Connecting the dots

"When I was a child, I talked like a child, I thought like a child, I reasoned like a child..." 1 Corinthians 13:11

I discovered The Dave Matthews Band when Crash came out in 1996. It doesn't always make my top 5 list, but I love rediscovering it. Last night, as I listened to a live Dave CD, I wondered why he had stuck with me, even as I'd changed so much over the years.

This album was my life's first soundtrack to a relationship. I was just as passionate then, but without much focus and a heart aching to love just about whoever would take it. At the time, I was pining after my first love and my overanalytical mind sought solace in late nights filled with poetry writing. The brain did its best thinking while absorbing the song Let You Down on repeat. (Click here, then select the song to listen.)

He whispers, "I have no lid upon my head, but if I did, you could look inside and see what's on my mind...oh, it's you," surrounded intensely, desperately, by the repeating chorus, "I let you down, let me pick you up."

My fifteen-year-old heart had been crushed - stomped on forcefully with a sturdy shoe and the side to side grind of an intentional man, and I could only focus on the repeating....I let you down, let me pick you up.

He had dropped me hard and turned around, so at night, I'd pretend those contritions would part his lips. I let the lyrics soothe me like I'd heard them in real time.

I obsessed about that particular lyric because the utter heartbreak of the moment demanded it, but mostly because I didn't have the experience to appreciate the better parts of the song. The idea that someone could be both sorry and wish that they could let you in completely in the same moment was foreign. Life wasn't that complex yet.

Rethinking all this, I decided to experiment. 10 years later, I've reset the scene. I'm sitting in a similarly darkened room, candles casting flickering shadows on my walls like they used to then. I'm taller, rounder and my soul has seen more battles now. Still, surely I'll identify with the same feelings. That's why this CD is so great. It stands the test of time.

The introduction is quieter than I romanticized. I remembered it more frenzied and sturdy. His voice is soft, not as penitent as it was when I put Joel's voice behind it.

I have no lid upon my head, but if I did, you could look inside and see what's on my mind...oh it's you. I notice that he had to work up to adding in the last line, admitting that it was her. He couldn't say it on the first pass.

On second listen, I realize I've heard I let you down so many times that my brain skippes over it. It's just repetitive, and the song doesn't make it ring true anymore. When I was 15, pain was novel.

But wishing that he could share his very thoughts, now that's something that makes me get up and press the left arrow...three, four, five, no, six times now. I can't believe I missed something so impressive and genuine.

At the end of the song he whistles it away. I used to get lost in the passion of it, but now it seems like he's giving up on being sorry, maybe even giving up on her, and he's sort of happy with it. That makes me chuckle. In the last few years, I've left intense relationship conversations drained like I'd given blood. As I drove home confused, bewildered and unsure, I've laughed and cried at the same time. I suck at whistling...otherwise I'd have tried it.

Enough for now. I can't listen to the same song with repeated ferocity any more. My time traveling is over. Even I can't stand to analyze this much.

End result: the reason this album is so good is that it doesn't stand the test of time, it walks through it with you. Like Pablo Neruda, my many journals, God and Dinah Washington standards, it was my first heartbreak when I needed it, and now it's the validation of a life I've experienced.

...so, maybe I'll just hit repeat one more time.