Songs

I get stuck on certain songs. Sometimes, I can’t even listen to an artist’s whole album because I’m so absolutely in love with just one song. Today was a music day. I probably listened to about six hours of music. When I can't do anything else, I can still listen to music. It keeps me whole. Brings me back to earth, back to myself when I'm fearful and panicking.These are the songs that have enraptured and captured me today ( and mostly for the last few days.:

“Memory Picture”-Terami Hirsch

“I cut six inches off my hair so I won’t feel pretty, and I walk in public where I won’t drown. Make it stop”…she’s so lyrically simple yet defined in this song, accompanied by chord progressions that just catch in my chest. Such a sad sad song that feels like home to me. A punch to the gut kind of song, brutally gentle. I love emotionally confessional songs, intimate and hands held open, bare and vulnerable, a life explored and shared.

“Sweet Chariot”-Charlotte Martin

Ms Martin is my most recent musical true love. While I’ve been listening to Ms Hirsch for about 7 or 8 years, I just started listening to C.M. about a month or two ago. This song, again, is quite a simple chord progression, all piano and voice, uninterrupted, and close. Songs like this keep me sane, keep me feeling as though I am a human being. That emotions exists and flow through us, and that sadness and working through deep grief is such a part of life. The production is immaculate, sounds like being in a small room with a large wall window looking out onto a field or a forest, with a piano against one wall, with this song being played. Another very intimate sounding song. Present and alive, not just a recording. Living music.

“What we want”-Brittain Ashford

This one is just. This one is my heart. Short and sweet and sorrowful. Such a small song, “ and how were we to know we’d spend the rest of our lives trying to forget what made us who we are”, and such description, heartfelt cleverness. A love song that is an offering, again, another song that feels like palms stretched widely out, heart in hands, still beating vividly. “ I found you washing windows on some 32nd floor and I was pushing World Books door to door, and haven’t you ever wanted to know everything, and that’s exactly what it is I am offering you”-she writes such a story in three tiny verses, as though they are the most important musings ever. And this strong as warm voice over tinny, thin, and inviting instruments. So homemade and lovely. I can’t get over this song.

“Sea of Possibility”-Noe Venable

Dreams of the end, and new beginnings. “ With you I want to taste this freedom, with you remember life’s divinity, without you this love I take with me into the sea of possibility".Awake at night, the moon shining in. She makes clichéd poetic images completely new again with whistling and piano and marimba or something, and sort of beat boxing, into a sweet and slightly despondent but not too despairful and through to hopeful again. This song is the sea.

“Kimberly”-Patti Smith

An outside song, environment, storms and shatterings, kind of a companion piece to the imagery in the Noe Venable song. “the sea rushes up my knees like blame and I feel like just some misplaced Joan of Arc” is quite possibly one of my favorite lyrics ever. I’ve been listening to this song for about ten years, and I continuously forget what it is, that in the melodic and instrumental repetition are these stunning words, still so alive, more than thirty years after being recorded. Instants captured in art, and returned to life through the act of listening. A handing off of history, of experience, into a new form, someone else’s imaginative experience. Art is such an extraordinary and strange thing. Familiar and yet completely distant and unknown.

“Summer in the City”-Regina Spektor

It’s the first line, “Summer in the city means cleavage, cleavage, cleavage” that draws me in smiling, and the witticisms continue, but it’s also such a sad, sad song, and these two things working so brazenly with and against each other just creates magic. Quiet plinky piano and pauses, then full chords and her voice. Passionate and detached at once, little story and noticings bunched…”and it’s summer in the city and you’re long gone from this city, and I start to miss you baby sometimes”, the choir or something comes in. A perfect ending song to a perfect album, “Begin to Hope”. It kind of makes me want to puke it’s such an amazing song.

“Got a Suitcase Got Regrets”-Tom Mcrae

It’s the chorus. When the piano comes in, heavy and quiet. The whole arrangement to this song is stunning, different sounds meandering in and out, repeating, then disappearing. “But all I know is, I’m not ready yet, for the light to dim, got a suitcase, got regrets, but I’m hopeful yet, and I’ll raise this glass of wine and I’ll say your name”, piano, cello, not particularly the best lyrics ever, but they get to me. I get them. In fact, this isn’t a great song in any way, but sometimes, those are the best ones. Yeah, it’s the chorus. “So wake up pretty girl, see the hope in small things, disappointment can wear you thin…”.

