Music Reminds Us Who We Are
A song that changed my life
On my birthday, in 2012, a song changed my life.
When I hear it now, the raw vocal, the silky piano, the heartbreaking cello, I journey back in time. I am right there. My hands clamping headphones tight to my ears, head bowed, eyes closed, blocking out everything extraneous, plunging deep, as deep as I can, down into a sonic cocoon.
That I had made.
It was the day, the song, that made me a songwriter.
It was not the first song I wrote; I had been singing words for as long as I could say words. But putting words to music doesn’t make you a songwriter, even if they are new words sung to a new melody.
To be a songwriter you have to make music that people connect with, songs about them, not about you. Songs that are intimate and universal.
And you have to believe you are a songwriter.
On that day, for the first time, I believed it. I knew I’d hit the sweet spot. I knew it inside me, the place I needed to know it.
The Time Travelling Wife
The song that made me a songwriter is about our eternal need for the warmth of another. We will sacrifice almost anything for it and its loss is devastating. And yet, so often, we fail to realize how we blossom under the sun of that special smile until we casually or wantonly stride into the shade.
And then it is too late.
‘The Time Travelling Wife’ is not my story. It is not your story. But it feels familiar to anyone that has taken someone for granted. So, probably, it is everyone’s story.
If I could travel through time
Would I change the world
Right the wrongs of human kind
No no no no
I am too small
Too inconsequential
To make those journeysIf I could travel through time
I know where I would fly
To that warm Egyptian night
My head was resting on your chest
And we’d synchronised our breaths
Your heart was beating with my own
I thought I’d never be alone
No no no no
I did not know
That on a winter’s afternoon
You’d take your things and goIf I could I’d rewrite all of our dramas
I’d walk on by all of those charmers
I wouldn’t waste our precious days
Being careless with your heart
I would cherish your devotion from the startI wouldn’t let your courage fail us
I wouldn’t let the years derail us
I would curb my waspish tongue
I’d remember how to laugh
Every day I’d show you we were meant to lastIf I could travel through time
I would say sorry sorry
Sorry sorry sorry
I would say sorry
For all of time
All of time
All of time…. (ad infinitum)
This song reminds me to curb my impatience, ingratitude and ‘waspish tongue’. It reminds me to cherish.
But mostly, and most personally, it reminds me of the day I got out of my own way and became what I was destined to be.
