Into My Arms
A couple of months ago I got a mix from a friend, two mixes, actually. She’d made them for me but then forgotten to hand them off…I later found them and since they already had my name scrawled on the silver top coat, I decided to take them. One wound up in my car, and unfortunately it’s a little too slow for car-driving tunes. Music too slow induces a near coma, and while it’s quite nice on a dreary day, lying about across a couch, it doesn’t bode well for operating a motor vehicle. I remember that the last time I listened to it I was driving back from Wal-Mart just a mile from home and was sprawled along my door’s open windowsill entranced with the slow rhythms and just barely aware of my surroundings.
The other mix found itself in my cd changer and in the envious spot of Disc One, so that every time the player wakes up from being ‘off’, it starts with this CD. Part of it is the joy of listening to it on a pretty decent stereo…not my dream one for sure, but it’s better than a boombox or one of those everything-in-one-box jobs that seems to be the craze: small nondescript home theater that impersonates enveloping sound. Perfect for those discriminating listeners who aren’t bothered that the necessary dynamic range, the whole freaking soul of the music can’t be successfully returned in a room by 2.5″ or 4″ drivers and a 6 1/2″ “woofer” in a box in the corner. Give me my gaudy black boxes (until I can afford the ostentatious yet beautiful electrostatic loudspeakers) that sing without sounding forced.
Excuse that past rant. Anyway, I got some new gems by people I’d heard of any obviously never gave the time to, or perhaps I simply wasn’t ready for them yet. Radiohead, singing There there. Kills me. Then along a few tracks later comes Steve Earle, duetting with Lucinda Williams on You’re Still Standing There. I thought There there killed me. Ha! The ache in their voices is echoed by that harmonica just perfectly. It gives me that glorious itch in my ear and jaw, much like Rufus Wainwright. It’s such a real feeling and it’s sooo annoying, yet I love it. I can’t explain it…like hayfever crossed with an orgasm.
Next song: Lucinda Williams duetting with David Crosby on Return of the Grievous Angel. Wow.
A few songs later as the mix nears its end and I am caught unawares by a fluttering row of words falling like dominoes in the end of the 2nd verse…
To each burn a candle for you
To make bright and clear your path
And to walk, like Christ, in grace and love
And guide you into my arms
It so interested me that I played the song again and again and the more I played it I was absolutely floored by Nick Cave singing Into My Arms. It’s sitting on the same shelf as Jeff Buckley’s version of Hallelujah - the same, but different.
This mix is so very not a mix I would make, but all the same, it’s such a mix that I love so very much.
May 8th, 2007 08:59
I love those kinds of mixes, the ones that are a reflection of their maker. So of course you’d never make that mix, because it’s only theirs to make.
May 13th, 2007 23:05
Heh, I’m nervous to send you this mix cd I’ve just been working on. I believe the transitions are nice, but segues have always been challenging for me…plus, since you’ve introduced me to such awesome music, I always hope I can get at least one song on there you haven’t heard, but that’s pretty much impossible.