HALF A WORLD AWAY
As I get older my surety of when things happened "back in the day", wavers. Events that history says were incongruent ,meld together and overlap. Such is the case this morning. I awoke with a lyric from REM's 1991 "breakthrough" album, Out of Time stuck clearly in my head and I immediately associated it with Operation Dessert Storm, of sitting in my room at the Lambda Chi house, watching CNN on a grainy hand me down TV; thinking the flashes of light and play by play of a younger Wolf Blitzer and Bernard Shaw, boring. Show me some shit blowing up I thought, as Patriot missiles ravaged Kuwait and Iraqi soldiers threw down their weapons in a surrender even the French would be proud of.
This is a time/space impossibility. The line in my head, not from the first single release, but from a deeper cut, was on the full album, which was released in March of 91. The night of Desert Storm was in January 16, 1991 ergo, I could never have heard Half a World Away.
I can see how the connection happens. Iraq is half a world away. They did come out close to each other. This isn't a great whodunnit. Even so. I revel in the process of seeing this minute memory through to its conclusion. It's at once nostalgic and satisfying, as memory and pieces fall into place.
Related "minute" is a heteronym. A word that is spelled the same but has two different meanings.
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The actual song that got us here, upon a thorough re-reading of the lyrics these thirty-one years later, is a little bit of a downer. All the good songs usually are. The lyrics, desperate, the melody, longing. That's a one two punch that always delivers, and Half A World Away is an upset knockout. A James Buster Douglas. It's a song I've heard a lot but cared little about, yet this morning it helps inspire me to write better songs. That's a great thing to have happen on a random Thursday morning.
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I have an ongoing conversation with a musician friend of mine. We send each other lyrics and we discuss songwriting ad nauseam; he, half my age. Me, watching him do the things I did in the 90's, a small glow of pride in him, while still considering him a peer and not an underling. Yesterday, we had a short back and forth about why we write and the complications therein.
Guys like he and I push music out into the world and decide things about why we do it and who we are and portray ourselves to be. What being a musician means to our identity. The reality of it, always more complicated. I've done a lot since I quit playing music the first time in 2000. I still approached my life like I wanted to be seen as a rock star. No shame.
We discussed writing as a release (it isn't). We talked about how we can't play guitar to relieve stress and we agreed that lyrics need not tell the story but that they need to get you close, the performance, melody and music will hopefully convey and connect the feeling, maybe the same as the writer, but any emotional response is a win.
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I purposely left the lyrics to Half a World Away out of this as you can seek it out. Well except for this first verse, as I'm grateful it allowed me this memory.
"This could be the saddest dusk ever seen
You turn to a miracle high-alive
My mind is racing as it always will
My hands tired, my heart aches
I'm half a world away, here"
#hugsandhi5s
