The Good Ones

As I'm listening to these two discs, Punch and How to Grow a Woman from the Ground, I find myself snared by the clever lyrics. Snared, in some cases, moved, and, in that place where I try to be honest with myself, a little jealous.

Being a person who is in every way fascinated by words, I enjoy good songwriters. Don't get me wrong; you will also find me blazing down the highway at lightspeed singing along with stuff that has almost no depth at all to it other than "loud" or "happy." Sometimes, I don't want to think or listen intently. Other times, though, I need the wall of sound to resolve itself into meaning, maybe because so much that goes on around me is so frequently meaningless.

There's a danger to the good ones, though. It's the same allure that's always there with my favorite print poets. Where there is genuine craft, there is something generating it, there is a magic shimmering just under a seemingly-calm surface that might pull you in before you even know you've been grabbed, take you on a journey that might be pleasant or painful, but will leave fingerprints on you either way.

Dickinson said, amongst other quotes of hers related to what poetry feels like, "If I feel physically as if the top of my head were taken off, I know that is poetry." I have felt that way once or twice in the presence of really good songs or poems. There have been poems that have left me jawdropped, either saying or thinking, "Yes, oh yes. Just so. This is what I've always wanted to say. Now that it has been written, nothing more needs ever to be said about this topic again." Some of them have been so right and keen that the reading or hearing of them was like being struck with a thin, razor-sharp blade in the heart, a moment of perfect pain. What I said on reading those probably isn't fit to print. Still others writhe through the veins like an intoxicant, bringing to the mind a slow, slow smile and memories.

A couple of these songs have this kind of evocative, almost physical, power, too. Track 13 on How to Grow a Woman from the Ground, "I'm Yours If You Want Me," is the auditory equivalent of being pinned to a wall and slowly, lusciously, voluptuously kissed senseless. There is such a raw honesty, self-doubt, and need in the lyrics and that is mirrored in the stripped-down nature of the music that by the time Thile gets the promise at the end, one wonders who ever could walk away? The string quintet on Punch has the same power but with different emotions and to different ends. The music is lovely, but it's the lyrics that are captivating me. These are the words of somebody who had the heart ripped right out of his chest and destroyed but is living on at least to tell the tale.

If these are the genuine article he's showing, if he's doling out little bits of his soul into what he is singing, then I admire what he's able to do more than I can say. My own personal "muse" has been largely silent now for about a year. I don't know if it is because of my schedule (teach, grade, come home, fall down, teach grade, come home, fall down...), because I am not pursuing those things that make the words and the blood flow (for me, love and travel), or because the migraine medicine I'm taking is suffocating said source of inspiration along with keeping me from being able to name common everyday things and focus properly. (Sometimes I feel like a whole team of engineers rewired my brain and did it badly. Maybe it was badly wired to start with, and that was the problem all the time....) Regardless, Thile's lyrics as much as the glorious riot of the group's music are going to keep me coming back to these discs and looking at whatever they come out with in the future. Maybe if I surround myself with that kind of power, some of it might awaken the spark in me, if it still burns at all.