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some sad songs

Hi Thursday.  Work today might suck, so I wrote this in preparation.

I like writing about music, so I thought I’d write today about songs that “move” me.  A lot of songs move me in positive ways, making me happy or pumped-up or reminiscent, but the sad songs seem to get the short shrift.  So today I want to focus on just a few songs which make me feel… sadness.  Some, in fact, move me to the point of tears; not because of some associated memory or anything, but just because the songcraft or words or whole package is done juuuust right.  Here then, are some songs that make me sad.

Save the Life of My Child – Simon & Garfunkel (from the album Bookends, 1967) [listen]

How can a song about teen suicide not be sad?

Poor kid.  Who knows what’s driven him to this.  To climb out onto the ledge of a building and contemplate ending it all.  Paul Simon narrates from a 3rd-party perspective, showing us the crowd and the cops and the poor child’s mom, begging someone to rescue her child, to not let him die.

Where does it wrench the gut?  Oh, people, if you’ve heard it all the way through and you don’t know… they you ain’t got blood in your veins.  After all that time up there, all alone with his thoughts, the crowd that’s gathered below is growing hungry with bloodlust.  As night falls and the the police train their spotlight on our protagonist, Simon almost laments, “He flew away.”  The song changes drastically, and is a cue for us to recognize that we’ve now entered the mind of our young jumper.  We hear his thoughts as he falls, “Oh my grace, I’ve got no hiding place.”  Over and over again.  The lack of resolution makes the resolution clear.

As soon as I hear that, “He flew away” bit… I get chills and can almost feel the weight of that fictional kid’s choice.  What an awesome song.

The Ballad of Humankindness – The Dears (from the album, Gang of Losers, 2006) [listen]

Who said sad songs can’t be powerful?  Because, let me tell you, if a dude did say it that dude was dead wrong.

By now you’ve maybe queued up the song from the Grooveshark link and it’s starting.  You might be wondering, “Dave… this sounds cheesey.”  Stick with me!  Please, I beg.  Just make it through the trumpet solo (and don’t let the fact that there’s a trumpet solo turn you off).  Right around the end of that solo, you’ll hear a stray tambourine… it’s your warning bell, your omen, your hint of the amazing denouement to come.  Musically, this track is like a lovely jack-in-the-box, winding and winding and winding and finally exploding into an orgasm of arpeggio guitars, steady tambourine, sing-song chorus, and that final strum-hold/strum-hold/strum-through rhythm.  Musically, it’s bright and powerful and… maybe you’d say… happy-sounding.

But lyrically… lyrically I want to re-cast it for you.  Listen to Lightburn’s words.  Listen.  Bemoaning the plight of the homeless, Lightburn asks himself what he’s been doing about it.  Indicts himself for simply “living with” such a terrible situation.  The part that cuts me to the bone is the impassioned, “I’m gonna change, I’m gonna change, I’m gonna change, I’m gonna change!” verse.  It’s a song about being disgusted with yourself for not heeding your WWJD bracelet.  Maybe the words are a bit over-the-top, but I love the sentiment.  The guilt, the shame, all of it comes across really well for me – and qualifies as a song that makes me sad.

Little Dancing Girl – Harry Connick Jr. (from the album Lofty’s Roach Souffle, 1990) [listen]

There are no words to this song.  In fact there are no words on this entire album.

But people, this is one sad song.  I don’t pretend to know what it’s about, other than maybe a little dancing girl, but I like to imagine a story in my head of a father who, for whatever reason, has lost his daughter.  Years ago, maybe it was an accident, or a divorce, or even just bad blood and a broken relationship.  This song is him remembering when things were better.  When she was maybe five and he was her idol and her rock and everything she looked up to in the world.  He can think back to that day, maybe she was just dancing around silly in the house, maybe it was her ballet recital, but it’s a perfect memory and he holds onto it.

The song really gets bad, sad-wise, when everything else drops away and all you get is the upright bass, somewhere around the 3:40 mark you get that little bass solo.  So deep and round are the notes on that big bass that you have to turn the stereo waaay up to hear it.  But this bass breakdown represents, to me, my fictional dad’s breakdown.  He knows his memory isn’t reality and this is the part where it all falls apart.  Dang.  Tearjerker (in my own mind).

