Here's another of those songs that's been haunting me for some time; today I finally got the message and sat down to share a few thoughts.
The Felice Brothers are a pretty special band, blending US folk, country, rock and - often - rich nature references. And this is a very special song about "the persistence of certain mundane memories". I have so much respect for people who are able to write so captivatingly well about minor points of shared human experience; things which most of us may never really stop to ponder, let alone produce art about.
The song starts understatedly with dark guitars set in a landscape of reverb, and then what may sound at first like the beginning of a typical love story: "We were 17, hoping for better things". But then the uniqueness of The Felice Brothers begins to take hold, with an unexpected metaphor of "worms waiting for wings and high school rings".
Through this relatively simple, but very carefully thought through, production, the band brilliantly captures the feel of trawling through the strange haze of your memories. There's that sense of the random and bizarre - the way your brain throws up odd fragments of experience which - you assume - must have been coherent at some point but can never fully be reassembled. Here, that includes memories of an unplanned movie and a dark walk home.
Like all good art, this music gets you thinking. Listening to this song stirs up all kinds of memories for me - fragments which I thought had been lost; random dots on the timeline. It also makes me very aware of the gaps on that timeline, and I wonder why some bits go missing, while other parts stay.
Ironically, a song about haze of memory has stuck firmly in my mind. Brilliant music does that.