I’ve been a sucker for singer-songwriters ever since in fell in love with Carole King as a teenager in the seventies. It’s a long story but the short version is that “she spoke to me.”
Not literally but with her words. Meaning when you’re so lonely inside that you fear no one will like you once they discover the real you, a song like You’ve Got A Friend means everything.
You just call out my name, And you know wherever I am,
I’ll come running to see you again,
Winter, Spring, Summer or Fall, All you have to do is call,
And I’ll be there,
You’ve Got A Friend….
If you wonder why so many of us deep down sensitive baby boomers prefer a call to a text, well, that pretty much says it all.
I mean, all you have to do is text just isn’t quite the same thing.
In any event, for me these days there’s a different kind of fear and loneliness. One that’s difficult to describe except to say it’s a feeling of being let down by so many of the people I came of age with in a country I thought I knew but don’t know at all.
It would be easy to make this merely political but it occurred to me this weekend that it’s not. There’s a callow self-centeredness permeating the air, determined to change the norm of what’s right and wrong. A shifting back in time to what is moral and acceptable, sometimes to the 1950s and, other times, to the 1850s.
A societal, redefinition to the alt right where the media actually indulges in rational discussions (Note: That is if we’re lucky) on whether it’s okay to snatch people as young as two years old out of their schools, their streets or even their beds in the dead of night and fly them to a foreign gulag in a country they’ve never been to without a hearing, much less a trial.
A time where it’s okay to openly shout at or discriminate against people with a different skin color, gender preference or even income, insultingly and/or at the top of your lungs, and even use a nasty pejorative word about their ‘kind” (Note: And by “kind” substitute the word for a particular group you’d have seldom heard implied, much less said out loud in public 10 years ago) as they do so.
A place where those in authority promote the Christian Bible and the virtues and obligations of parenthood while dismissing anyone decidedly non-religious, or atheist, or voluntarily childless as lacking a strong moral compass, selfish or simply immoral.
Listen, this is not the language of my friends and family. But it IS what is becoming the language of our country. Questions are being posed in the public square to which the vast majority of American know the answer to.
NO – it is not right to snatch people off the streets, without a trial, never to be heard from again.
NO – you don’t have to be a Christian or have/raise a child to be a moral, loving, worthwhile, contributing member of society.
And NO – it’s not okay to be racist, sexist, homophobic, transphobic, ethnic phobic or, ______________. (Note: Fill in the blank because you truly do know the rest of the categories).
Yet somehow, in some fashion, this is all on the table again and up for discussion.
In my random 3:00 am nights awake I wonder, Is bringing slavery back, next? In my mind’s eye I can actually hear some of those voices arguing, It depends on the circumstances. Why can’t we at least debate it?
Lately, I’ve come to realize that in the last few weeks, okay months, I once again find myself turning to another singer-songwriter to get me through. This time it’s 28-year-old Noah Kahan, a Grammy-nominated folk-pop performer from Vermont who plays guitar, banjo and mandolin, sounds like a cross between Paul Simon and Cat Stevens (Note: He cities them as two of his big inspirations) and has dealt with mental health issues since he was a kid – so much so that he used funds from his success to establish The Busyhead Project, a mental health initiative that provides information and resources to end the stigma around mental health.
I didn’t know the latter before I started listening to him. I just gravitated to his music and his words. But in retrospect it all makes sense. Who better to help you when you’re feeling rather hopelessly disoriented than someone who has been dealing with those feelings most of their life? It made even more sense when I began watching videos of him performing. He reminded me of the type of burly straight guy who was kind to me in my younger years. The sort of mostly silent fellow who’d actually exchange a few words with me if we were at a party or some dumb function, and then ask me a question or two about myself and actually listen to the answer.
His song Stick Season, which is also the title of his breakthrough 2022 album, derives its title from that time in New England when the leaves have fallen and the trees are bare but the snow has not yet arrived. Again, it makes sense I’d be listening to this over and over again as I drive through the hills of sunny L.A. since in my view we are awaiting some great societal snow to wash away a kind of cold ,chilly creepiness threatening our land.
Or perhaps that’s just me liking flowery, melodramatic metaphors. (Note: Perhaps?)
In any event, in Stick Season, Noah writes about a relationship he’s sort of in during a transitional period in his life.
…And I’ll dream each night of some version of you
That I might not have, but I did not lose
Now you’re tire tracks and one pair of shoes
And I’m split in half, but that’ll have to do
So I thought that if I piled something good on all my bad
That I could cancel out the darkness I inherited from dad
No, I am no longer funny, ’cause I miss the way you laugh
You once called me forever, now you still can’t call me back.
And I love Vermont, but it’s the season of the sticks….
Make of the meaning of the song what you will.
It could be a relationship with a girlfriend.
But it might also be one with a boyfriend.
Or even an old friend, lover or family member.
Someone or something that’s been in your life forever but you feel you’ve never known.
Like your country.
notes from a chair 