Could it really, really be?

Oh, you sing of love and longing, the joy and the helplessness of it, better than anyone. That sweet, easy voice--stronger and more primal than actual memory, woven into my childhood mind and heart, even if it was coming out of a tinny Toyota radio.

And then, when I grew up, and loved and longed for "sweet----wonderful you" with "your mood...like a circus wheel, changing all the time" while "waiting for the sun to come up," the words and the tone and the feeling merged and I understood what you were doing more deeply.

These Tusk songs mean more to me than the formative stuff on WLAP when I was a kid, somehow. Maybe because they are (relatively) new discoveries, made in adulthood. And "Songbird" is too unearthly to even hear outside of life events.

Somehow, because I didn't hear her singing these out of the car radio or from vintage vinyl of their perfect, signature album, the songs are mine, to me, for me, from her.

Wonder why you haven't before

I used to loathe this song. Not so much the song itself, but what it stood for, of course. The end of opaque R.E.M., cool (whatever that meant to you) R.E.M., blah blah. Now I know it was self-admittedly "stupid" and that it passes the float test for me right now: "Singer Michael Stipe has said of the song's meaning, 'It's about making decisions and actually living your life rather than letting it happen.'" 

The general synopsis at one-eight-double-o

I wish to drift in the day the way that this sounds. For TFF, this was a snippet, a throwaway experiment, a b-side with the instrumentation of "Everybody Wants to Rule the World" with a recording of British Isles' daily Shipping Forecast.

How comforting it sounds, an almost lyrical recitation of the weather on the faraway seas, intoned four times daily! A schedule, a structure, some wrangling of the uncontrollable. Speaking about the roiling ocean, but not from it, or upon it, or affected by it. Instead, issuing warnings, forecasts, affixing words and numbers to the wind and water.

Maybe Roland added this in the spirit of experimentation, making no connection to the song or its progenitor. 

But I'm glad to discover this odd and wonderful ritual, and feel its comfort while I seek to move to different sea areas.

And you don't come from this town

After five days under the big sky a mile high, fuzzy-headed and languid, this is the perfect fit, just as it was in the humid Kentucky summer in '89, when I was finally fully driving, working full-time at TJ Maxx and figuring out how to continue to live in the liberation I had during that first year of college while staying in my old room back at home. How odd to return to childhood in your last teenage year when you'd gone where you wanted when you wanted, and if you didn't go where you needed when you should have, you and you alone paid the consequences. 

At least I had the freedom of a car. Did they finally have two cars then? Must have, because I was able to take the matte-blue Toyota out at night, to work, to where I needed (and sometimes wanted) to go. I have a distinct memory of sitting at the light on Waller Avenue at Broadway, an intersection where both streets turn into other-named streets, Waller becoming Mason-Headley Road and Broadway becoming Harrodsburg Road. This must have evolved from the junction being the legal boundary of town at some point, where city streets became country roads named either after people or their farms, or the destination/terminus, where a managed thoroughfare, a part of a whole, abruptly ended and became a country highway. 

Anyway: I'm at this light, and this song is on the radio. And I'm sitting there, late in the night, waiting at a red light where the green-lit street is empty, no traffic, where, decades before, what was controlled became free. And I'm noticing that key change in guitar in the song's "doo-doodoo, doo-doo" outro, and I feel...my age. Grown. Living on the highway, not the street.