I’ve had parts of thisStill Corners — Slow Air album on repeat to the extent that I thought I was dreaming it, and would 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.
The first on this album, In the Middle of the Night, was one of those songs that I had this instant reaction to. A recognition of something that I lack the words to describe and can’t express. Like something buried wanting to be seen and here it is hidden in plain sight.
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.
It evokes my rabbit head images, or perhaps the ones that wanted to be made. What drew me to make them is from a kind of playful disturbance, a dissonance that I am interested in. 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. But we encounter all kind of dissonance in our lives. We often struggles between what we want and our values. Or what we believe of ourselves to be and who we actually are.
I think it’s useful to explore this, to move away from judgement and suspect rationalization and allow us to sit in discomfort, or consider the bringing together of elements that maybe doesn’t seem like to should be together. Anytime we can questions our assumptions or expactation seems like a good thing to me.
I used to show some of these rabbit head images at the occasional art fair along with my landscapes. I’ve learned that the rabbit head images either speak to you or they don’t, you either have a sense of humour or an appreciation for the bizarre or you think I’m a bit mad. If you don’t get it, well I hope you can accept that I am just different you.
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 hear it too much, 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