If only I could be so grossly incandescent…

Any time I hear Jeff Tweedy’s voice and smell spring I feel the framework of the world around me dissolve. The music floats upon my ears like a baffled sun; one whose solar system has suddenly fallen into disarray. The planets adjust their gravity as best they can in shame, but lets be honest, the heavens don’t just reorganize themselves on a dime…which makes the sudden appearance of an old celestial body all the more confounding. A song, once recorded, is fixed; not like a mood, not like a drifting interpretable spirit, but like a date. One date, etched in granite; utterly devoid of entropy…yet we the world are not so, are we? For a while a song lingers in its nursery, and belongs just where it is. A spirit of the times, they say…but then things shift, adjust, acclimate, settle. The song doesn’t care, doesn’t notice. We call it forth, years later, only to find it doesn’t belong at all– that it’s an outcast in a changed place; its sense of belonging long since ruined. We question this. How could that which was once perfect, and since gone unchanged, ever be "ruined?" The answer is that it can’t; that it’s only us, the world, the ‘spirit of the times’ that has grown unworthy of the song. The music plays, and we rearrange things, in our minds, back to settings more appropriate for the melody…but the heavens don’t just rearrange themselves on a dime, and we create instead that old familiar longing– the good place, and the place that cannot be.