love out loud: sometimes i’m always gone

In my (ultimately unsuccessful) quest to finish all the uni work that would be due while I was in the United States before I left Australia, and having realised some years ago that I work best late at night, I spent a lot of time strung out on coffee. The unfortunate result of this was that I often ended up going to bed still jittery.

One such night, I decided to listen to my iPod in an effort to calm my central nervous system. As I flicked through various bands in a disconcerting state of both alertness and fatigued inattentiveness, I finally settled on Dead Meadow’s I’m Gone.

Before I could process anything else, I felt my body in a vehicle traveling up the Princes Freeway.

My immediate thought was that I might have died. This actually isn’t the first time I’ve thought this; my being in bed and feeling momentarily, but calmly, detached from my body generally results in my thinking I might have died (or at least it did the only other time it happened), but I soon reassessed the situation and realised that it was a combination of the caffeine and, more importantly, Dead Meadow lifting me from my bed and into 2009.

Around a year and a half ago, I was crazy about a boy, Jimmy Page, who was never crazy about me back. He introduced me to the Brian Jonestown Massacre and thus began one of the most musically rich periods of my life to date. And as I drove to a work experience placement in the Adelaide Hills every week, I had enough time to listen to a different album each way. But a song that kept thrusting its way into my playlist was I’m Gone.

The lyrics felt particularly pertinent to my Jimmy Page ordeal, and accordingly, the song seemed to reach the extremities of my body every time I listened to it. The bass line tapped its way along my spine and the lyrics and reverb clouded my head in the best possible way.

Similarly, a drummer whose eyes I couldn’t remember the colour of, told me that the video clip for Sometimes Always by the Jesus and Mary Chain was beautiful. It was, and I listened to the song an obscene number of times over the next few days, thinking of the drummer (what pseudonym do you allocate to someone when you use the names of musicians as pseudonyms and the individual in question actually IS a musician??) telling me secrets in the dark and making up stories about Orion’s belt because we couldn’t remember the real one.

Of course, Dead Meadow didn’t have me in mind when they wrote I’m Gone, and I was just shy of six years old when Sometimes Always was released, but that’s why we love music. It moves, jars and excites you. It makes you wallow, it makes you drive faster and sometimes it makes you hold your breath.

What these songs evoke in me has nothing to do with how I feel about either of these boys now, but it’s nonetheless a nice thought that as much as the feelings may fade, there are still little reminders of them to be found in wonderful songs.

(Image credits: 1.)