So close your eyes,
you can close your eyes
it's alright
I don't know no love songs
And I can't sing the blues anymore
But I can sing this song
And you can sing this song when I'm gone
Now before you think I'm going all cheesy on you let me tell you that for me listening to James Taylor is going back to my musical roots, man. As a high school kid, JT is the first singer I really ever got, that really ever made sense to me in a poetic way. In a sense I can attribute all of this musical pontification to first being inspired by James Taylor. I'm serious. Well, JT and Jackson Browne, but we'll get to JB later.
It's a shame that James gets dissed by people thinking he's too vanilla and schmaltzy. His early stuff -- which is up through the album "JT" -- has that certain magical quality of being simple yet complex at the same time. Lyrically he's straightforward, but with that vein of melancholy that makes you consider some undefined pain or longing, especially when referring to traveling:
I had a little woman in Memphis
She wanted to be my bride
She said, settle on down, traveling man
You can stay right by my side
I tried so hard to please her
But I couldn't hold out too long
'Cause one Saturday night I was laying in bed
And I heard that highway song
Back on the highway, yeah, yeah, yeah
Back on the road again
There's just something about this early JT that goes with the fall of the year, when the sunlight is at a certain angle, that stirs up the restlessness oh so subtly in the soul. It's that part of you that is impelled to move out of that place of slumber, something disquieting, not like a clap of thunder, but like the wind changing directions:
Love is just a word I've heard when things are being said
Stories my poor head has told me cannot stand the cold
And in between what might have been and what has come to pass
A misbegotten guess alas and bits of broken glass
I think there is a certain poetic appeal to being a wandering seeker, someone who is hungry for truth and light; but I think in the end we all have to make some kind of choices. Still, it's in our nature to be restless -- in mine anyway -- and on certain days when the wind is blowing just right and the sky clouds over in that sort of uncertain way that you don't know if it's going to rain or just be drizzly and nasty, that life just seems like some sort of highway, and all you can do is get up, make a move, and don't let the grass grow under your feet:
I said all the dead head miles
And the insincere smiles
Sometimes I can laugh and cry
And I can't remember why
But I still love those
Good times gone by
Hold on to them close or let them go, oh no
I don't know
I just seem to sing these songs
And say I'm sorry for the friends I used to know
It's on those days, like this specific overcast pissing rain Monday, February 8, 2010, driving in my car up highway 77, that I get it:
Sweet misunderstanding, won't you leave a poor boy alone
I'm a one-eyed seed of a tumbleweed
In the valley of a rolling stone
cds
No comments:
Post a Comment