Song of the Day #167 - Sun Kil Moon - With a Sort of Grace I Walked to the Bathroom to Cry

I remember when I first heard Led Zeppelin's "Tea for One"

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3y-zahEmkaU

And I remember when I first heard this song! It wasn't that long ago, but there's already a distance. Now it will exist on the internet forever. I'm glad I wrote it down but I don't think in the future I can feel sentimental for "staying up late typing a lot" in the way that he's sentimental for "Laying by my bedroom window soaking up the warm afternoon sun"... but maybe that's for the best? Cause carrying around that sort of emotional potential oh man I don't think I could handle it. How can you get through life if a neighbourhood can smell so much like your childhood? It's like a great weight out there, like dark matter, like the other reagent to something in your body that can suddenly produce something huge and swelling.

I remember thinking that "The Possum" was absurdly good and that "Birds of Film" was just about as good and then when I heard that electric guitar churning up I was overwhelmed by a sense of potential, like, oh, he can do THIS too?? And every line hit like a truck or missed like a truck because I didn't quite understand it at the time. How is "When I was a kid I kept toads and garter snakes/In the window well and they drowned when it rained" such a brutal line? It's because right before he's driving around flooded Ohio lines, and he remembers. Why is the title line brutal? Are you kidding me? The fact that it's followed up with "Remember when we were just young/Just young, young little kids/Before the heaviness of life took over every fucking thing"...

And then we get another godly transition, into this bluesy riffy little interlude, where he recounts seeing a groundhog in the ditch. Everything is linked, but not explicitly, but through the natural bonds of memory. And everything flows naturally into a wonderful diverse structure of reminiscing and present observations blending, the latter becoming more intense as he rages in his inability to help his friend, raging harder as his memories become more crystallized and idyllic.

Like jfc look at that last verse, how does he do it? There's an innocence in the observations/memories, a sort of obviousness... there's no pretense, no over-elaboration. The guitar playing is a world in itself, radiant and spherical. Christ man when he says "I remember when I first heard Led Zeppelin's 'Tea for One'" just listen to the tiny catch in his voice, he's REALLY REMEMBERING IT, right there, right when he sings it. When he talks about how he feels about the memory it's totally unnecessary because you can hear it all just in his voice. But he still says it. That's the appeal. The other memories he shares can't really even be spoken of. It's really beyond.

I dunno, I dunno. This song makes me feel very emotional. Maybe I already have that heaviness. Like I was just looking at how I haven't posted anything here besides Song of the Day since that last review. That sucks, that makes me feel bad. There's a bunch of drafts in between them, when will I finish them, when will every song of the day post not also have a bunch of whining about free time etc at the end of it, when will i be truly free instead of just 99.9% free like i am now, when when why why cry cry cry cry ;_______;