Posts tagged with "themesong"
themesong 12/15: I haven’t listened to this since I was a child
[warning: contains Christian ska-punk]
I was raised in a non-denominational Christian home, so my first real exposure to any sort of rock music was through Christian rock. It was really all I listened to until late in high school. At the time, I was totally into it, because it was rock music and it had lyrics that agreed with the way I thought about the world.
Blah blah, college, blah blah people who are different than I am are cool, blah blah evolutionary biology class yada yada yada, atheist*.
Last week I chatted with my high school buddy Frank. He told me Five Iron Frenzy is recording a new album. Five Iron Frenzy was a third-wave Christian ska-punk band, and it was, no joke, my favorite band for like six years. Maybe even longer than that. Certainly from 1997 onward, and I still liked them enough in 2003 to travel five hours to see them in concert.
My favorite Five Iron song was “Every New Day.” It’s about wanting to return to a childlike state of curiosity and energy, seeing every new day as if it was truly new. And, naturally, asking Jesus for some help with that. The bridge lyrics, excerpted below, adorned pretty much every writable surface I owned in middle and high schools.
Man versus himself.
Man versus machine.
Man versus the world.
Mankind versus me.
The struggles go on.
The wisdom I lack.
The burdens keep piling
Up on my back.
So hard to breathe,
To take the next step.
The mountain is high;
I wait in the depths.
Yearning for grace,
And hoping for peace.
Dear God,
Increase!
It’s super-weird to listen to a song that was your favorite song years after you’ve last heard it and realize that you’re essentially a different person from the punked-out Christian rock fifteen-year-old who loved that song. You’re the same person, but you’re a different person, too. I can barely see it from here.
I haven’t listened to this since I was a child.
[lyrics]
*Or rather, igtheist, but atheist for all practical purposes.
themesong 10/20: Not to be Shared
There are songs that speak to secret parts of us, that we can’t play for anyone because we think they’ll read too far into it and somehow divine all of our secrets.
This is not that song; at least, this is not that song for me. But this is a song about having things that you don’t share. This is the best song I know about the cold fierce miserable joy of being alone. About not sharing yourself, about cutting yourself off from the highs to seal yourself away from the lows. About being selfishly selfish, romantically distant. About buying into all sorts of self-pitying hype. About pretending you’re a windswept rock off the Scottish coast.
And a rock feels no pain. And an island never cries.
[lyrics]
themesong 9/4: No Man is an Island
I used to think of myself as an island. I maintained emotional distance from everyone and the seas around my head were rough, man. And I had up days and down days and it was all terribly romantic and sad and whatever. Screw that. I was an island, but now I’m a person, and I have a person, and everything’s way better.
I’m not an island. I’m home.
[lyrics]
themesong 9/3: hot in the city
The last carefree summer I had was in 2005. It was right after my sophomore year at Northwestern, and I was working a few hours a day at a place that made bike shoes, and the rest of the time I was wandering around Evanston and Chicago, soaking in the warmth, laying on the beach, hitting up Intonation Festival, drinking a bit too much, and picking up a smoking habit (oops). And in those glorious half-drunk beachbound summer afternoons, I listened to an awful lot of this song.
The lyrics are vintage Decemberists, and the music is joyous, and one hot summer night I danced in a dusty field full of hipsters as the Decemberists played this a few yards away.
There is a road that meets the road that goes to my house
And how the green grows there
And we've got special boots to beat the path to my house
And it's careful and it's careful when I'm there
And I say your uncle was a crooked French-Canadian
And he was gut-shot running gin
And how his guts were all suspended in his fingers
And how he held 'em, how he held 'em, held 'em in
And the water rolls down the drain
The water rolls down the drain
Oh, what a lonely thing
In a lonely drain
July, July, July!
It never seemed so strange
This is the story of the road that goes to my house
And what ghosts there do remain
And all the troughs that run the length and breadth of my house
And the chickens how they rattle chicken chains
And we'll remember this when we are old and ancient
Though the specifics might be vague
And I'll say your camisole was a sprightly light magenta
When in fact it was a nappy bluish gray
And the water rolls down the drain
The blood rolls down the drain
O, what a lonely thing
In a blood-red drain
July, July, July!
It never seemed so strange!
Since I’m friggin’ awful at posting things, I’m jumping on the themesong bandwagon. Themesong is a music meme started by inthefade. See here for details. The theme for today is (and here’s the calendar of themes) goodbye to you.
I’m not in a “goodbye” kind of mindset these days. In fact, I just got married, so breakup songs in general aren’t exactly resonating with me right now. That said, Mountain Goats, always and forever. Michele picked “No Children,” which is an angry-goodbye song, but for me the ultimate goodbye song is “Woke Up New.” It’s devastating. I have to be really fucking happy when I listen to it or I can’t take the scraped-raw sadness of it.
On the morning when I woke up without you for the first time
I felt free and I felt lonely and I felt scared
And I began to talk to myself almost immediately
Not being used to being the only person there
The first time I made coffee for just myself, I made too much of it
But I drank it all just cause you hate it when I let things go to waste
And I wandered through the house like a little boy lost in the mall
And an astronaut could've seen the hunger in my eyes from space
And I sang 'Oh, What do I do? What do I do? What do I do?
What do I do without you?'
On the morning when I woke up without you for the first time
I was cold so I put on a sweater and I turned up the heat
And the walls began to close in and I felt so sad and frightened
I practically ran from the living room out into the street
And the wind began to blow and the trees began to pant
And the world in its cold way started coming alive
And I stood there like a business man waiting for the train
And I got ready for the future to arrive
And I sang 'Oh, What do I do? What do I do? What do I do?
What do I do without you?'
(Source: mountain-goats.com)
