There are songs that are a sort of soundtrack of your life, representing time periods, feelings, relationships, and the like. My go-to band for my life's soundtrack is Counting Crows. Now, CC is one of those bands that most people either really love or really hate. I'm not sure what it is about them that brings on the hatred, but it's there, I assure you. I've had some heated discussions with the haters. I haven't written about CC for that very reason, but over the weekend I did a lot of listening and a lot of soul searching and usually that brings me around to CC and Adam Duritz's lyrics, so here we are.
The weekend for me was like a big flashback in a movie. Going home usually does that. For me the best lyric in "Mrs. Potter's Lullabye" is "if dreams are like movies/then memories are films about ghosts." Boy, that fits. Whenever I have flashes of memories from whatever period of my life it feels like that and it sums up my trip home pretty well. The reason I do not reside in my hometown can be heard in "Recovering the Satellites." I know that sounds cryptic if you're not familiar with the song. Here's the heart of the song:
So why'd you come home to this faithless town
Where we make a lifetime commitment
to recovering the satellites
and all anybody really wants to know is…
when are you gonna come down
She sees shooting stars and comet tails
She's got heaven in her eyes
She says I don't need to be an angel
But I'm nothing if I'm not this high
But we only stay in orbit
For a moment of time
And then you're everybody's satellite
When you're the self-appointed caretaker of everyone who needs saving in your circle, you're recovering the satellites and at some point you get tired of that job. I can practically pin-point the moment I resigned that job and I try not to look back. While I was still head satellite-recoverer I went through a dark period that lasted 3 years, my "She Don't Want Nobody Near" period. I still have moments, as everyone does, but when I heard this song in 2003 I had a majah flashback to that dark place in the movie of my life. This sounds like it's straight out of a journal of mine, circa 1993:
http://kerryfaler.typepad.com/files/16-she-dont-want-nobody-near.m4p
Pretty whitewashed lies/Endless alibis
And the reasons that need cleaning every night
Half a world away
You can't wash away the stain of the deceiving
And the things that you cannot believe, and well…
She don't want no one around
Cause she don't want anybody to see
What she looks like when she's down
Cause that's a really sad place to be
Man, that's sad. I was sad. It's really not a depressing song, just melancholy, like me from time to time. If you've taken the Personality Plus test and remember the Perfect Melancholy personality, that's me — with a healthy dose of Popular Sanguine (those really don't go together, but that's me). And I don't know how CC got hold of my journal and turned it into a Top 20 song, but I haven't seen a dime of the royalites. I don't keep a journal anymore, unless you count this blog and stuff scribbled in my Mom Agenda. Anyway, things are good now, no big, but that song is a reminder to me of how far I've come and the dark times I don't want to go back to. Of course, this past spring what I've suspected for years came out when Adam Duritz admitted to being treated for severe depression and dissociative disorder, which makes a hell of a lot of sense when you examine his songs. There's nothing like a little mental illness to bring on creativity in artists, just ask Brian Wilson.
The follow-up to an earlier CC song, "Goodnight Elizabeth," "I Wish I Was a Girl" is one of my faves. In the song, Adam is saying if he were a girl, maybe Elisabeth would believe him when he told her that he hadn't cheated on her, but the lines in the song that always get me are:
The devil's in the dreaming
You see yourself descending from a building to the ground
You watch the sky receding
You spin to see the traffic rising up
And it's so quiet
You're surprised
And then you wake
For all the things I'm losing
I might as well resign myself to try and make a change
Maybe you've never had a time when you felt like throwing in the towel, then had something happen or someone point something out to you and thought, "for all the things I'm losing/I might as well resign myself to try and make a change." But for me, that line nails it. The line "And I could shake this static everytime I try to sleep" is fab, too. The diction CC uses is pure brilliance in my opinion. Like I said, people either love or hate CC, I've loved them from day one, since "Mr. Jones" won over the masses and I've stuck around for everything after. If you see them live, you may have the oppurtunity of seeing the slow version of "Mr. Jones," which I prefer and you'll get to see some superfantastic covers like "Ghost in You" and others. Anyjones, if you've never listened to Counting Crows, go pick up Films About Ghosts (their greatest hits) that came out a while back, then get Saturday Nights and Sunday Mornings — it's the most recent CD and chronicles Duritz's climb back out of crazy. It's a good listen and filled with great lyrics as well as beautiful melodies, particularly "When I Dream of Michelangelo." I'm included a live performance of the song just for fun. Hope you enjoy and happy Tuesday.
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