Take me to a place where love can mend these wounds…
“I want you to get into the deep beautiful melancholy of everything that’s happened.” – Claire Colburn in Elizabethtown
There are certain songs that seem to evoke a feeling that nothing else does. You can’t find it in any other artistic medium. Not in film, nor literature, nor poetry. The combination of that music and those lyrics and that voice…it takes you to places you can only dream of going (or never wanted to). I relish those moments. Those moments when that song, that one song that perfectly describes the way you feel comes on your Ipod or on the radio. Those are magical moments. Over The Rhine seems to really bring this out in me. I don’t think any music can be better described as “melancholy” than the piano of Linford Detweiler meeting the voice of Karin Bergquist. That voice….good Lord, that voice, I think Karin could control the world with her voice if she wanted to. But there’s a new artist in town that’s taking over my melancholy musical moments. Well, he’s not really new. Just to me. Somehow I managed to miss him for way too many years. Matthew Perryman Jones has one of the most engaging voices I’ve heard in modern folk music in a long time. There’s something to it that pulls me in…I feel I could swim in his voice. His voice brings comfort, yet a strange sadness. When he sings “Refuge,” I feel every word, every line. I LIVE every moment of the song, from the first breath. It’s a strange phenomenon. Ray Lamontagne and Damien Rice, both mentioned in my last post, provide cathartic tunes as well.
I’m thinking of making a “songs for catharsis” mix…more to come, perchance.