What can you say about the moment where music becomes the biggest emotion you ever felt. Someone could say, “I love you”, but if someone said, “I music you” you’d be in trouble. At a recent concert my heart got dislodged in a holy cloud made up of the music of Over the Rhine, only comparable to wine that goes straight to the heart. It felt like God spilled His happiness all over the Red Brick theater and the music was what made Him do it. Trying to re-tell meeting Over the Rhine outside of the actual moment is like trying to tell a joke to which you forgot the punch-line.
The tragic part is where you want to tell someone how good they are, and how their music has changed your life, but you know that some fan (less deserving than you) has already said those words. You just want to kiss them on the lips because they did something so beautiful for you and then not regret getting tackled by a security guard and the harassment charges that would follow. I’m just gonna come out and say it. I wanted Over the Rhine to write a song for me, not because I deserved it by any means, but just so they could sing it until I nearly died from dehydration due to excessive crying, and I felt ready to start again.
Maybe my emotional response was so strong because some caged feeling was reaching it’s hand out desperately through the bars and saying, “I want my life to be what you sing about.” Their new album “Meet Me at the Edge of the World” was inspired by their old ideal farm/ranch and quaint home. The way they talked about it was like a piece of heaven chipped off a cloud and they found it.
Right now I’m in the middle of a time of searching to feel at home with myself. Sometimes music awakens creatures within you that haven’t been documented yet, so when they shoot out from under a glowing flower you try to sketch out the glimpse you saw before you start to feel the sad distance between you and what you almost realize you are longing for, and then you get lost in the metaphor of this sentence and I just shake the fairies off my chest and end with a piece of the lyrics to a wonderful song: “Called Home”.
Just shy of breaking down/there’s a bend in the road that I have found called home./Take a left at loneliness/ there’s a place to find forgiveness called home./ With clouds adrift across the sky/Like heaven’s laundry hung to dry/you slowly feel it all will be revealed./ When evening shadows come to fall/ on the awful and the beautiful/ every wound you feel that needs to heal./ And silence yearns to hear herself/ some long lost memory rings a bell/ called home.
– “Called Home“, Over the Rhine
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