“Recessional”-Vienna Teng

“It’s so beautiful here, she says. This moment now, this moment now…” starts the most heartstopping song. Literally, Vienna Teng is all about the spaces between notes, and the sweetness that lingers in and after each small moment of sound. Lyrically, I can’t even begin, so many images following each other, the separation of words echoing the music. Definitely a late at night, alone and longing song. She’s not afraid to play with single notes, not afraid to let suspension take over, then falling into water piano flows. Reflective and bittersweet. It’s almost a poetic novel. “who are you taking coffee no sugar, who are you echoing street signs, who are you the stranger in the shell of a lover, dark curtains drawn by the passage of time”. Lost and found.


“Another Song About the Darkness”-Lauren Hoffman

Another comfortable, recognizable home song. “And you’re almost dead, you’re almost dead…and I wish I could hang out up in the sky and be the light to shine you home, so I write another song about the darkness and how you’re not alone”. Nothing special electronics and synths, almost trip-hoppy but saved from that in simplicity. This is just a me song, something that I recognize myself in way too much, from both points of view in the song. It’s a warm blanket song. Like the green blanket at my apartment.

“Redeemed”-Charlotte Martin

“Every tree has got her root, every girl forbidden fruit and got her demons…one to three the flashback to get me on the one two four the threat of the memory. Where is the end for me to reach, where is the moral I’ll ever teach myself, in all the black in all the grief, I am redeemed”. I can’t really say anything about this song. It just perfectly encapsulates where I am, what I feel like most of the time, how I get through the day. Redeemed is such a big word, such a loaded word, and she somehow manages to bring it down to a bone deep level that makes sense. This song inhabits my days and mind. The drums and piano that come right after the chorus, and the piano all through the second verse. In and out of restraint and passion near the end, so amazing.

“Various Stages”-Great Lake Swimmers

“ I have seen you in various stages of dress. I have seen you through various states of madness”, all sung in a strong yet tremulous voice, with the most beautiful soft banjo playing. It’s a forest song, a field song all about outside, yet so close to the inside. My bones feel both heavier and lighter with this waltz. So beautiful, and quiet, and bold, gentle and reckless. I’ve been listening to so many pianos lately, and this was the song that brought stringed instruments back to me, balancing.

“Diagram of Love”-Terami Hirsch

My day doesn’t feel complete until I’ve listened to this song. Heartbeats and pianos. “This is not our failure. They speak in wordless tongues. Their hearts explore each void, looking for a diagram of love. This is not our failure, this is our compromise. The disintegration of hearts uncared for…”. This song is an encapsulation of all of Terami Hirsch’s music, how electronic music can sound organic and whole, mixing with a piano and voice. “There is no perfect formation, there has never been enough. There are only passing pleasures that we beautify to make a diagram of love”. I love the repetition an d reinvention, word like “formation” and “diagram”, making sciencely terms organic and down to earth, about the everyday.


“Human Remains”- Tom Mcrae

I lost my first copy of the album this is off of, “Just Like Blood”. I still have the case, just no cd. So I bought it again a few days ago, because I absolutely had to hear it. It was the only thing I wanted to listen to. “Our history is just in our blood, and history like love, is never enough”. The arrangement just manages to be complex yet intensely simple simultaneously. Much like his lyrics. “This is not enough for me, this is not enough for any of us to be.”.

“Streetlight”-Tom Mcrae

I may as well list the entire “Just Like blood" album.I haven’t really listened to Tom Mcrae in about two or three years, but his debut album is one of the most emotionally stunning works I’ve ever heard. It’s up there with Tori Amos’s “Boys for Pele”. Yet it’s also one of the most intimate singer-songwritery albums, which is what I love. The ability for an musician to make intense music and still have it sound and feel like you’re reading your favorite novel, or listening to someone across the table tell an impossibly philosophical and beautiful story. That’s how all of these songs tie together. They all have that feeling, that they are with you, not beyond and out of reach.