got a head-on collision

Bit of a pace change in this post (excluding the Battlestar Galactica post left open from the previous blog incarnation because it’s a durn good show and I stand by my praise for it). This time though the subject at hand is Bruce Springsteen, or more precisely the music of Bruce Springsteen.

I’ve got a new girlfriend (yes, I’m as shocked as the next committed bachelor). Following the grand old tradition of merging our interests, I’m currently at work on introducing her to Springsteen’s musical oeuvre. I decided on what I thought was a simple method of asking her for a couple of her favorite musicians and then picking an album which most closely matches the output of those artists. First part went fine. It did happen that several of the Boss’s albums match with the work of the musicians she chose, but that should be a good thing, shouldn’t it? I thought so. I wasn’t going to have to worry over handing her a copy of Human Touch. So I started listening to the albums and then the real flaw in my plan stuck up it’s head and said “boo” or it might have been “supercalifragilisticexpialidoceous”, either way, it caught me by surprise.

Turns out I know his music too well. For all of my adult life (including the years when I wasn’t yet an adult, but thought I was), Springsteen’s music has been within earshot. Very few of his songs aren’t inextricably wrapped within memories and emotions to such an extent that I can’t listen to them again for the first time. I listen to one album and I suddenly remember the smell of the flowers outside the townhome where I lived in Las Vegas, the feel of my hand on the concrete wall I jumped on the way home from my girlfriend’s house out there. Another album brings back memories of lying awake the night before Easter when I should have been sleeping, but the silence of the night was overcome, via headphones, by Bruce’s voice singing about racing cars and faith and hope and standing strong against the storm. Queuing up a third album smacks me with the feeling of being at a concert with another girlfriend as our song blew the rafter roof off and I was thinking, completely out of touch with reality, that no one else there knew just what that song meant the way we did. I’m listening to the memories and not the music.

So now I’m going to go back to it and try briefly, having spilled some of the associations out here, to purge my mind of years of memories. I’ll sit down and just picture her while listening to these albums. I’ll imagine the new memories we’ll make together and what the soundtrack for them should be.