There are those songs, you know.
Those songs which contain words and phrases that spell out the aching particulars of however you experience life and beauty and pain and truth.
We all have this soundtrack.; the songs that bring us immediately to a place or time or feeling. Without preamble or fanfare, we are fully and utterly lost to that moment, that emotion. And sometimes, they make no sense or they make a sense that only your insides can interpret. They are often profoundly unglamorous and leave us raw and exposed, but in the best possible way.
And today with my speakers up louder than I can usually have them at work, I heard again the line from a song that most says LOVE to me while I listen. It is contained in a song about stumbling upon love while not yet free to have it. It is not a scenario I have ever found myself in, yet it cries out with the most beautiful poignancy what I most feel… and want to feel from someone else, about love.
There have been others: they tell a story about the way my concept of love has changed
Ghost by The Indigo Girls “Of all my demon spirits I need you the most”
I always felt like this song was about being in love with the idea of someone, rather than their actual person. About idealizing someone past the point of all reason so that you could have no real hope of loving them in actuality. This is something I know well how to do. This was my idea of love when I was a sophomore in high school. It still tugs at me though…
Do What You Have to Do by Sarah McLachlan “And I have the sense to recognize that I don’t know how to let you go”
Some part of me is convinced that love has to hurt. That it isn’t real if you don’t ache for the lack of the other. Probably too large a part of me indeed. The quality of love I most readily recognize is the sort that causes me to lose myself so completely in the feeling that I become someone else as a result. the person I was before ceases to exist and so, in a very real sense I struggle with the notion of losing anyone I come to truly love, for it would result in becoming Not Me, at least Not the Me I’d been ever since falling in love had made me Someone New. Plus also, I just don’t like to let go.
Steam Engine by My Morning Jacket “Your skin looks good in moonlight, goddamn those shaky knees”
This song was just eerily appropriate for the love I was falling in at the time I first heard the song. I had never had someone so enamored of me as was the boy who was the object of my affection at the time. I had never had anyone speak with such fervor about how beautiful he thought I was; about the effect I had on him with the mere fact of my presence. This was the lesson of being adored as an aspect of love. It was a good lesson.
Crash by Dave Matthews Band “Hike up your skirt a little more, and show your world to me”
Far from being smutty, I find this line to be singularly romantic. It acknowledges the fundamental vulnerabilty inherent in revealing oneself this way. The faith, entire and unblemished, that accompanies such a gesture. It is an intoxicating moment, to feel that trust for someone else, and to feel it expressed toward you as well.
And now…
Challengers by The New Pornographers “Whatever the mess you are, you’re mine”
This, oh this, is what I have come to believe is really what love is about. Not that we do not see, or that we are made perfect by our love, but rather that we are seen, and known, and absolved, and loved nevertheless. I think I like this notion best. It feels truer, and wiser and more likely, when compared to the illusions and self-sacrifice of the past.
And I wonder, as I always do, about the quality of love that others feel. How it is sounded out across their lives. What resonates inside of them and carries them forward on waves of song…
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