She Sends Kisses – The Wrens (from the album The Meadowlands, 2003) [listen]

I wrote about this song already, back in 2004.  I loved it then and I love it now.  The lyrics are so perfect, 100% unrequited love.  The girl is gone.  She’s been gone.  He spent a lot of time missing her, still misses her, maybe not rawly or every day anymore, but he still loves her.  He’s got all these memories of the time they spent together, how much he worked for her, how badly he wanted her.  “Hopes pinned to poses honed in men’s room mirrors,” and “I put your face on her all year,” are simply amazing bits of lyric.

And then, around the crescendo things go dim.  My eyes go damp, my chest goes tight.  This poor, sad, pining sucker.  This dude is head over heels and this specter from the past just sent him a note signed with Xs and Os.  Those are stupid-letter-code for kisses!  Kisses?! That bitch!  After all this time she’s going to do this to me?!  He reads the note and sees those Xs and Os, knows what they mean and all of the sudden, “Back doors blow open.”  Every memory cued at half speed, it all comes flooding back.  Xs and Os.

Oh you poor man.  Down the rabbit hole again.

Thorn Tree In the Garden – Derek & the Dominos (from the album Layla and Other Assorted Love Songs, 1971) [listen]

A gorgeous song by Dominos member Bobby Whitlock.  An unbelievable stereo mix, the guitar and sparse knocking percussion clear and present and balanced.  The harmonics repeated in the background almost like bells.  I imagine I can hear Whitlock’s held-back tears.  At the end, when he goes falsetto to wonder, “And maybe some day soon, some way…” you want to just put your arms around they guy and tell him it’s going to be OK, it’s all going to be alright.

I wonder how many people have listened to this song whilst bawling over their very own lost love.  I wonder what they’d think if they learned Whitlock was actually singing about a dog.  Yeah.  A dog.  A roommate of his took his dog and killed it. Bobby hated him for it and wrote this song to “out” him to the world as the guy who did such and awful thing to the pet he loved.  Don’t worry though, those of you who may have misappropriated the track, Whitlock himself clarifies, “It’s all about love anyway. There is no love of this and not that. There’s no measure of it. Whether it’s a dog, your mother, dad, brother, sister, your companion, your horse or your neighbor, it is that one thing. It doesn’t have a distinction. There’s no barrier, it’s just one thing that encompasses everything if you stop and think about it.”

OK, that’s enough for sad songs.  Here, have a tissue.

How about you?  Got any songs that start the waterworks every time?  What did I forget?  “Tears in Heaven?”  Cash’s “Hurt” cover?  Yeah, saaaad.

Goodnight.

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let’s not trivialize

I’m really bothered by my posting frequency.  I used to get four days a week, now I’m getting two or maybe three.

Work shoots some nights in the foot, making even a limping attempt hard.  Other nights I simply re-prioritize.  Maybe playing a game with Sharaun and Keaton or reading instead (reading consistently is such a fleeting thing for me that I choose to feed it first).  Tonight it’s work; although the 8:30pm meeting isn’t as “disruptive” as some of my later ones.  It’s OK; I’m earning a wage and all and that’s a good thing.  One of the many other nights, I spent outlining.  I want to write a book; have wanted to for some time.  I’ll probably never finish, but I got an idea.  A friend of ours is doing it, or maybe has done it by now, I find that encouraging.  All my ideas were limp, but then I got inspired.

Did you know that Cohen, our other kid, the new one with the still-soft skin and still-soft hair and still-toothless gums, can roll over now?  He can.  Been doing it, like a boss, for about a week. I think that this is, probably, a bit “behind schedule” as as American parents say.  Although I find the notion of child development adhering to a strict “schedule” somewhat presumptuous and maybe a little insulting (can babies be insulted?).  I’ll tell you what, Cohen himself could care less; I’m confident of that.  You get into that kid’s brain and you read his thoughts as he hears you say to another mom, “Yeah, he’s rolling over now.  A bit behind, I know,” and you’d hear that kid think, “‘Behind’ what, fool?  I just rolled over, did you not see that?  This is the greatest single achievement of my life.”  So let’s not trivialize; my kid is amazing.

Goodnight.

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i run from a bee

Saturday in California the weather went downright Springy.

