Month: March 2024

Angie! It’s been a while!

“My bedroom is a disaster, my dog has got kidney failure, failure, I’ve been sitting at the bar too much, kissin’ people in my head, and saying rubbish things I should not have said, and they’re building things outside my window, everywhere I look there’s signposts, signposts, I just sit in my house making noise for fun, and I’m not moving much or proving much to anyone”

This song reminds me of those little fuzzies you see floating in the air when the bright sunlight shines through a window. That’s the vibe. A carpeted floor. Maybe some smoke in the air from a cigarette.

“How am I simultaneously on top of someone’s pedestal and also underneath someone else’s shoe, oh isn’t it a shame about the view, can anybody climb aboard this structure I have made to wrap myself around the promise that there is room? oh isn’t it a shame about the view?”

When the guitar kicks in with that lyric above and we dance-rage (which I definitely think is very different from rage-dance) until the ending outro…cathartic.

Angie does an amazing job of synthesizing relationship angst and the mental health fallout that comes with it, but also I think the blue skies that are ahead.

No matter the weather today…remember the blue skies. Even when it’s cloudy, the skies are still there behind the clouds waiting for us.

Be good, do good. Love!

This a bit of an embarrassing admission for the list. I really “discovered” Pearl Jam last year.

I’d obviously HEARD the songs before, I was like 11 when this song came out, and really did have the radio tuned to stations that played their catalog in obvious “rebellion” to my country/bluegrass/gospel upbringing.

But I didn’t…consume…Pearl Jam until last year…and this song put me on my ass. Stunned me. What a performance. What songwriting. Top-shelf.

If I had consumed this song then, do you know what kind of badass 11 year old I would be? So wizened beyond my years and so many ways. Seeing through time and space. It would’ve been amazing.

But pea-brain (essentially given how I feel like my brain just matured at 42) Jesse then didn’t have the life experiences to draw upon that I do, right? So no crazy super-powers, just an overwhelming appreciate for a song that is so purely ART.

“Sheets of empty canvas, untouched sheets of clay, were laid spread out before me, as her body once did, all five horizons revolved around her soul as the Earth to the Sun, now the air I tasted and breathe has taken a turn”

“And now my bitter hands chafe beneath the clouds, of what was everything, all the pictures had all been washed in black, tattooed everything”

…and quite possibly, in my opinion, the greatest verse of song ever written (containing the most heartbreaking set of lyrics I’ve ever encountered, experienced, endured?, etc.:

“I take a walk outside, I’m surrounded by some kids at play, I can feel their laughter, so why do I sear?, mmm, and twisted thoughts that spin, ’round my head, I’m spinning, oh-oh, I’m spinning, how quick the Sun can drop away?, and now my bitter hands cradle broken glass, of what was everything, all the pictures have all been washed in black, tattooed everything, all the love gone bad turned my world to black, tattooed all I see, all that I am, all I’ll be, yeah-yeah, oh-oh, oh-oh, ooh, I know someday you’ll have a beautiful life, I know you’ll be a star in somebody else’s sky, but why, why, why can’t it be, oh, can’t it be mine?

That’s where the bar is set people, and I don’t know if there are a set of words that can capture that feeling in such a pure way outside of what Vedder used. It is All-Time.

Enjoy this song a few times in a row. That’s how I like to do it. 😀

Be good, do good. Love.