Saturday, January 21, 2012
Memories of....
....this is Memories of East Texas by Michelle Shocked. For me, it summons up very different memories than those Michelle was talking about. And yet--you know what? Exactly the same.
You live somewhere small.
You move on.
It stays with you.
Back in... well, a more than 20 years ago, this had the sound of somewhere I wanted to be. Which was Anywhere But Here. Man, I couldn't leave home quick enough.
And now? It sounds like something else altogether.
And I mean to tell you my friends, there weren't no easy roads.
True, that, as they say. Nowadays.
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3 comments:
I've been returning semi-obsessively to Michelle Shocked's "Anchorage" lately while I work, and I'm so struck by how subtly it conveys that sense of having changed so gradually you never even realized it happened until you talk to a friend, a friend who sees the time-lapse differences. And the melancholy way that her old friend trails off after a few lines written only in her husband's voice, "Leroy says, Leroy says, Leroy says...."
HJ
What a haunting song. Like Sycorax Pine, I'm familiar with "Anchorage", which I found disturbing as well.
I remember trying to explain to a friend why East Texas Backroads was about more than the words described and being stunned that he didn't get it. I grew up in rural Australia and Michelle delineated that trappedness of that and the way it stays with you a ghost layer inside your skin.
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