When your heart takes over

Let's state the obvious first, as a sort of pre-requisite: there's lots of music. Lots and lots. More than you can imagine actually. About everything. Ever.

Songs about strangers on trains that we are immediately drawn to; trees and bushfires; politics and religion; glaciers and hurricanes and tragedies; tears and sadness and deaths in the family; parents that left before birth, promises that were never fulfilled; the 'what if's and 'but's and everything that could've been done differently, and everything that might never have happened, and everything that despite our prayers and wishes never did; the money lost on the bus; the gambling debts that ruined a marriage. Songs about distance and time and space and the big fuck-off "WHY?!... Why are we here? What's our purpose? Who is my God and what of my life and when was I most pure and where is hell?"

And there are a lot of songs about love. But this one. It's summed up in the words that emerge through the laughter at the end: "Oh God". It is one of the most elegant, sad, delightful little songs I have ever heard. It's poorly recorded, and it's casually performed, and it's so so unbelievably fucking heartbreakingly beautiful.



Elizabeth Frazer and Jeff Buckley

All Flowers In Time

Reunion! Union!

Stars

Reunion

Striking down on that first chord like some sort of smiling tribute to The Smiths, dancing and twinkling with the musical equivalent of controlled chaos. Conjuring images with the fantastic frivolousness:

driving to school, and home again, with the wind in your hair and tears in your eyes from the gush of air, and the freedom, the beauty of the scenery - it's not much to look at, actually - but right now, in this, precise moment, it's beautiful. Palm trees instead of Palmpilots. Staying up during the night dreaming awake and then eventually nodding off.

(You couldn't slip into slumber like that these days when you're doing an all-nighter 'cause you know you have to have that essay in by noon, or else.)

But before you left the waking world, all you could see in your thoughts was the girl you kissed on the cheek; the girl who's hand you held and afterwards convinced yourself you were in love! - the one you said you cared for, sort of. 'Cause even though you were by parts shy and by parts confident - your own little enigma - you could never tell that girl, all the things that you probably should've told her. I'll let this song be your story. It's smiling, it's nostalgic, it's sad. It harks back to innocent days of drinking yourself silly - as much with happiness as with alcohol. It recalls a time when you were too scared to tell a girl, well... that... you...

truly truly loved her.