Iron & Wine's "Best Of" CD has two tracks that leave me heartbroken. I've had the disk essentially on repeat over the past week, and each time through, I'm battered by track 2, Such Great Heights, but demolished by number 4, Jezebel. Here's why:
Such Great Heights was penned by The Postal Service duo Ben Gibbard and Jimmy Tamborello, but was covered by Sam Beam of Iron & Wine for the Garden State soundtrack. I like both versions, but have a particular affinity for the slower, crooning version sung by Beam. Two particular reasons come to mind.
I've always had a thing for the mopey singer-songwriter tunes, evidenced by my penchant for what my roommate during freshman year of college called "kill yourself music." He was much more into Lil' Wayne, and quickly grew tired of my never ending stream of David Gray. But second, I think it's because the first time I told Kate that I loved her, this song, and this "kill yourself" version, was quietly playing in the background. The moment was perhaps a bit sappy, and even stunk of movie quality melodrama, but it's my life, and that's how it happened.
We acknowledged the song as historically ours, and Katie even went so far as to frame a picture of our two faces pressed together, side by side, along with a printout of the lyrics. The picture hinted at the line, "I'm thinking it's a sign, that the freckles in our eyes are mirror images and when we kiss they're perfectly aligned."
I can't hear that song and avoid the realization that whatever I felt in that moment has been corrupted by the passing of time and the clawing of our flaws on our collective hopes.
And I can't hear Jezebel without remembering a podcast that NPR's All Songs Considered released in 2007. I was in DC, staying with Kate while taking a two week course up in Baltimore at Johns Hopkins. Each morning, I'd have to make the commute north in the cold of the predawn, January morning. There are few things as pathetic as boarding a commuter train before the sun can even warm the sidewalk, leaving the bed of a woman dear to your heart for a commute to another sprawling, criminal city. That's where I found myself each morning, and my sole company was this concert, played in its entirety as I rolled into Maryland. The commute was about an hour and a half, almost perfectly coordinated to the concert's duration. As I'd pass BWI, the airport between the two cities, the sun would crest and create a glow on the windows of the train's right side. Beam would offer to me, only me; "who's seen Jezebel? She was gone before I ever got to say, 'lay here my love, you're the only shape I'll pray to...'." Other than the fact that it was me who was gone, the symmetry worked well. I was realizing on those train rides that Kate and I were perhaps running on different tracks, with mine heading away while hers remained within the more respectable confines of a career.
And now, each time I press play, I am taken back to two different times in my life. The first; an unspoiled display of hope and longing. The second is the realization that though I may wish otherwise, people, and more particularly, people's lives, don't stay put.
My mind goes back in time now, and tries to remember. I need to find some new music.
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