Model Trains—Rye LaChance

#365Songs: July 15

Just two more articles for this week’s #ThemeWeek: Songs about hometowns.

Despite it seeming like an obvious choice, I’m not actually going to write about Springsteen’s “My Hometown.”

Partly because it’s so obvious, given the theme.

But mainly because, as fate would have it, I already wrote about Springsteen recently, in an essay about “My Father’s House,” and how it would make for a great baseball walk-up song.

As it turns out, I actually did include mention of “My Hometown” in something else I wrote recently.

I had the honor of penning a blurb for a newly released volume of poetry by Michael P. Hill titled “Where That Leaves Us.”

The book’s epigraph is a Springsteen quote, and I referenced “My Hometown” in my blurb, as a mechanism for trying to capture something of the character of Hill’s narrative gifts.

I was pondering Hill’s poems as I was preparing to write this essay. And in rereading some of his wonderful work — thinking, as I was, about hometowns — I began to understand the subtle ways many of his pieces speak to the impermanence of those things we tend to associate with our concepts of home.

The book’s opening poem, “Garage Sale,” includes these lines:

a flock of local bargain combers
has descended on the house next door,
where tables, washed up by the tide
of departure, are out in the driveway,
spilling over with domestic debris.

I imagine those tables — the hundreds of meals consumed upon them, the conversations both shallow and deep, the emotions shared, the affections and aggressions communicated, the graces said in faith and falsely — and my heart withers a bit at the reduction of everyday life to “domestic debris.” That it’s so true only makes it more disturbing.

Elsewhere in the collection, Hill gives us a powerful image that helps us understand how our lives and the spaces we live them out in can commingle in ways that tell a much bigger story.

The poem is “Ascension,” and in it, Hill describes using a pencil to mark off on the inside of a door the height of his children as they grow. He ends the poem by pondering how some future society might interpret these markings, and what he hopes they might think:

I’d like to think that they might
be similarly afford a glimpse
into the workings of a civilization,
long vanished, where the individuals
grew taller and then taller still,
until, as it may be assumed,
they arrived at some higher purpose.

What, you may be wondering at this point, does any of this have to do with today’s song recommendation?

I’ll tell you.

Of the many of Hill’s poems that speak to stories about home, there is one in particular that speaks perhaps more directly than any of the others: ”Visiting the House I Grew Up In.”

In this poem, Hill describes what he sees and remembers as he moves through the rooms …

concluding high in the attic, where
my dad’s old model railroad table
crouched in amongst the shadows.

… which instantly reminded me of a new song I stumbled upon quite by happenstance the other day.

It’s called “Model Trains,” and it’s by a new artist I had never heard of before, Rye LaChance. (Contrary to what my fellow writer-editors Smitty and Dr. J like to claim, I actually do occasionally listen to new music!).

Given all I’ve said above, the song feels as if it offers the perfect lyric for today’s post:

If pushing model trains
‘Round tiny plastic table towns
Didn’t make me feel like running
Back to Maine to settle down
I’d find a hobby
In the railroad tracks
But the longer I control them
The faster I
Slip through the cracks

Musically, it’s a kind of liltingly bittersweet alt-country waltz that segues into an unexpectedly pounding crescendo at its conclusion, with the journey from sparsely strummed guitar to full-blown epic playing out under complex vocal phrasing and an impressively sophisticated degree of wordplay that leverages both straightforward and sneakily crooked half-rhymes to deliver an uncharacteristically rich narrative.

And I must say, while I doubt the artist would cite Springsteen as an influence, I myself feel a throughline to both “My Father’s House” and “My Hometown” in these lines from LaChance’s song:

I thought I’d see my dad cry
For the first time I’d recall
But he sat there staring blankly
At the marble on the wall
My mother shed two tears
And gave one to him
And I shed many more
One for each of my sins

Artists new and old, working across mediums, tend to come back to the same topics time and again. While the methods and mediums may modulate, the themes somehow stay the same. Our parents, our children, ourselves. Our homes, our lives, our deaths. And because it’s often all too big to hold onto at once, we grasp for the smaller moments, the smaller items, the smaller places. A driveway, a door, a model train.

~

Start following the #365Songs playlist today, and listen to each new song with each new article!