All the things we know are gonna fall away from me
like a grain of sand slips through a good friends hand
A friend once told me, "People are in your life for a reason, a season, or a lifetime." Our life experiences are defined by those people, and there are many reasons that they go out of your life. When the end is tragic, however, it can forever cloud every future relationship.
Kind of deep thoughts for a rock album, maybe, but the single vein of "Out of the Vein" is the loss of a high school friend and how it affects everything in the writer's life. "Wake For Young Souls" is the centerpiece of this album and solidifies this thought, not so subtly:
I held your face in a photo in high school
When you were alive, now that's all I have
Now I can't remember who I was myself then
But it doesn't help, now I look to you as a friend
To tell me ...
Who we are now who we are,
Who we are now who we are,
Where does time go?
On a wake for young souls ...
This song is poingant enough, but what is left to discover is how this moment winds its way through the whole album. In "My Hit and Run" the singer is reminded in the middle of his crash of the crash that killed her:
Mister death in the car below
Doesn't even slow
And away he goes
In the majesty of a motor crash
You skid into my darkness forming
Sex and death, heartbreak and strife
But I give no warning
Unresolved issues, to be sure. How often in art do we have a reminiscence of an earlier, happier time? In "Palm Reader" he shows just how stuck he his:
There's no one to trust except maybe the two of us
But that's in the past the place where I'm living is haunting broken dreams
I read horoscopes in magazines especially yours
in the sign of the Leo,
the regal one but man you let your claws show
oh it's so slow, when will they let me go
It is such a pervasive force in his life that it prevents him from moving forward in any present relationship. In "Forget Myself":
You're crazy and you never faded
I don't want to be so complicated
See my life come undone
Watch it go and let the damage run
I'd change the song now if I could
In the slickness of your blood
The great thing about this album is its sense of discovery -- you really have to dig to find out that "Out of the Vein" is really a kind of eulogy, a blood-letting, if you will, to try and get past this really bad thing. Towards the end, "Self-Righteous" departs from the format of the other songs gives us a slow, somewhat free-form introspection which features a kind of weak, detached female voice in the background that hints at redemption:
Get up on your own now
Way up all alone now
Lift your head again and try this
Everyone is so self-righteous ...
cds
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