s throes, the agony of intense pain and the accompanying mental unhinging caused by its treatment with opium. I am thankful mine is not so acute, more one to wear me down, force me—if I am to accomplish anything—to overlook it when I can, or look at it with toleration and a Charlie Brown, scraggle smile when it won’t go unnoticed. Not to worry that no one seems to be able to define or remedy it, not worry what’s causing it, not worry if it will ever go away. Just accept it and keep going. Sometimes I can do this.

Eye-catching…
at any time of year.

One of my favorite groups put out a new song not long ago, “Ways,” and it happens to ring with as fitting a lyric as any for my year: “Aren’t you afraid of eternal Hell? Well, it’s not the end of the world” … “I can’t find any ways to change the pain to something else,” Frank sings. I admit that one of my primary goals for this year is to get rid of this pain. But if it can’t be diagnosed, or can be diagnosed, but simply won’t go away, I am creeping towards an acceptance of that, layered atop the other pains I’ve managed to set aside.

To Consider
Double pain is easier to bear
Than single pain: Will you so dare?
(Niet., Prelude to The Gay Science, 20)

Concluding ridiculous postscript.
Distraction has been one of any alleviations of this year’s pain. The sweeter pain of nostalgia. I got into an exchange with my sister and others about old favorite lost or utterly changed businesses of our hometown: Sports Bowl, Graham Crackers, Cee Bee’s, The Mole Hole, The Chocolate Key, Alton Drugs, Cock Robin, Tong Inn, Someplace Else, Old Peking, that old sports card shop run by Ernie.

Stark March
Mellow December, featuring 2020’s thematic “bleary sun.”

Read Full Post »

Place Beside Me

Posted in Music, My Life's Rich Pageant, tagged , , , , , on October 29, 2020| Leave a Comment »

As a kid I played the standard football, baseball, and basketball with my friends on the block, and was in the local soccer league through the park district, complete with reversible shirt, allowing us to be the yellow or blue team as needed. Gym class, a tiny bit of track, tennis lessons, and then softball and misc in college and after. Most of what I played in did not attract a crowd.

My parents I am sure did a great job cheering me on, and my dad certainly ran to my rescue when I was kicked in the jaw by my own teammate, but I can only think of two occasions when I noticed being cheered for while playing.

The first was in junior high, a day when for some reason we had to run laps around the school—state fitness standards or track tryouts? A certain tall, curly-haired KJ made a point of yelling my name and encouraging me, something immensely more inspiring than the binomial equation she wrote when she signed my yearbook. It must have been our Project Idea ties and general camaraderie in sharing a bunch of classes throughout our careers. I hope I cheered her on when she was similary forced to lap the school.

The second, still more treasured, a certain blonde-haired and blue-eyed BD in college cheering me on by name from the sidelines in an intramural basketball game. (Not the greatest basketball player, but I had my strengths.) We were most likely playing the fraternity whose members she hung around with, so her mentioning me from the sidelines was especially exciting and inspiring for me. Thank you, B.

What effect it can have when someone on the sidelines is there for you, especially unexpectedly. BD also majored in English, but, not surprisingly, we didn’t see much of each other as I seldom saw much of English majors and there was no apparatus tying such majors together.

Such tiny slices of memory taking on such a relatively large shape. The mind and heart are amazing. I could catalogue moments like these.

* Musical Interlude *

Two trios of songs joined me yesterday.

The first started with me listeining to Document after ages away from it. R.E.M.’s “Central America Triptych” has some of their best music and more intriguing lyrics and concepts, all seemingly inspired by Noam Chomsky’s Turning The Tide and the general 1980s anti-Reagan vibe I remember fondly.

Document offered “Welcome To The Occupation,” with “The Flowers of Guatemala” and “Green Grow The Rushes” from their previous two albums. The third has quite possibly my favorite R.E.M. guitar hook, the second a rousing solo, and the “Welcome…” just an all-around vibe and melody that easily lands it on my best of R.E.M. which should one day exist. Until yesterday I’d barely connected any of them to 1980s U.S. intervention in Central America. Oh well. Layers of meaning?

