In Bed With Headphones
Lately I have noticed how passively I listen to even my favorite albums. So here I lay in bed relistening to favorites. Sun Kil Moon. I came upon a song I knew to be beautiful but had neglected to truly allow myself to feel. When I was 15 I went to New York City with a church group. A church van full of friends and others. I sat in the back and gave an album a chance. It was Safe Away by Denison Witmer. It was the most beautiful thing I had ever heard and I probably listened to it the entire way to NYC. It spoke to me and healed me and hurt me and wouldn’t let go of me. It still hasn’t. Over a decade later I call on that specific album to celebrate and to console me all the same. To accompany me on a drive through a beautiful desert scene. All because I gave an album a chance when my 15 year old heart was broken and it was the right one.
I am missing out by not giving the same focus to other songs and albums that speak to me. Tonight I’m trying to remedy that. So I came back to a song i knew to be beautiful. And i laid here and experienced it over and over again. I can recognize even more of the reasons it is appealing to me. In bed with these Bose headphones I hear guitar and not just melody with pretty lyrics. I hear background noises in the room. I can see him playing his guitar and the microphones. And I see his fingers hammering the notes. And the face he made when I saw him live - he makes it in the studio in my mind as well. And then I can hear my own heartbeat in the headphones.
I don’t know why I wanted to write about it. Safe Away always felt like one of the most important pieces of my life and a template for how i handle things. It is part of my responses to emotion. It is a defense mechanism. And though the song below isn’t Safe Away, maybe it would be if I allowed it to carry me through a hard time. I suppose the reason I wanted to write about it is that the whole concept isn’t any different than friendship. My friendships are similarly forged. Maybe that is a new realization for me. I can’t think of one true close friendship I have that wasn’t birthed through endurance of hard or beautiful times. In either scenario I allow myself to have a truly open experience with someone else. I pity those who get by with casual relationships and friendships rather than ones that bind together without becoming exhausted. These friends I will have for a lifetime hold on to me with the same emotional bonding agent as Safe Away does. And though i might not listen to Safe Away for a month, or maybe months, or maybe a year, the connection doesn’t change when I revisit it. The connection endures as a loving connection is meant to.
Listen to Admiral Fell Promises by Sun Kil Moon (lyrics below) at this link:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vqc7JrV5-Z8
And one of my favorite tracks from Safe Away by Denison Witmer here:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wUa0-EKop-U
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Come out from the burning fire butterfly
Let me lock you in my room and keep you for a while
Could you be the answer to my every prayer?
Could you be the one for who I care?
Come into my arms and let your worries die
Come out from the web of all your tangles lies
But be true to me and I’ll be true to you
Judge me not for what Ive done but what Ill do
A million nights have led
To this one that we are spending
And I know its better here
Than anywhere I’ve been going
With every morning grew
A void more wide and endless
Come out from the burning fire butterfly
Let me lock you in my room and keep you for a while
You watch over me and I’ll watch over you
And if you go tomorrow choke me till I’m blue
A thousand days have passed
In this house she and I were sharing
And I hate myself for it
But I have stopped caring
The Marilyn sky tonight
Is so black and blue and beautiful
