Friday, March 16, 2007

America

The song "America" by Simon and Garfunkel is a very powerful love song for me. Stephen played it for me in college because he thought my arrangement of a song for my singing group began the same way it does, with the same sort of humming. Then we listened to it a few more times because we liked it.

It just takes me in my imagination to that bus ride described in the song. Really, it just captures the feeling of being in love and taking off somewhere, ready to explore a new place together, that feeling of time stretching out. Adventure, youth, the great wide open made less scary by the presence of someone you love beside you. But still a touch of loneliness and desolation in there, in the lines when he talks to his sleeping girlfriend, saying he's lost, empty and aching.

Not many songs put me in such a specific mood, where I'm imagining myself on a Greyhound, watching the fields go by. Hearing it just now made me realize that recorded songs can take up such a specific place in one's brain, that they can produce that electric key-into-lock sudden recall that most people get only from certain scents. I mean, everyone associates smell with memory, but I'd say that recorded song can produce that same sort of emotional vertigo, of being suddenly awash in a different time and place.

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