In the evening I played Dionne Warwick and pleasantly remembered she had recorded the Bacharach-David “This Empty Place.” Is it somehow only my third favorite version of this excellent song? I think so. I first heard it by The Searchers as an extremely catchy album track, backed up with their smoothly great instrumentation. Then, it came again later as a highlight album track for Swingin’ Cilla Black who has a way with the drama and nearly veering out of control, and this song is no exception. Her version’s modeled on Dionne’s and I can only say, woo-weee!

Think pink cover from Cilla’s 1965 U.S. album. (from Discogs.com)

Some old Sandie Shaw stuff is next.
We’ll see how that goes!
Long long live love.

Read Full Post »

Return to MacNeice

Posted in My Life's Rich Pageant, Non-Music, tagged , on October 8, 2020| Leave a Comment »

I used to read Louis MacNeice in my birthday month, tracking his published poems with my age. I gave it up several years ago, but decided this year to catch up, starting with reviewing some poems MacNeice published in his late 30s and early 40s. In a couple of years, we’ll meet in age again as I catch up.

I’m not sure why I stopped with the annual reading of him. Maybe I got bored; more likely poetry—both writing and reading it—was lost in pain to me. But now maybe I have found the strength of sane return in my late 40s while MacNeice found it in his late 20s. 

Before I turned to catch up with my reading with the poem “Plurality,” I took up Louis MacNeice’s pinnacle, “Sunlight on the Garden” and “June Thunder,” poems I remember from the old Norton anthology, my Oxford anthology, and now my worn Faber Collected Poems.

Set amid some poems with a similar theme, this is MacNeice at age 29 or 30, ushering in a new era of his life, with looks to nostalgia, loneliness, and how youth experience the world, turning to experience the world in a new phase of maturity. “Taken for Granted” and “The Brandy Glass,” are two other excellent poems in his 1938 collection, The Earth Compels, capped off with “Bagpipe Music.” (I notice I pencilled in that 1939 was his annus mirabilis, but 1937 makes a good case at quick glance.)

“Sunlight on the Garden” has the hard coziness, sunlight on pavement, that characterize this time in MacNeice’s poetry. Read it on renowned poet W. S. Merwin’s (palm tree forest) conservancy page. It’s a poem of maturity, a reconciliation to death’s more tangible reality, a relishing of beauty through a new lens: “And not expecting pardon, Hardened in heart anew, But glad to have sat under / Thunder and rain with you.”

“June Thunder” too, a return to a place not in thought alone. He returns to the old fields, his old room, a “cleansing downpour / Breaking the blossoms of our overdated fantasies.” But in this poem he is alone, not sharing the garden with someone: “If only now you would come I should be happy / Now if now only.”  

It’s wonderful to experience these poems again, reaching a deeper delight in them at an age much more advanced than MacNeice’s when he wrote them. And I have not experienced a good thunderstorm in some time, either, maybe because the seed took hold that being out in thunderstorms might get me struck dead by lightning, plus the fact there is no one to run around with in the weather with anymore. (More here.) 

Here’s a lesser-known poem of the same time, directly following “June Thunder” in my Faber book, a fading echo of the previous poem:

 

The heated minutes

The heated minutes climb

The anxious hill,

The tills fill up with cash,

The tiny hammers chime

The bells of good and ill,

And the world piles with ash

From fingers killing time.

 

If you were only here

Among these rocks,

I should not feel the dull

The taut and ticking fear

That hides in all the clocks

And creeps inside the skull—

If you were here, my dear.

 

I usually don’t have anyone specific in mind anymore to think of as “my dear,” but the sentiment still exists. I wrote a short story based on “June Thunder”; I wonder if I have the daring to turn to look at it.

 

Read Full Post »

Magic’s in the makeup

Posted in Music, My Life's Rich Pageant, tagged , , , , , on August 12, 2020| Leave a Comment »

No Doubt: Return of Saturn

An album listen. A rough record of my thoughts while listening.

