Song
Today I fell in love with a song. Its name is “The Bleeding Heart Show” and it is Track 4 on the new New Pornographers album, Twin Cinema. I haven’t felt this way since “New Slang” by The Shins.
It’s curious, how a new song can be just like a new love. All day, I thought about the song. I was drunk on the song, I was high on the song, I was sick on the song, I was the song.
I listened to the song repeatedly. When I wasn’t listening to the song, I still heard it and hummed it and sang it and kept time to it. I missed trains just so I could have the run of empty subway platforms to dance alone to the song. I had smiles for everyone in the street because of the song that only I could hear, the song that captured everything I’d ever felt and everything I’d ever hoped to feel, the song that had become the sound of life itself.
I was trying to listen to the whole album, but I had ears only for The Song. If I had listened to the entire album sooner I’d have found the song later on that says “Listening too long/To one song/Sing me Spanish techno.”
I shyly showed the song to my roommate, but I couldn’t just let her listen to it. “Wait, wait,” I whispered, “This isn’t even the best part. This is like the prologue to the best part. Now. This is the best part. Because it swells. Do you hear it? Do you hear how sad and happy it is?”
She smiled with the patience of someone who understands the blind, fanatically observant stare of love. “It’s a good song,” she said.
A good song? A good song? This song has ripped me open and freed my heart from the prison of my ribs to lie flayed and naked to the entire world! Because of this song, I live and breathe again, I rejoice in the pain of being alive, I am alive, and it hurts so much to be alive and be so in love with the world that I can die now, let me die in this state of grace, let me fly to Heaven on the wings of these gospel-tinged backing vocals! O cruel beauty! O exquisite painful temporality! O setting sun, o lumbering train, o man in the madras jacket, o child jumping rope, o homing pigeons, o sunshine, o gathering darkness, o beautiful trannies on Christopher Street, o marching subway drones, O Life, O World!
Repeat One!
THE PUNCH LINE:
Lucky we didn’t say anything about the dirty knife.
http://www.ibras.dk/montypython/episode03.htm#5
[in other words, a calming counterpoint to the immense commotion preceding, closing Monty Python’s ‘Restaurant Sketch’]
Now you know how *I’ve* been feeling lately whenever “Mutiny, I Promise You” by The New Pornographers (from Challengers) plays on my PC via the all-Canadian indie-pop channel 52 (“The Verge”) on XM satellite radio! Thinking about it while cooking, showering, paying bills, &c.
The odd thing is, I only heard “your” song on the radio for the first time tonight, not knowing it before as anything but the song backing a long-running TV spot for the University of Phoenix!