I’ve had parts of this Still Corners — Slow Air album on repeat to the extent that I think I am dreaming it, and I’ll catch myself with a mishmash of fragments in my head. Which one is that fragment from, the sad one? The hopeful one? And why that one? Is my subconscious trying to send me a message?
I don’t even remember adding this album to my playlist. I thought my daughter introduced me to it, but no. Because it’s not house-y upbeat music, I often skip it in my playlist. I’m already introspective, I don’t need music to help me get there. But the album was waiting for me at this particular fork in the road where I needed to stay embedded in the tension of challenging decisions, searching for solutions that didn’t exist and saw me out the other side where I realized there is no frictionless path.
Two of the songs stand out because I have been thinking a little more deeply about them for various reasons.
In the Middle of the Night, was one of those songs that I had this instant reaction to. A recognition of something personal or private that I lack the words to describe, that I want to, but can’t, express. Like something buried wanting to be seen and here it is hidden in plain sight.
It evokes my rabbit head images, or perhaps the ones that wanted to be made. I think what draws me to the rabbit head images is a kind of playful disturbance, a kind of dissonance, that I am starting to think might be at the core of my more personal work, and some of my preoccupations. In music, dissonance can refer to notes that feel unstable or unresolved — they create a kind of friction that often “wants” to move somewhere more settled.
Those rabbit head images either speak to you or they don’t, you either think I’m a bit mad, or you get it. If you don’t well then I hope you can accept that I am just different you. But it’s never comfortable.
It is reference in the song to the drums and the deer, and the idea of following your path in the middle of the night; the pursuit of whimsical desires and the quests for deeper experience at times and in patterns that perhaps don’t make sense to others. I keep running up against that in small ways.
But it’s the music itself, in it’s lush complex layers that forms the base of which the vocals and lyrics are nestled into that in-between feeling. If I overhear it, I expect in time, that kind of weird dopamine hit I must be getting from it will subside. But not yet.
That it coincidently references my nocturnal winter wakefulness this year is beside the point. 😉
In the middle of the night
Said she wanted to go
In search of a sound
She still wanted to knowShe could hear the drums
She could hear the deer
In the middle of the night
It was all so clear
Dreamlands
Dreamlands doesn’t have, and to my mind shouldn’t have, the complexity that In the Middle of the Night does. Instead has a kind of gentle simplicity, with its dreamy angelic voices and tonality of wistful hope. Like imagine you deeply wanted to come to the aid of someone who was stuck, who maybe couldn’t even see they were stuck, or perhaps you became estranged with one you loved that you wished you could reconnect with. Perhaps it’s something else. It’s the dreamland of wishes and desires, the optimism that it could happen, if only.
But the dissonance of that guitar cuts through like it’s the reality of life intersecting the dream, The guitar; murky, full of edges, slightly uncomfortable, but yearning and hauntingly beautiful in it’s own way. It all goes together in my mind. This kind of hopeful optimism, my own never ending idealism, the simplicity of deciding this is the meaning I will make of it, this is the magic I choose to attach to it.
All the while tempered by the harsh truth of past experiences.
I feel the dissonance of my own nature.
The pursuit of peace and happiness is almost always idealistic. There are no frictionless paths. And yet peace, happiness… if you’re lucky and perhaps not looking too hard, can come in wafts of wind, glints of sun reflecting off the water, in fleeting stolen moments and changing skies.
I took this image of this sky of gold before the pandemic. Song and lyrics below.
Dreamlands
Lyrics of Dreamlands – by Still Corners
I know there’s a long road
They told us it is unknown
If we wait too long then we’ll never go
I know where the sky’s goldIt’s getting dark but we’re so close
It seems far but we’re not alone
If we turn back now than we’ll never know
We’ll go where the sky’s gold