Uncynical Wednesdays

Yesterday I was driving to work and Stephen Bishop was playing on the radio and I was thinking about how impossibly sentimental his songs seem today, but maybe that’s because I don’t listen to music on the radio much. I’d never even heard of Delilah until a few years ago, when I did a brief stint in a prison hospital, and one of the doctors was listening to her show while we played Risk in the double-wide trailer the state provided us. But that’s another story.

Looking back as lovers go walking past...
All of my life
Wondering how they met and what makes it last
If I found the place
Would I recognize the face?
Something's telling me it might be you
Yeah, it's telling me it must be you

I was trying to remembering the first time I heard music that moved me. There is a super 8 of me at four years-old singing ‘I think I love you’ with a ukulele, jumping around the Christmas tree. I can also remember ‘Seasons in the Sun’ when I was six years-old and my father telling me what a cheese-eating song it was. But at the time, I was moved by the romanticism of knowing one was dying and wanting to live for a few more seasons. I have no idea how I escaped being a Goth kid, but it is Uncynical Wednesday, so we won't discuss that.

I started thinking about being a sophomore in college and listening to the Dire Straights. The nature of being up at five in the morning listening to songs that were, frankly, musically and emotionally more sophisticated than anything I had experienced. It’s difficult to articulate what made that song different, because the nature of the song was not—at face value—different. It was another song about love and loss.

But it was different, wasn’t it? You remember it, don’t you? That song you can point to and say, ‘that’s it, hearing that song changed the way I listened to music.’ I remember being so filled with awe for whoever introduced me to those songs that finding the line that separated respect and lust was like untangling a fly fishing line after a bad toss. That led to a few odd mornings waking up in a dorm room, using stale beer to clean the blood off the tiled floor. But that, also, is another rather complicated & involved story.

Juliet the dice were loaded from the start
and I bet and you exploded in my heart
and I forget I forget the movie song
when you gonna realize it was just that the time was wrong Juliet?

I can't do the talk like the talk on the tv
and I can't do a love song like the way its meant to be
I can't do everything but I'd do anything for you
can't do anything except be in love with you

And now many years later, I’m often the one playing music that unravels and reveals what a song is capable of and have those curious audio intimacies. I can still feel my blood thicken and my hackles rise when I hear those songs.

Listen. Sit. It’s dark, and we’re back from the bar, and you’re not going to believe this fucking song. Do you hear that? The way that bass is just a little off tempo, just a little behind? How can a hesitation do that to your chest? Damn it, it’s a good life.

It’s a damn good life.