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.

What's wrong with that?

I'm reading Macca's 2016 biography right now, pushing to finish it (not too hard a task) before a long trip, so, of course, I'm kind of tipping on the edge of a rabbit hole with this video. The audio in the song must be the single cut, and it must have been speeded up, because he sound positively squeaky compared to the Wings at the Speed of Sound remaster from 2013 (or 14?) version that I keep coming back to.

But the sweet pleading in the Wings video is as familiar as the sun--streaming through a backseat window, angling lower as the highway rolls by. Oh, indeed, this is one of those as indelible as the vinyl seat seemed to be on your bare legs below your shorts in the car back then, summer of 76, watching the world go by and thinking that it must hold as many good things as the tinny melodies wafting back suggested. Now, what I am pondering as I need to seek the early evening summer sun, is how Linda became a musician through fortune and sheer force of will. And how, exactly, do you keep becoming something when it's all on you, and fortune seems far?

 

It could happen to us any day

This is one from the backseat of the car. It's also one that I will never tire of, that I stop everything and hop on for the whole ride, no matter if it's from the tinny Toyota radio or coming out of a sleek device. Is it the bass line, the loping stride of it, Carrack's buttery voice, that puts my head against the seat back, gaze out the window at nothing and everything. It wasn't the words; I wouldn't have understood the knifepoint of the lyrics. I do know now what I wouldn't understand back then: you'll have scenes breaking up over and over and over again.