Ex-Girlfriend: Guitar strings, then a driving beat. Smart, sharp, but romantic and vulnerable. So this album begins, with its mysteries to me when I first listened to it, a decade after it had come out. But it brought me back to when it came out, when Gwen Stefani and I (of similar age) were similarly looking at our futures. She had plans, me I had never really paid much attention to nailing things down—and I suppose that’s what this album and lead-off song are all about, one person with a clear wish for settling down, the other not feeling as much urgency despite wanting the same thing. Here’s the bridge, a little of the whine of Tragic Kingdom when she’d enamored me with “I’m Just a Girl” and “Spiderwebs” in the mid-90s, just five years before this leap.

Simple Kind of Life: Super transition to this crunchy song. This is a new No Doubt and the band is going along with her lyrics, not ska-ing it up constantly, which made Tragic Kingdom a hit or miss. Gwen at her most vulnerable and honest. Who wouldn’t want just the simple kind of life? If we’d opted for that, would we be happier now, would we have been happier then? “I’m covered in shells,” I love that cryptic image. “Oh, I always was the one with all the love, you came along, I’m hunting you down / Like a sick domestic abuser looking for a fight,” I love those lines. She understands young love in its all its aspects. I love how she adds that “oh” between lines. Gorgeous layers of sound, drum fills, her voice at its finest. It’s all really simple enough, this song, but No Doubt had and never has surpassed it. How she turns over different modulations of the refrain at the end, “A simple kind of life….”

Bathwater: Notwithstanding the performance that brought me this song, cue up Sanjaya on AI, this one hangs with the previous two in a gorgeous hat trick. Comical, music hall, yet still touching and effective for all its ooky, okay gross, chorus image. Yes, we do really feel that way when in love—we’d wash in their bathwater. In fact that may be the clearest sign of love, being more than willing to more than tolerate others’ bodily functions and fluids. Gwen is once again led down the primrose path, not thinking about the future, thinking through what dating this person would be like, would it come to anything, would it just work out somehow despite everything? The comical girl voice at the bridge, it’s junior high all over again. She’s almost tripping over the complex alliteration here, but it’s working as the song traipses to its final chorus. The little girl voice returns again as she relishes her wash in nostalgic disregard, like a kid with a serious crush.

Six Feet Under: The hat trick that starts the album ends, and this song’s alright, but nothing special, a return to the old No Doubt. Good beat, the melody and lyrics not quite up to the previous three. Would the album return to form or is this another case of a 50/50 album like Tragic Kingdom—50/50 being what I call an album that is half great, half virtually skippable. There are a fair number of these even in the albums I’ve kept, and it shows how hard it is to make a great cover to cover album.

Magic’s In The Makeup: An instant return to the first three super songs, amazing! Her voice pretty again, sentiment open, vulnerable, trying to overcome her girlhood ways. “I’m a chameleon,” how fun to sing along with that. “Makeup’s all off, who am I, the magic’s in the make up, who am I?” What a chorus, what a chorus! (I always thought she was saying, “Makeup’s all wrong,” also good) The magic in the makeup on her face, the making stuff up in her mind about who she really is and what she really wants. What is her true make-up? Again, amazingly touching, and the chorus and voice and accompaniment all work together startlingly well. Lovely modulations of the lyrics and melody. “I wanna be the real thing,” and she wants the real thing when it comes to love and relation to the world as well.

Artificial Sweetener: Sister of the previous, a little more aggressive, more sexual. “The return of Saturn,” amazing to sing along with. The mystery of the phrase before I learned what it referred to. Still, not knowing exactly what it meant, there was a menace to it, fitting for the raw assessment of her life, the “second guessing,” and the artificiality of all she does and has done. “I’m only sure that I’m not sure.”

Marry Me: Another contemplative little tune, confessing again her humble, conventional side. I had this too, I have it, I never cried out to be an artist, but here I am in my current situation with those writerly dreams at least half my humble ambitions. Echoing her earlier self, teasing to remind us of her first hit song, beginning a verse singing “A girl in the world…” Echoing when she wasn’t thinking who would be the one to marry her, but proclaiming her grrrring independence in that song that grabbed me: “I’m Just a Girl.” Nothing wrong with wanting a conventional life and still freedom to choose our way, independent identity even in a close relationship. She is both the woman of “Marry Me” and “I’m Just A Girl,” and maybe that’s why everything seems askew in her experience of this world.

