Resonance

My taste in music runs far and wide -- if something clicks it just clicks; C has said that he's got something in his huge music collection to offend everyone. Often our tastes overlap, often they do not, and we have both been known to broaden the horizon of the other musically. Last week I went to T.arget, looking to spend money I don't have, and on the way there I heard a song on the radio by Sara B.areilles. It's the song that gets a lot of play on the radio around here, and it took a bit for me to accept that I liked it, and I was curious about the album. What the hell, i though. It was ten bucks. It was a good ten bucks spent, I'm enjoying it. When I told C I picked it up, he said, that he had just been checking her out on line, curious, too. Just coincidence that we were both interested independently of each other. Doesn't happen too often.

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Music has always been evocative for me. Though I started piano at 4 and cello at 10, I've never been a particularly strong musician, at least in performance, in creating the music. But throughout my life, like many people, there are songs that simply resonate; they make me not just laugh, but feel joy; they articulate my feelings, my experience; they make me not just weep, but seem to validate, perhaps even mediate, my pain. When I'm sad, I tend to apply my sad story to whatever music I'm listening, too, to see if the words fit, if they tell my story without my words. Yeah, neurotic. Whatever.

There's a song on the B.areilles album that I can't quite get enough of, One.Sweet.Love. I'm certain she's talking about romantic love, but somehow the words resonate for me, in my struggle with infertility and pregnancy loss, particularly (obviously) the loss of my boys, the fear of never having living children. I linked the full lyrics to the song title above, but here's a chunk of them, taken from the middle of the song:

Sleepless nights you creep inside of me
Paint your shadows on the breath that we share
You take more than just my sanity
You take my reason not to care.
No ordinary wings I'll need
The sky itself will carry me back to you
The things I dream that I can do I'll open up
The moon for you
Just come down soon

[CHORUS]
The time that I've taken
I pray is not wasted
Have I already tasted my piece of one sweet love?
Ready and waiting for a heart worth the breaking
But I'd settle for an honest mistake in the name of
One sweet love.

Savor the sorrow to soften the pain sip on
The southern rain
As I do, I don't look don't touch don't do anything
But hope that there is a you.

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I recently came across Sarah Mc.Lachlan's Surfacing album, too, In particular, the track title Do.What.You.Have.To.Do. This song wrecked me. Wrecked me. Go ahead, ask C. It had been years since I heard this album, but it seems it was specifically written for me to bawl my eyes out to (how did SM know about me and my boys?). When I heard this, I could see myself in the hospital when my water broke, before labor, during labor, as we were leaving, as I sit in the dark waiting for sleep to come...

Have you heard that song? Full lyrics are linked to the song title, but here's a little sample, another chunk from the middle of it:

and I have the sense to recognize that
I don't know how to let you go
every moment marked
with apparitions of your soul
I'm ever swiftly moving
trying to escape this desire
the yearning to be near you
I do what I have to do
the yearning to be near you
I do what I have to do
but I have the sense to recognize

that I don't know how
to let you go
I don't know how
to let you go

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I've always been a big crier. And usually I feel much better after I have a good cry -- songs like these often do the trick for me. What about you? What are your weepies? Or what songs make you feel better, feel good? Maybe in another post i'll find songs that do make me feel good (or used to, anyway).

Or, is it poetry? Movies? Something else? What resonates for you?