Unsolicited rave.

I’m listening obsessively, I mean OBSESSIVELY, to this song called Have You Heard Them Talking by Carrie Clark and the Lonesome Lovers. Carrie is a friend of my brother’s and apparently I met her at his wedding, though all those new faces are mostly a blur, obscured by my overarching memory of the Greatest Freeform Frisbee Game Of All Time. We must’ve had six frisbees, plus a soccer ball and a football at various points, and about twenty players, on this huge lawn by a lake. It went on for hours. But anyway, what I do know about Carrie is that she writes amazing country/blues songs, and I can't get over the twanging guitar and her haunting voice in this achingly bittersweet song about (as far as I can tell) miners who with their backbreaking labor are “no longer part of this time, no longer part of this daydream.” It lilts along in ¾ time and I can just picture the smoky dance hall and the couples waltzing in their cowboy boots.

I’ve tried to stop playing this song – I’m afraid of that thing that happens when you over-play a piece of music: eventually you achieve Song Overload and the song must be retired for a respectable period of time until you happen to hear it again a year later, and then you remember with excruciating clarity what it felt like to be living your life at that time. The only other thing that grabs hold of memory and emotion like music is the sense of smell: my mother, young and glamorous, wearing White Shoulders, leaning in to kiss me goodnight before going out with my dad. The dust and oil paint and turpentine of the arts center where I went to college, socking me in the solar plexus when I go back to visit. The heady mix of perfume and leather seats in an ex-lover's Mercedes.

Other songs that have had this hold on me: These Girls by Rachael Yamagata, Unfinished Sympathy by Massive Attack, the Eurythmics' For the Love of Big Brother, New Year's Prayer by Jeff Buckley...the list goes on.