70° and a few high wisps of cloud.  Sharaun had all-day (and most-of-the-night) plans with girlfriends so I was playing daycare (it’s actually kind of dumb to say that, like it’s not half my job anyway… but I find men do make jokes about it so I guess I’m part of the herd).  Around 2:30pm I decided it was too night to say inside, even if to listen to some fine music and read The Hobbit with Keaton.  Since the trees, both ornamental and fruit, needed pruning I decided it would be a good hour of sunshine and fresh air.

Put the new Dead Road Trips (’88 April Fools Day show) on the outdoor speakers and pulled out the ladder and went to work. I chopped and trimmed and shaped and formed, not really knowing if I’m doing ill or good, not really caring (OK, kinda caring if I’m forever ruining the fruit trees, but I did do some internet research – three minutes looking at “good pruning” vs. “bad pruning” pictures – beforehand) if I was doing it totally right or not.  In the end I think I did OK, although standing back and looking at the Japanese maple I think I could’ve been even more heavy-handed, guess we’ll see when the canopy begins coming in for true-Spring.  Afterward I gathered up my cut branches and put them into a pile (the green waste thing is full of winter clippings).

Know what though?  I didn’t want to write about pruning or the weather or how great it was being outside doing something.  Nope.

I wanted to write about the small blister on my right ringfinger.

It was maybe an hour.  Maybe.

How soft have I become?  Apparently that soft.  So soft that an hour, if even that, of what would be classed somewhere below “light” work leads to a blister.  Egad!  The humanity!  This life of computers and cubicles and elevators instead of stairs and supermarkets and horseless carriages and insoles has torn me down.

On YouTube this weekend I saw a video of a native dude in some dense jungle scaling a tree that must’ve been a hundred feet tall with nothing but a vine and rough-made axe.  Once at the top he walked bravely out on a spindly limb, high above the ground, not tethered to anything, and proceeded to chop a hole in the limb to reveal a massive hive of jungle-bees.  He then blew smoke from a smoldering bundle of leaves – which he’d hauled behind him tied to his waist – into the hole, getting stung the entire time.  As the angry bees swarmed, he reached bare-handed (and bare-feeted, for that matter) into the hive to break off and steal honeycomb. After hepping that honeycomb down to the jungle floor he and his family feasted on the raw comb, hungrily plunging comb and bees and all into their grateful mouths.

This is from whence we all came.

The guy who got a blister from pruning his Japanese maple… blood and mettle so thinned by time and trade.

I run from a bee.  A bee.

Goodnight.

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the daily betrayal

This morning I watched some old Pink Panther cartoons with Keaton before work.  It was awesome.  It was an awesome feeling, almost like when I was a little kid.

It was early enough that the light was that kind of all-over light where the sun isn’t up it’s just all-around.  It was foggy or just morning cloudy; the light diffused through all that water in the air and just was.  Keaton was in her Tangled PJs, blue bottoms with flowers and a big Rapunzel on the top, and I was in boxers and a white undershirt, beard still wet from the shower (no hair left to be damp, it’s the beard’s job now).  Sharaun and Cohen were still asleep.  Keaton cuddled up to me and jammed her feet under my thighs to keep warm.  I tucked her hair behind her ear (for some reason I love doing that) and patted her knee and laughed with her.

We watched about ten minutes together.  I didn’t want to go to work.  I could’ve made a pot of coffee and turned off my phone so the rapid-fire click, click, click of e-mail didn’t remind me of my delinquency.

At 7:50am I left it all.  My daughter, Pink Panther, the couch, the everywhere light of morning.  Left it all and went to work.

Again.

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maybe the wine did help

It’s not “writer’s block.”  It’s not.

It’s a day filled with too many other things, most of virtue, sure, yet “other” as compared to writing.  A shame, because I love writing and get all bummed when I can’t do it (either because of lack of time or writer’s impotence; the dreaded ‘ED,’ essayist dysfunction).  But you’ve heard it all before.  I got glass of wine, 6oz, I measured the pour first in the marked measuring cup (because ounces, bravely “out” and batting for both teams as liquids and solids, have always escaped my comprehension as a meaningful measurements).  There are apparently some ~130 calories in it.

A single calorie is something like the amount of heat required to raise the temperature of some defined measure of water one degree, maybe that degree is Celsius, maybe Fahrenheit; it does matter.  In what surely has to be some of the most convoluted math ever, if you burned this 6oz (wet ounces!) of wine, and placed one gram (or whatever) of water above the resultant blaze… you’d apparently raise the temperature of that water by some “meaningful” number.

