When all else goes haywire, I keep going back to her songs. There is comfort in them, even though almost all of them talk about pain, and reflect a level of emotional experience that surprises me.
One of my favorites is also one of her sadness, making me wonder what the story is behind it, what doomed but once promising romance inspired it.
Except on rare occasions, her songs tend to be less convoluted than her poems, giving a much clearer vision into her inner conflicts, especially when it comes to the idea of love.
She always seems to be saying goodbye to someone and tends to be left in shreds on account of it. And yet, she has said more than once, she never turns back once she’s walked away.
This song clearly lives up to that painful expectation, and the sense that eventually the pain will go, even if at the moment she expresses some regrets, and confusion.
“Where is my head? Where is my heart?” she sings in the first verse, laying the foundation for a conflict between those two elements, how they are bound together, and yet…
“How did my life turn into this?” she asks a mess, a heap, and she admits she is floundering without him.
But the rain falls, the trees grow, and the earth moves, and the pain – the pain goes.
The simplicity of the song is what makes it so powerful, her voice and a piano, so utterly personal, you have to wonder what the person its dedicated to must have felt like hearing it.
The song goes on to the passage of time, a day that feels like a year in passing, wanting to be with him, yet at the same time, “I don’t want you here.”
She asks how she let things fall so far, implying some level of disrespect that destroyed what might have been a great thing.
And still the rain falls, and the tree grows, and the earth moves, and the pain – yes, the pain goes.
But everything is spinning round and round and out of control. Everything gone, and she feels like she’s starting to lose her life, her sense of order, and she asked.
“When will this be done?”
The third chorus changes a bit, talking about how the day goes, and so does her head, but she’s still not dead.
Maybe the year will heal hear heart, but keeping hope is the hardest part,
and the rain falls, and the trees grow, and the earth moves, and the pain and the pain, the pain goes.
She wrote this at some point prior to 2006, and it seems she has already gone through such romantic tragedy even at a young age. You have to wonder, has her heart grown hard since those days, no longer putting herself in a position to feel such pain?
The poems earlier this year suggest she is still vulnerable, and I wonder if she was to write a song today, how much different it would be in tone and content than this one is.
There is still a sense of innocence in this tune, and this reflection of her attachment to the natural world. Somehow nature’s progress will heal her, a hope you have to wonder may not have come true.
She always seems to be saying goodbye, then and now, and forced to turn her back on something she hoped would provide her with joy.
This seems true of this song from more than ten years ago, and of the poems she wrote about the spoiled affair she had a few months ago.
This song seems to reflect her real inner life, this sense of hope dashed, and the slow recovery it takes until the pain fades away.
No comments:
Post a Comment