After the Goldrush

Some days I find the songs, and some days they find me. The former happens because I'm feeling something and I know of a song that echoes the feeling, and so I seek it out, and playing it acts as a salve of some sort. The latter sometimes happens because I turn on the radio or put the ipod on shuffle, but sometimes it is a little more mysterious than that. My personal soundtrack just starts to play a song, as it did while I was sitting at my desk today:

I was lying in a burned out basement
With the full moon in my eyes
I was hoping for a replacement
When the sun burst through the sky
There was a band playing in my head (I guess Neil has his own personal soundtrack too!)
And I felt like getting high
Thinking about what a friend had said
I was hoping it was a lie

Until I found it again on my beloved youtube just now, I hadn't heard this song in a long time. My ex-husband was a big Neil Young fan, so it was during that part of my life when I came to really appreciate his music. When I moved out, Neil didn't come with me, and I haven't gotten around to adding him back to my music library. Hearing Neil sing this beautiful song now though, it isn't bringing up any feelings about the ex. Instead, there are three parts of it that are really resonating today:

1) I was just talking to a friend this morning about the power of dreams -- how satisfying and unsettling they can be and what they have to tell us -- and hearing Neil sing "all in a dream," makes me wonder further about the line between dreams and waking consciousness.

2) The line about hoping what he heard a friend say was a lie has me thinking about how much power we give to things that people say and do that may or may not actually have the meaning that we attach to them.

3) The beating that Mother Nature is taking courtesy of BP here in the 21st century.

On that last one, I also found a Dolly Parton cover on youtube, which seemed really incongruous to me at first, until I listened to it, and she had changed some of the lyrics, including:

Look at Mother Nature on the run in the 21st century (instead of in the 1970's in Neil's version).

This weekend on State St. my kids and I saw a bunch of naked and semi-naked people riding their bikes in a protest of the oil spill. Many of them had written "nude not crude" on their bodies. I'm not sure exactly what they accomplished other than raising awareness, giving some a thrill (me), and mortifying others (my 10 year old) , but I have a feeling Neil and his hippie buddies would approve...