The wine was an attempt to maybe whet the pen, or keyboard.  So many great writers are also great juiceheads, you have to wonder if there’s something to it.  I will never forget the feeling I had reading The Sun Also Rises (who cares if you’re supposed to underline that per MLA standards, I think underlining on the web when something’s not a clickable hyperlink is stupid; italics is more effective).  It’s such an alcohol-soaked tome, you can feel the pervasive state of drunkenness that enhances the clique (maybe fogs them, too?).  It’s funny, I’ve told Sharaun before how, when I read books about people who are abusing substances, like The Sun Also Rises and On the Road and Ham on Rye and The Naked Lunch, I feel an undeniable draw, almost a longing or an envy or maybe a sense of “what-if” wonder.  Same thing watching terribly depressing movies like Leaving Las Vegas; there’s something dangerously attractive (to me, at least) about selling your soul to the junk.

I don’t think this is what they call an “addictive personality” or anything.  If anything it’s more akin to how young boys dare each other to jump over big holes or spraypaint cursewords on their math teacher’s van (looking at you, Desi) – some kind of “bad is fun; broken rules are thrilling” adolescent mentality.  But anyway it doesn’t matter, I’m not here to write about my fatal attraction to mood-altering chemicals, I was writing about how I poured some wine to see if it helped me write… better.  I suppose better is subjective, and I don’t need to conduct a scientific experiment to tell you that there’s definitely some BJT-esque saturation region where the sauce wrecks and ruins the creative process, so… is there a conclusion here?

In the end I don’t think the wine helped, but the idea of drinking wine to help did help, so maybe the wine did help.

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not bad for freeloading

One of the most memorable things I’ve done in my thus-far far-too-short life was a thirty-six hour Greyhound bus trip from Florida to the hill country of Texas.  You wanted adventure, you got adventure.

Maybe not adventure like Bond would find in Monte Carlo, but adventure sort of what like Sal and Dean found on the road.  OK maybe thirty-six hours can’t compare, but there were some real now etched-in-stone moments for me during that trip.  When I visualize the time in my head I see that famous ending shot of Joe Buck and Ratso Rizzo and I hear the Simon & Garfunkel song, “America.”  I know, you’d expect Nilsson, but Simon’s bus-ride anthem lines about, “Michigan feels like a dream to me now,” and, “We smoked the last pack an hour ago,” seem to fit so perfectly.

In Defuniak Springs Florida a young overweight guy took the seat next to me.  I didn’t really want to talk, but he did.  I can’t remember his name, but whatever it was it should’ve rightly been Bubba.  Bubba was leaving his dad’s house in Florida and heading to his Mom’s somewhere I can’t remember.  Once there he was going to finish one more year of school and join the military.  His innocent eyes gleamed with the recruiter’s details: A career, authority, fat pockets and world travels.  On the bus in the first place to go visit my buddy in the Air Force and not wanting to knock the military, for there really is no reason to do so just because it’s not your chosen path, I played it non-committal and agreeable.  Turns out Bubba was a downright nice guy, like nearly every person I met on the bus, actually.  I saw him off somewhere in Alabama or something.

Somewhere, still in Florida, I decided to take up smoking for the rest of the ride.  The knot of folks gathered as they indulged at each stop was what convinced me; it was where the socializing happened.  I bought a pack (one of probably a handful I’ve ever bought in my entire life) and joined them astride the coach to talk about whatever bus-folks talk about in the middle of the night while they share cigarettes.  I didn’t even think about eating, they never stopped long enough to consume anything proper.  When hunger started to kick in I bought a family-size bag of potato chips and one of those pre-made sandwiches from a gas station.  In thirty-six hours that and a bottle of water and a pack of cigarettes were my sustenance.

That night a dirty skinny dude got on from the middle of nowhere Louisiana, likely going nowhere to boot.  Guy had the shakes, DTs, white-horse  jazz-step, whatever you want to call it.  He sat a couple rows behind me, bopping and scratching and mumbling.  Made everyone around pretty uncomfortable with his retching sounds and junk-sick ticks.  Somewhere near the Texas border, in the middle of the damn night, the driver stopped the rig and actually put the sad sucker out, said something short like, “It’s my bus and you’re not on it anymore.”  Right out onto the road into the middle of nowhere from whence he came.  I remember feeling so bad for the character, turned out into the dark with only whatever hooch or scag he had in his backpack to last until those shakes and visions came back.  Hope he got where he was going.

