Science fiction, fantasy, mystery and what-not
Today brought a 1995 song from Collective Soul.
“December” is about endings and breaks from what’s going on. For Ed Roland, the songwriter, it’s about parting with the band’s manager. Pour moi, I pull the sarcastic and bitter sense of weariness from the sound: it’s done. Let’s end this, and this is just the polarized, argumentative state of the United States. I went to see Trump and the disastrous GOP reign end. The sooner that comes, the happier I’ll be.
On to the music.
Many songs that I remember have specific moments attached. They follow traditional, predictable patterns of love, success, pain, and failure.
Today’s song is hotly linked to success. It was 1999. Retired from the military, I was working in a medical device startup company. I began as the customer service manager. Then the company was bought out. And on this day, the new VP of marketing from the company who bought us had offered me a big promotion, to become a product manager, and I’d accepted.
The world looked great. This was in the summer in the Peninsula portion of the SF Bay Area known as Silicon Valley. I was in my car, a vehicle I enjoyed The sky was blue, the sun was bright and warm, and the future seemed amazing.
Traffic wasn’t bad either, as I left Highway 101 and I-280 behind me and headed west toward home on highway 92. For that day, I put in Bush, Sixteen Stone, and selected “Comedown” (1995).
Here are the lyrics that drew me that day:
‘Cause I don’t wanna come back down from this cloud
It’s taken me all this time to find out what I need
I don’t wanna come back down from this cloud
It’s taken me all this all this time
h/t AZlyrics.com
(BTW, I wanted to indent the lyrics to call them out, but can’t find the indent on this new, cumbersome, tedious, loaded WP editor. This is supposed to be a quick post; I don’t want to spend a lot of time searching through blocks and patterns, widgets and menus to find what used to be a simple matter. And where is the help? Oh, let me look for that.)
Don’t have a specific reason for this song in my head today. Just awoke to that beginning from the song. Maybe it was a dream thing, or a writing thing, or my generally foolish, optimistic nature.
But that’s today’s music.
I encountered a friend on the street. He was coming out of a store and I was walking by. Eighty years old, his wife is two years younger. She’s having medical issues.
Married for fifty years, his only spouse, he seemed like he was going through the process of thinking about life without her. They’ve downsized their home twice in the last eight years, but her mobility is going, as is her vision and her mental acuity. In his words, “It all seems to be falling apart for her.”
Sad, and an often heard story. I commiserated with him, but what struck me was his comments about being nothing without her. He said, in his thinking, everything that he’d done after getting his college degree was about her, and then their family that they created, and their life together. It was his constant motivation.
After we parted and I thought more about what he’d said, “Bring Me to Life” by Evanescence (1995) slipped into the stream, a song about being nothing without another.
I’ve been reading a lot about walls in recent months for some odd reason.
Walls. Are they needed? Do they work? Are they being built? How much do they cost? Can’t we just buy a DIY at Home Depot?
Wondering why there’s all this talk about walls was obviously an invitation for “Wonderwall” by Oasis (1995) to slip over and around my walls and into my stream.
It fits as a song for the times, though; wonderwall, in the modern urban sense, is about a person you’re infatuated with.
Lots of people seem infatuated with walls these days.
Thursday afternoon, under warm sunshine, Handley parked his car and dashed across the street.
Returning from the cafe with his purchases scant minutes later, the man beside him was opening his door. A box was on the ground beside him.
“Excuse me,” the man said.
Door unlocked, being opened, hot food starting to cool, Handley paused, eyebrows up in expectation. “Yes?”
“Do you have jumper cables?”
Handley nodded. “I do. You need a jump?”
Smiling, the man popped his hood and picked up the box. “No, I just bought a charger. I’d been waiting for an hour. Nobody had cables. I figured that the first person I saw in the parking lot after I went out and bought this would have cables.
“And here you are.”
Handley commiserated. “Isn’t it ironic?”
Today’s music came from thinking about the struggles with writing April Showers 1921. During a conference call with the muses, they advised me to trust them and go with instinct. “Everything zen,” I replied.
That introduced the old Bush song, “Everything Zen”. Released almost a quarter century again, it came out the same year that I retired from the military. I enjoyed this song, but the entire album, Sixteen Stone. “Everything Zen” joined my daily commute tape, used in emergencies when I couldn’t find anything on Bay area stations, while the album was put into the CD player’s preferred section.
Thinking over those words, it’s remarkable how technology has changed. Sixteen Stone was on CD. Two CD players served me then and now. One is part of the Bose Command Center, and holds six at a time. The other player is a Sony two hundred disc player, which can be organized as eight sections of twenty-five CDs. I rarely use it now, as music is so readily available via digital sources.
While I know the words to “Everything Zen” and like their play, I wasn’t aware of their references to other songs until recently. Now that it’s all been pointed out, I was dismayed that I didn’t recognize any of that. Songfact explains it well.
Have a great life, whichever day or night it is for you, wherever you reside on this spectrum of existence. Cheers
With an icy wind slicing up my cheeks, I thought about living by the ocean. The ocean is always warm in my mind, even though I have experience with being at the ocean and running from arctic blasts. I guess it’s my reality that it’s not cold when you’re living by the ocean. Naw, just looking for a change from the mountains around me where icy wintry fingers are slowly clenching around it, and thought, beach! Sun! Warmth!
Which prompted the stream to deliver Everclear. You know, “We can live beside the ocean.” Except then, it being Everclear, “Santa Monica” (1995) becomes a bit dark with sparks of hope and longing for havens where we live unencumbered by all the shit wrapping its tentacles around us.
Laughing to myself, as I almost put Tuesday’s Dream Music as my post title.
Last September, I had a dream and awoke with “The World I Know” by Collective Soul in my head. This time, the song was in my dream, twice.
The first time, I was discussing it with my youngest sister and a cousin. We were talking about the words, and then we sang it. Afterward, I continued through the dream, and came upon my oldest sister.
My oldest sister can claim to be the shortest of our family, but she was taller than me in this dream. I mentioned the song to her, and she said, “Well, it becomes kind of maudlin, which isn’t what you want in a song.” I said, “That’s true, it does, but it ends in an uplifting manner.” Then we sang it together, and then I continued on through the dream.
So, here it is again. You can imagine my sisters and I singing it. It came out the year I retired from the military. Wonder if there’s a connection for me and my dream in that?
I thought Bush’s Sixteen Stone was an excellent album. Coming out in 1995, it was one of the albums kept in my car to deal with the SF Bay Area Peninsula traffic jams. It ended up as a source for songs that I stream in my head while walking around, too, as it happened today.
Motor on with “Glycerine”.
Notorious RBG is playing locally. My thoughts go to Notorious B.I.G. when I hear or read comments about the Ruth Bader Ginsburg movie. That’s how my mind and its connectome plays. Likewise, I connect specific groups or performers with certain genres and categories of music. Right or wrong, Biggie Smalls was a handful of performers who I link to classic rap.
Here’s to the music and the art, and the past and the future. Notorious B.I.G. with “One More Chance” from 1995. It’s a mellow sound.
