So, a friend of mine posted a video (Rain by Patty Griffin) on her Facebook page and it is a song that I had really forgotten about. It's about 7 years old now and I remember hearing it for the first time just sampling some stuff at Joseph Beth on one of the few occasions that Jess and I went to Joseph-Beth... that's pretty much my favorite thing to do there is go and sample all the new music that you really never get to hear anywhere else unless you listen to WUKY for 80 hours straight... In fact, that was how I was introduced to Patty Griffin way back in 1996 when Living with Ghosts first came out... it was early spring... maybe May... anyway, I'm getting off topic.
I remember that song so vividly and thinking how purely painful it was... it is a song that hangs on pain... 'Strange how hard it rains now'... like you didn't notice until you'd been hurt so bad. Pain has caused a wound so deep in you that now it is filling with rain that you never noticed was there before and you feel like you're going to drown.
The essence of the song is basically 'I can't give you what you want and you can't give me what I want and it really fuckin' hurts'... but it is done so beautifully that you know that instead of drowing you, the rain is working to wash the pain away... you know you're going to be at the brink of suffocating under all this water but then the water will release and you're going to be cleansed.
"When I'm still alive underneath this shroud"... it's almost like if you gave it one more verse, the sun would come out... but you're not quite ready for that yet, so it ends... just like that...
It's beautiful.