The time I spent in Texas was awesome, one day I’ll write more about it (I’ve done a little already, again from the tobacco angle), but this was about the bus.

My bus back left Dallas on New Year’s day.  The station was absolutely packed to the gills and every single bus was running late.  I couldn’t find a place to set up camp inside so I wandered out into the pull-through area where there were already several groups of folks sitting around on the concrete.  I settled down near a group of not-yet-old black guys who were sitting atop their suitcases and duffle bags, situated in a circle tossing dice, smoking, and seemingly having a grand old time.  After a while the asked me to join them and I enthusiastically accepted.  By this point the whole trip had me pretending I was some windblown road-dog character from a novel, out cutting his teeth on the world or something.  I had a great time playing some Dallas bus-stop variation of Gin with the guys, smoking menthols and swapping stories.  When it got late (or early, maybe) I excused myself to curl up and sleep.  The guys gave me a tip before they wished me well, “Better sleep on yo suitcase ’round here; else it might not be there when you wake up.”  Good advice, and I did.

When I did wake my new friends were gone and my bus was still not in from wherever it was.  It was going on first light now and I wanted to get out of Dallas.  I saw folks climbing aboard a bus marked for Atlanta, which seemed a heck of a lot closer to Florida than Dallas.  I walked up like I belonged, handed my suitcase to the porter and watched him stow it below the bus, and walked aboard.  When the driver walked the aisle to do his ticket-check, I feigned sleep.  Soon I was Georgia bound, and it all felt even more romantic, breaking the rules and all.

In Atlanta I played dumb, pretended I had no idea how I’d got on the wrong bus, things were crazy in Dallas, all messed-up, I’d said.  The agent took pity on my ignorance and told me she could get me as far as Tallahassee.  Better, but not home yet.  In Tallahassee things went much the same as Atlanta, but this time I was only looking to go another few hours.  After a short terminal nap I lucked into another bus headed further south.  Before I left I called Sharaun from a payphone (no mobiles in those days, my friends) and told her I was five or so hours away.  In the end I beat the bus I was booked on by three hours, not bad for freeloading.

Man that was a fun trip.  Never again.

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don’t find any crabs or spiders

A co-worker told me this morning that OCD is an inherited trait.

But I didn’t learn that today.  No, no; I’ve known (via empirical evidence) for a few years now that OCD is an inherited trait.  I’ve seen it firsthand, passed on (passively, at least) lovingly from me down to our daughter.

First, some setup: We’re not talking OCD like those half-hour shows you see on cable at night where the girl washes her hands so many times a day that they are bleeding and raw.Not the kind of OCD like the guy who locks and unlocks the door to his apartment nineteen times when coming and going.  Nah… this is just the kind of OCD like I have, where, when I see a tableful of magazines and papers and remote controls I want to stack them in a neat pile according to size.

So, bad… but not really life-impacting.  More like this stuff, or these things, or maybe a little of this.  Strange; odd; eccentric; but overall nothing more than the the human cruft we all come with.

Now then… here I am to tell you another endearing story, the germ of which is the ongoing joke about my daughter’s inherited OCD.  This story is about Keaton’s somewhat ritualistic morning “goodbye” routine.

Some mornings when I leave for work, Keaton is already awake.  Some mornings, she’s still asleep in bed.  But nearly every morning, regardless of her waking state, she manages to communicate the following to me before I close the garage door, get into the car, and drive away for the day:

Daddy!
Don’t work too hard.
Think about me and how much love that I give you.
Don’t find any crabs or spiders.
Tell anyone I know that I said, “Hi!”

Always those exact words, always those exact phrases, always said in that particular order.  Almost every single day.  Even on days when she’s hard asleep and I make it all the way to the car backing out of the garage she’ll sometimes burst into the garage in her pajamas and wait for me to roll down the window so she can say her little piece.

Most of it makes sense and is expected “goodbye” fodder… all but that bit about “crabs and spiders.”  Who knows… maybe she really doesn’t like crabs and spiders (I’ve always thought they look sort of similar anyway, so maybe they’re equally undesirable to “find” in her mind).  Good advice in the end, though, I suppose…

I really do love that little girl.  Goodnight.