New: Immediately catchy, starting with the chorus. Caught up in the immediate rush of “different than the former,” has she abandoned the wishes of the previous slew of songs or is this new guy the one who will fix up the mess of wishes that has become her life?

Too Late: Churning guitar, then back to the wistful, whimsical Gwen, wanting to parade her new love from the previous song (apparently about her Bushy future and now past husband—this song fittingly begins like a famous Bush song). Again “Fulfillment just adds fuel to the blaze,” hard to pick out, fun to sing, more alliteration. Her wordiness is fun on this album and she had it in Tragic Kingdom too. The butterfly lines, gorgeously described. Is it another relationship that will end without marriage, in sheer disappointment after initial fervor? She can’t get past the indifference that can come after lust is sated. It seems so. :(

Comforting Lie: Another wonderful melody for her to play her voice on. Great, frantic chorus. So fun to sing along with “Oh build a bomb and blow it away blow it away ” ending with a lovely guitar bit back to the verses. On and on and I would love it. And it seems the reationship of the previous few songs is gone in dramatic fashion, with a joy in blowing it up. Sort it out, toss it away, just give up, but she can’t decide…. “I’m feeling weak, yeah……” Amazing how the album keeps yielding such precious moments to feel and sing and revel in.

Suspension Without Suspense: Clever title and wonderful working through of the chorus, the story of her life and this album as she wrestles with finding what she really wants and falling into traps along the way. I’ve had a relationship or two or like this: “We get so far and then it just starts rewinding, and the same old song we’re playing it again, suspension without suspense, intention without intent.” I find myself singing this couplet often. We can’t get any further in this relationship, it’s stuck, it cannot build any higher, but I don’t want to lose it, why can’t things stay the same?

Staring Problem: Instant turn-off once one starts to notice it, and maybe starts skipping it, but why skip a weak tune on a top-tier album? I got over skipping it and kinda like it now. It has a goofy fun to it, especially with her little piped-in voice in the background of the break, itching to fight saying crazy stuff and that little girl voice joining her in the chorus, and then the shouts at the end. “Predisposed cat fighter.” Seems shorter than its 2:44 and the gamelan ending way cool, shades of my 1998 first experience of that music, not long before this album came out!

Home Now: Jam-type (well, Style Council and Crowded House too) beginning with station waiting room announcement voices, maybe she is hitting the road. Seems like the final song of the album, but it’s not. Only downside is the intervening of the old No Doubt and its a-melodic ska stuff in the break. It’s catchy and weird here, a semi-weakness of an awesome song. These last two songs again somehow return this album to genius. so well over half of the songs are top top tier with nearly all the others good to very good. “What you givin’ up for me, what shall I give up for you? I love the “shall.” Wondrous chorus, delayed: “If you lived here you’d be home now.” Sweet voice, driving chorus to the extreme with the layering and keyboard stabs, guitar lacing around the affair. Horns, “casual light days, part of the furniture,” guitar lacing again. Could go on another ten minutes musically, with more chorus please please.

Dark Blue: Enticing title and use of “dark blue” in the lyrics, giving a cosmic tone to Return of Saturn. Cool harpsichord, it’s too bad you’re so sad, “Unlike you I had it easy, you’re dark blue.” I never did catch that first phrase; I thought it was a garbled “moonlight blue.” Suburban, nice family me and Gwen vs. whoever she’s with and his dark blue past. Wanting to heal her loved one. So much love to give and no one to give to…

Piano Coda, Too Late: The Cardigans did this, Madness too in a way, but not so affecting as here. But here it lets her be alone with her thoughts, and I’m alone with mine.

As I said before, nothing else captures the feel of that time for me even though I didn’t know the album then. The late 90s, when I wound down grad school and found new work and then struggled subconsciously to settle down, trying to get over and get started with things that didn’t work out. Truly staggering. Time travel through one of the most important albums of my life.

936px-Saturn_from_1996_to_2000

Saturn from 1996 to 2000, by NASA Hubble

Read Full Post »

Older Posts »