this is not pitchfork

It’s 1983. I’m sitting in the basement of my boyfriend’s house in the middle of winter. There’s a huge storm going on outside and we’ve got blankets and pillows and High Land, Hard Rain on the stereo as we watch the snow swirl around under the streetlights.

I wanted to memorize the moment because it was just so perfect. And, at the wise old age of 20, I thought the perfection would remain, that every night would be like that, that I’d found everlasting happiness. There was so much comfort and warmth in those blankets and Roddy Frame’s voice was the perfect backdrop to all of it.

It’s so easy to think things are wonderful when you have no idea what’s coming next. When there’s calming melodies and soothing rhythms enveloping you and the mood is set in a way that lets you forget how much angst and anxiety is buried in your soul, it’s so easy to call it perfection.

Listening to this album now, I think if i knew then what I know now, if I knew that so many years later This Boy Wonders would bring a rueful smile to my face – I’d still enjoy the heck out of the album, even the moment, however fleeting.

I love that I can still enjoy Walk Out to Winter without feeling any kind of remorse or regret over the memories it brings up. Unlike other albums that remind me of less stellar times in my life, there’s such a quaint sweetness to this that makes me remember the warmth and forgive the cold that came after.

High Land, Hard Rain is full of words that sound like movie dialogue spoken every so quietly by some wispy haired boy brandishing a broken heart, a thousand secrets and a gun. Yet those words somehow make you smile wistfully, as if we’re all privy to some intimate memory he’s about to shoot down.

This entry was posted on Thursday, July 9th, 2009 at 12:22 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.