Ceremony, from the album Substance by New Order. Whenever I hear even the first few notes of the song, I'm transported back in time. I can see my
younger self – I must be 18 years old, frustrated by being on the razor’s edge
of change, feeling the bite of that metaphorical blade. I think it’s how Luke
Skywalker must have felt being told by his uncle to be patient, to spend just
one more season on the farm. I was chomping at the bit – already accepted into
Michigan and just counting the days, the minutes, until I’d be into the next
chapter in my story.
Waiting for my world to change. To be where
I thought my life was.
None of it turned out quite the way I’d
planned. But then little has, and most of what’s been unexpected has ended up
being good to me, even if it didn’t always seem so at the time. But once the
fragments get pieced together, refined and glazed over, once it’s in the
rearview, then it can become a story and make sense.
Just a few notes of that song though, it
brings me right back to that spot in my past – working with my friend Jason at
the Exxon station his family owned just around the corner from the Montgomery
Mall. Summer just around the corner, the air was already getting heavy and
humid, and we’d be going different ways – he was off to Boston and I was
heading for Ann Arbor. I was starting Summer term, not just because I’d heard
it made acceptance a little more likely, but also because I was itching so
badly for it. I can smell the gasoline on my hands, which I much preferred to
the distinct scent of Kimchi fermenting in Jason’s garage. I keep trying to
clean the grease of my fingers, but it’s the green and white checkered rag I’m
using that keeps making things dirtier.
That blank impatient space between chapters
– that’s was the song Ceremony makes me think of.
My painting "Ceremony," made while listening to the song
It was originally written when the band was
still Joy Division, before Ian Curtis ended his life on the night of the band’s
first world tour. They too found themselves between worlds – in transition from
a strange new sound in basement clubs to becoming world renowned pioneers in electronic
music. En route to becoming legendary. Post Joy Division but pre New Order,
which is what the survivors would become – this one song seems to bridge those
two different periods, without fitting comfortably into either. An interlude, and
one to which I was particularly attuned at the time.
It’s up tempo, but still down. Minor chords
played fast. The murky vocals and lyrics further shaping some new hybrid
emotion. Angsticipation.
To be honest, I don’t know if the music made
me feel that way of if I’ve just layered my feelings at the time over the
sound. Or both. I don’t think it’s knowable, and I don’t think it matters
either way. The music, the time near the end of my teen years and the internal
emotional whirlwind I was going through are all inexorably fused. It has become
one of the main tracks on the soundtrack of my personal history. It’s also impossible
to if it will mean anything at all to you, but if I had to guess I would think
that there is some song that does. All the same, here it is for you:
Here are the lyrics:
This is why events unnerve me
They find it all, a different story
Notice whom for wheels are turning
Turn again and turn towards this time
All she asks is the strength to hold me
Then again the same old story
World will travel, oh so quickly
Travel fast and lean towards this time
Oh, I'll break them down, no mercy shown
Heaven knows, it's got to be this time
Watching her, these things she said
The times she cried
Too frail to wake this time
Oh, I'll break them down, no mercy shown
Heaven knows, it's got to be this time
Avenues all lined with trees
Picture me and then you start watching
Watching forever
Forever
Watching love grow, forever
Letting me know, forever
No comments:
Post a Comment