who's to say i don't have wings?

Everyone who knows me knows that I’m a huge Sleater-Kinney fan. What’s so funny about my love for Sleater-Kinney is that I was a latecomer. I didn’t start listening to them until I bought The Woods, and even then I bought The Woods five months after it was released. I saw them open for Belle and Sebastian a week or two after my junior year of college, and their set was quite good. The music went over my head, and I put off diving in for a few years. Much like with the Rolling Stones, I wonder what the hell made me put off diving in.

The Woods was a record that I knew I liked from the first listen. It wasn’t a TNT blast, but the opening feedback of “The Fox” told me this was exactly what I was looking for, and the first time I heard “Modern Girl” I knew I had my hands on something special. I listened to The Woods a lot that fall. It won a place in my rotation of car CD’s, and whenever I waited for laundry or a power steering fix it accompanied me along with Wolf Parade’s Apologies To the Queen Mary and Sufjan Stevens’s Come On Feel the Illinoise. I knew The Woods was a favorite. Five months passed before my love blossomed into what it is.

I can pinpoint the exact moment. I was driving back to Martinsburg for my grandmother’s funeral in March of 2006. I was in that stretch of I81 that goes through Harrisonburg, and I was listening to The Woods. “Let’s Call It Love” had just entered that long improvisational bit, and I thought to myself, “This is some serious shit.” I looked at the time on the CD player and it was right around the 6:10 mark. Honestly, I’ve never been the same since then. Moments like those are few and far between in the lives of human beings, but we all have them. They’re what make us who we are. It doesn’t have to be a record or a work of art. It could simply be an experience. Something happens to us that changes us forever. I wouldn’t call it scarring. It’s more like an impression that lasts the rest of our lives. It’s as though we are lumps of clay, and for a brief instant the hand of the Divine touches us and molds us into something different. We are the same as we were before, and yet we are not. Our way of seeing has been affected. Our perception is altered. Maybe something inside us is opened and who we truly are comes out. Moments like these are unnamable and indefinable, but it’s the air you breathe.

I’m not trying to explain myself. I just spent all day driving around town with The Woods in my car, and tonight as I was driving home I made it into “Let’s Call It Love” again. I thought of that day nearly two years ago where I realized how much I loved Sleater-Kinney. I knew I had to write down the third paragraph of this blog entry. We live for moments like these. The sights and sounds of this world have their way with you, and sometimes when they’re done you’re just not the same. I’m trying to think of the shortest possible phrase to define it. Peculiar and lovely?

Currently listening to: Born To Run, Bruce Springsteen. You’ll be hard-pressed to find a more genuinely American record. “Thunder Road” gets me every time and it’s like, “You are mine for the next forty-five minutes.”