Grasping at Zeitgeist

I didn't get to see Eliot Smith live, and it's one of my greatest regrets in missed music experience opportunities. But I got to go see Mitski, in the summer of 2016, and somehow I feel absolved.


My friend introduced me to her music less than a month ago, and I spent the days since then feverishly falling for her clean, intelligent, emotional, multi-layered songs. And instead of songs from her latest album (Puberty 2), she mostly played songs from Bury Me At Makeout Creek, which is, IMHO, a masterpiece. In between soft voiced vignettes of being sick and eating "ox bone soup" at a Korean restaurant in Oakland (and unwittingly murmuring "mmm...yumyum" after each bite), and how to validate if the food at a Chinese restaurant's going to be good (lukewarm water being brought to the table), she played and sang her songs (and wiped her forehead with her elbow in between. I hope she wasn't feverish).

She fills me with all sorts of emotions and thoughts: being an Asian female with an all-American boy. Willingness to absorb the pain.  Her youth (she's 25). I could almost be her mother (it's biologically possible to have had a child her age!  EEK). And her songs resonate. I wondered what songs she'll sing when she's my age, from my dark corner seat in the way back (hands-down, couldn't have asked for a more appropriate spot).

I was tickled when Marceline covered Francis Forever in a recent episode of Adventure Time, find myself turning her lyrics in my head over and over and over. In a year filled with despair against violence and death and sorrow and bad decisions of a grand scale, I can't seem to muster any enthusiasm over anything. I am getting by. And her songs accompany me through the days like a compassionate shadow. Just don't ask us to smile.


Fireworks
One morning this sadness will fossilize
And I will forget how to cry
I'll keep going to work and he won't see a change
Save perhaps a slight gray in my eye

 I will go jogging routinely
Calmly and rhythmically run
And when I find that knife sticking out of my side
I'll pull it out without questioning why
 And then one warm summer night I'll hear fireworks outside
And I'll listen to the memories as they cry, cry, cry

 I will be married to silence
The gentleman won't say a word
But you know, oh you know in the quiet he holds
Runs a river that'll never find home
And then one warm summer night I'll hear fireworks outside
And I'll listen to the memories as they cry, cry, cry
Oh, one warm summer I'll hear fireworks outside
And I'll listen to the memories as they cry, cry, cry
Cry, cry, cry
Cry, cry, cry