30 song in 30 days: day twenty
A Song That You Listen To When You're Angry
"A Gentleman Caller" by Cursive
There are two suites to this song. The first is the drunken, see-sawing salvo that lasts a furious 1:25 seconds. It is a raw, bleeding, angry mess in which Tim Kasher dashes off some of the nastiest lyrics in his canon. The music is reflective of the intensity. Guitars crash, the spit flies, the drums hammer. It's beyond intense. It's damn near uncomfortable.
Once the vitriol is spilled, though, there is the aftermath: that horrible realization that the anger could have been misdirected - or, even worse, totally appropriate.
The final two minutes are gut-wrenching. The music slows to a pained crawl as those sneaking suspicions creep in: "In the morning/on the sober dawn of Sunday/you're not sure what you have done." Isn't this the way anger operates? We fly off the handle, we potentially say things we know we're going to regret, and then - bam. There it is. The regret. The guilt. The shame. We carry it with us or we drag it behind us or we bury it in a box and hope it never comes back. But it's always there. And sometimes no amount of forgiveness or forgetting takes it away:
"Whatever you need to make you feel/like you've been the one behind the wheel/the sunrise is just over that hill/the worst is over."
I rarely get angry - uncontrollably so, anyway. But even if I'm slightly peeved about something, this song is excellent therapy. Though the ending, in my more fragile moments, has caused me to cry. Because I feel that shame. And I guess we all do.
Listen to Cursive's "A Gentleman Caller" here.
"A Gentleman Caller" by Cursive
There are two suites to this song. The first is the drunken, see-sawing salvo that lasts a furious 1:25 seconds. It is a raw, bleeding, angry mess in which Tim Kasher dashes off some of the nastiest lyrics in his canon. The music is reflective of the intensity. Guitars crash, the spit flies, the drums hammer. It's beyond intense. It's damn near uncomfortable.
Once the vitriol is spilled, though, there is the aftermath: that horrible realization that the anger could have been misdirected - or, even worse, totally appropriate.
The final two minutes are gut-wrenching. The music slows to a pained crawl as those sneaking suspicions creep in: "In the morning/on the sober dawn of Sunday/you're not sure what you have done." Isn't this the way anger operates? We fly off the handle, we potentially say things we know we're going to regret, and then - bam. There it is. The regret. The guilt. The shame. We carry it with us or we drag it behind us or we bury it in a box and hope it never comes back. But it's always there. And sometimes no amount of forgiveness or forgetting takes it away:
"Whatever you need to make you feel/like you've been the one behind the wheel/the sunrise is just over that hill/the worst is over."
I rarely get angry - uncontrollably so, anyway. But even if I'm slightly peeved about something, this song is excellent therapy. Though the ending, in my more fragile moments, has caused me to cry. Because I feel that shame. And I guess we all do.
Listen to Cursive's "A Gentleman Caller" here.