The poems she’s posted over the last few months have created an echo in my head that took me a while to pin down, more heard than read, which naturally sent me back to her archive of music, where I found in some of her songs some of the same conflicts as she seems to be experiencing now.
Not as intense maybe, yet always with the same self-doubt.
One song of these struck me more powerfully than others in this regard.
It is not my favorite song, yet hauntingly familiar, and talks about the inability to come to terms as to what each lover wants or needs.
Like many of her other songs, this one is a kind of contemporary jazz, although not with a homage to pop with piano, bass, some guitar and a smooth piano solo at its center. She riffs through the verses and conclude each chorus with a skat that helps provide the song its structure, and eventually concludes with an extended held and fading not that suggests something unresolved.
We get image of young night and out of the darkness something else shines bright whenever he holds her.
Maybe she wants more than he can give her, that’s true, but his holding her –w hat more can she ask for?
This scene is reversed somewhat in a later verse where she suggests he needs more than she can give and cannot expect what cannot take.
But that moment releases a beautiful feeling deep inside her – what more can she ask for?
This suggests the idea that there is no such thing as perfect love.
Both might want more, and yet for that moment in time, they get something maybe even more than they asked for.
This suggests that these events aren’t destined to last, and so the song implies that both should accept what is, that moment of bliss.
It is a lesson she seems to have lost sight of over the last few months. Nobody gets everything they want or need, but in that moment, they get something special, and they need to be satisfied with that.
Somewhere in the middle of this, he and she got sidetracked, starting along the same path as the song implied, then everything on earnest, egos came into play. One poem mentions an engagement ring. Another poem claims she stalled at a critical moment, when things could have gone onto something grand. The poems suggests she feared losing her identity, or her stalling may have been a reaction to something he did nor said.
The whole thing fell in on itself.
She knew better back then when she wrote songs like this – or to quote the Rolling Stones – you can’t always get what you want, but sometimes, you get what you need.
She can’t expect what she can’t take, and yet holding each other, sharing a moment, brings bliss, if not the everlasting kind.
Who could ask for more?
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