Songs For Your Day

The beginning of the song, “Up From Below”  sounds exactly like a song my old band wrote, so when it first played over my car speakers on a rainy Monday morning in late summer,  I was carried back to a time when with the wind tousled my hair and friends and instruments surrounded me, when the fountainhead and dandelion wine first sprawled across me as I slept on the wooden slat of our tour bus. When the lyrics kicked in I was delivered to the present: “I was only five, when my dad told me I’d die…”

This song is engineered to tug at your heart strings. “Cause I’ve suffered I want you to know God, I’m ridin’ on hell’s hot flames, coming up from below.” Sounds triumphant and slightly spiteful, doesn’t it? But then listen to the melody, it climbs valiantly toward heaven, struggling towards God; the piano gives it weight, the guitar keeps its momentum, but in spite of those the lyric falls again, deeper, ending quickly on a note lower than where it began. This happens over and over again within the song and every time it only gets higher, more exalted, only to fall with equal and opposite force.

The other day I pulled out a copy of ‘Washing Your Hair in a Truckstop Sink’ a chapter of an incomplete manuscript about the band which I’ve held close to my chest for about two years now. It felt like time to prep the piece for submissions, release it to the lions. Usually when editing stories from that manuscript, I’m surrounded with music of that time period to get back into the now of then, but this time I went for Edward Sharpe and the Magnetic Zeros, straight to track three. For the first time, my pen crossed the page objectively, crossing out adverbs and unnecessary clauses surgically and tactically. More importantly, I was finally able to articulate the overwhelming disappointment that the tour ended with, and get a full grip on what had caused me to abandon the manuscript for so long. The album played a few times before I was finished editing, but track three stuck with me the most. The beauty of ‘Up From Below’ is its humanity; our capability to withstand and improve in the wake of our mistakes, rather than succumb to them.