Sappy diversion:10 years later I'm still convinced he's singing about me...

I remember very precisely the moment I fell eternally in love with Sister Hazel. Parking garage, 7:56 am, Monday morning back in 2000...while killing the last few minutes before heading into the office I was listening to their cd "Fortress" for the first time. The song "Champagne High" played (this was, incidentally, years before I developed any sort of affinity for sparkling wine, so that's pure coincidence)...

It's a fascinating song...the beautiful, heartbreaking elegy of a man watching a woman he loved marry someone else. It's melancholy. Poetic. While he reminisces over the million hours that he belonged to her and laments the fact that their story's come to a close, he's regretfully toasting the celebration of the rest of her life....I guess the juxtaposition of beautiful wedding imagery eulogized in a verse about loss and grief struck me as so lovely, so unconventional, and so sobering ...I listened to it and cried. Ten years later it's still my favorite song.

At that point, I had absolutely nothing in my life that compared on a personal level to that sort of humbling void, but I still felt so poignantly for his loss....to be moved to tears by a song the first time I listened to it was a first...I'd found my lyrical soul mate. I make the lyrical versus musical distinction because it's the beautiful way they string their words together that I particularly love.

Champagne High by Sister Hazel

From there: every sappy love song Sister Hazel cranked out was written specifically for me (and released with the unspoken understanding that the studio version was just an excuse for them to produce a better, more emotionally raw acoustic session later). The women they sang about always felt like they must be just like me. The women they loved, the women they lost...every time Ken Block sang about everything else falling away in her presence, it was my own personal aria. An ode to me. A search for me...a serenade to me...He was looking for me out there, somewhere. I was the woman meant to take him "to sunrise, from indigo..."

Here's the latest item certainly written with Heather in mind (the acoustic version, in this case because it gets an entire additional verse at the end...). Firefly. I haven't actually seen a firefly since I left Indiana, so all I have is a mystical, dreamy half-memory of summertime backyards aglow with the tiny, magical shimmer of what seemed like stardust. We'd catch them, put them in jars at our bedsides, and watch them flicker until we fell asleep...so childhood Heather thinks that to be compared to a firefly is as delicate, beautiful, mysterious and glowing a description as a woman could hope to inspire. And then to describe her speech as vivid paintings, her words colorful, her conversation enough to take you away to a better place, her beauty enough to light up a room....it's a stunning song...

...can't help it, these are precisely the sort of images I dream of inspiring in someone myself someday....of inspiring someone to the type of poetry in which I'm cast as that magical, summertime backyard glow that takes them - even for a moment - away to someplace better...the one that lights up the room...irrisistible, shining, luminous...

Firefly - Acoustic by Sister Hazel


she's not like anyone else...
you wonder why she captured you like a firefly
and makes you shine like you never could alone...

and tell me, can you see her shining through a crowded room where she's the view
and maybe she'll embrace your innocence, maybe...

she gets high but hates those cigarettes
she speaks and breaks your intellect
she's allowed to change her mind
just you try to stop her...

and tell me, can you see her shining through a crowded room where she's the view
and maybe, she'll embrace your innocence, maybe...

and so it is, the same you've not been since...
one hit and you were lit up like a firefly...
be careful what you wish...

she tells stories like a painter
with colorful words that I don't always understand
but it always sounds like somwhere better than here...
well anywhere's better with her...

and tell me can you see her shining through a crowded room where she's the view
and maybe she'll embrace your innocence, maybe...

and so it is
the same you've not been since...
one hit and you were lit up like a firefly...
be careful what you wish...

she has a subtle way of making you forget your darkness
behind some clever conversation
no finer heart could ever beat... for you

and tell me can you see her shining through a crowded room where she's the view
and maybe she'll embrace your innocence, maybe...
laugh at your nervousness...
don't let her slip away...

and so it is
the same you've not been since
one hit and you were lit up like a firefly
be careful what you wish
she's not like anyone...