Single of the Month - October 2022 - Part 1 - "I Have Seen the Light"
from Branches Breaking from the Weight
For many, songwriting centers on a certain kind of evasiveness.
Let’s say I go out to my mailbox and get my electric bill, and it seems high. I come inside, pick up my guitar, strum a few chords, and sing:
My electric bill is really high.
I think something should done about it.
Some songwriters can pull off a song like that. I’m not one of them.
In my songs, I’m always telling things slant. I’m never quite saying what’s going on in my life because, in the end, it’s not important to the song. What’s important is that you hear the song and it’s evocative in some way of your concerns. That’s the style of songwriting practiced by many of my heroes—Bob Dylan, Michael Stipe, James Mercer, Stephen Malkmus, etc. I get why they do it, and I try to do the same.
Which leads me to “I Have Seen the Light,” the Single from Branches Breaking from the Weight for the first part of October.
One morning, I woke up with these lines in my head:
They destroyed my city.
They tore this place apart,
The flower of my springtime,
The Paris of my heart.
I loved the lines, but I had a problem. Considering the time and the place in which I wrote them (Portland, 2020), there was no doubt to me what they were about, and what they would be about to anyone who heard them. They were about my perception that people had tried to destroy my city, which happens to be my favorite city in the world.
These lyrics were quite different in tone from anything I’d written in the past. I grew up on pop music, but I soon broke hard for bands like KISS (Destroyer), and later the Sex Pistols (“Get pissed. Destroy”). I could appreciate Metallica (“Seek and Destroy”) and the Kinks (“Paranoia the destroyer”). I knew the particular pleasure of the word “destroy” on my lips when sung over rock music. By and large, my destructive impulses did not come to fruition, but at points in my life, I knew the impulse well.
And now, people were trying to destroy my favorite city.
For the first time in my life, I had an entirely different take on destruction. I couldn’t fall back on the easy stance I’d fostered in my earlier years through rock music. This was real destruction, right here where I live, and I didn’t like it. In a way, I’m grateful to have made it over 50 years without seeing that kind of destruction. That alone makes me a lucky person. But in another way, it might’ve done me some good to see it sooner.
I now have a different take on anyone preaching a doctrine of destruction from any political persuasion. My question for them is: What are you going to replace it with? If there’s no answer—and as I guy who used to relish the taste of the word “destroy” on his lips, I can tell you there usually isn’t—then all you’re advocating for is a pile of rubble. I can pretty much guarantee I prefer whatever it is your trying to destroy to a pile of rubble.
So, I wrote “I Have Seen the Light” over Bret and Kevin’s hunk, and here it is today. Gravity is the force that pulls us all down.
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