Song of the Day

Today was a great day...warm enough to drop the top (mid-70s) and take a long, long drive north and east into Texas, just to clear the cobwebs. I was gone for about five hours, and as luck (or stupidity/forgetfulness) would have it, I forgot to take the camera. I can rationalize my oversight by saying "well, there wasn't much to photograph, anyway." Wrong. There's always something to photograph...always. But I digress.

While I was motoring and thinking today, the thought occurred to me to add a new "feature" to the blog: the song of the day. I'll post the artist, album title, song name, lyrics, a link to the song (if available), the source (radio, personal collection, other) and perhaps something or other about the song, ranging from a simple "I just like it" up to and including a long, drawn out and most likely boring war story. There probably won't be too many war stories. You should be glad.

I keep about 15 or so CDs in the car. The really good ones seem to stay there permanently, the "B" list gets rotated every two weeks or so. Matchbox Twenty's "Yourself or Someone Like You" is one of the CDs that hasn't seen the inside of El Casa Móvil de Pennington for at least two years. It got a lot of airplay today. It always does, it's one of my favorite albums. And here comes a war story.

"Yourself" is, in a way, the last gift The Second Mrs. Pennington gave me. The album was released in 1996; we broke up in 1998. I first heard the album while visiting my youngest son in the Fall of 1998, shortly after TSMP left Rochester and moved back to Detroit. I visited my son at TSMP's house. TSMP put my boy down for a nap and we went into her kitchen to talk. She put "Yourself" on her little boombox CD-player and said "I think you'll like this; it's a great album." I half-listened to the music while we talked, but I bought the album on my return to Rochester. She was right: it is a great album, and it's one of the best musical chronicles of a broken relationship I've ever heard. I have a tendency to project feelings into or on music (whichever is the appropriate usage), and it's like Rob Thomas was a fly on my wall when he wrote half the songs on "Yourself." I lived the situations he describes in most of the songs on the album, and most particularly the situation in today's Song of the Day: "Hang."

Artist: Matchbox Twenty

Album: Yourself or Someone Like You

Released: 1996

Song: Hang

Track available here. (Click the album on the far left; last track on the drop-down list.)

Source when heard today: Personal collection.

Lyrics:

She grabs her magazines
She packs her things and she goes
She leaves the pictures hanging on the wall, she burns all
Her notes and she knows, she's been here too few years
To feel this old

He smokes his cigarette, he stays outside 'til it's gone
If anybody ever had a heart, he wouldn't be alone
He knows, she's been here too few years, to be gone

And we always say, it would be good to go away, someday
But if there's nothing there to make things change
If it's the same for you I'll just hang

The trouble, understand, is she got reasons he don't
Funny how he couldn't see at all, 'til she grabbed up her coat
And she goes, she's been here too few years to take it all in stride
But still it's much too long, to let hurt go (you let her go)

And we always say, it would be good to go away, someday
But if there's nothing there to make things change
If it's the same for you I'll just hang
The same for you

Well I always say, It would be good to go away
But if things don't work out like we think
And there's nothing there to ease this ache
But if there's nothing there to make things change
If it's the same for you I'll just hang