Every now and then I get a crush on a song. Like head-over-heels aching crush. I can’t get enough of the song. I obsess on it, I circle around it, I listen to it over and over and over …
and over and over and over …
The song is a guy I want, a guy I dream about, think about, imagine, yearn for. Crushing so hard it’s almost unpleasant and you just want something to HAPPEN to end it all so you can move the hell ON.
Let’s try to be accurate: the song doesn’t express something for me, or put into my words my own emotions, no. Nothing that mundane. The song taps into some well of unnameable feeling, or maybe the feeling can be named, but I don’t feel like naming it because the feeling itself is so overwhelming. Sometimes it has to do with gratitude, with awareness, feeling alive to my fingertips. L.M. Montgomery’s heroine “Emily” called such moments “the flash”. I had one of those moments in Times Square the other night, 6:30 p.m., pink crazy sunset, crowds, and this song blasting in my ears. I had just seen a martial arts movie, and loved it, and sometimes I think too much, and as I walked across Times Square, I wasn’t thinking at all. I was alive. And putting it into words is useless.
There are songs I love. There are songs that comfort, that rile me up. There are songs that make me want to fuck. There are songs that make me want to wreak havoc, and break some windows. But the “crush” songs … the ones that tap into the abyss of feeling, a well with no bottom (which is why I can keep listening to the song over and over and over … ) … I don’t know where these crushes come from. And it usually happens with my first hearing of a song. I had that with Coral Sea’s “Look at Her Face” last summer, when everything was just a bit too intense, a bit too bright and clear and happy … so much feeling, that song helped me swim in the feeling, stay in it, drink it up. I would take drives that would last hours, up around Hudson County, down the Jersey shoreline, blasting this song over and over and over … The crash was coming, boy, I can see that now, but for the time being I crushed HARD on that song. The song was like a prompt, a permission. It launched me where I wanted to be. Instantaneously. With the first chords. The stress, anxiety, worries, would vanish in a puff of smoke, and the song would pour me back into the feeling, the feeling I can’t name.
Bleu (whom I have written about at length) has a new album out. I bought it the other day. Listened to it happily, enjoying the songs, his sound, his lyrics, his pop-princess sensibility (The man writes HITS and there’s a reason he’s a popular songwriter in the pop princess set), and his fearless rock-god voice. Happy to hear new stuff from him! That was my main feeling through the first six tracks: Oh, it’s so good to hear new stuff from Bleu, nice!
And then came Track 7. And the crush cracked over my head.
And now I am positively lovesick.
It’ll pass. It always does.
In the meantime.
Once again…
So, so weird. Love Bleu now that you’ve introduced me to him. And LOVE Track 7, too. But what’s so weird for me is how many CD’s have what I called “Magical 7.” Yes, track seven is so often the one song on a CD that I cannot live without. Needless to say, I cannot think of a single one right now as I write this, but I will check this out. And let you know. Amazing. And thanks again for Bleu. Really like him.
Is track 7 a thing?? I wonder! Yes, if you can think of other examples I’d love to hear.
For me, the title track on the Civil Wars’ “Barton Hollow” is a perfect example of a track 7–hearing it is what motivated me to seek out the CD in the first place! (However, their new CD doesn’t adhere to the same rule…the seventh track is nice, but not gripping for me personally.) Maybe it’s because that’s often at a climactic point about halfway or 2/3s through an album…?
Yes, the halfway mark (or thereabouts) through an album is a powerful position, come to think of it.
Lizzie – I love Civil Wars so much – haven’t got their latest one yet.
Imogen Heap’s “Angry Angel” was like that for me. A blast to the dust my bones had been collecting and a hiss in my ear, “You’re stagnating, you’re settling, you’re alive-don’t forget that.”
I don’t know that song but now I have to go seek it out. I love that you know the experience I am talking about.