It's the end of my last break, and a song about being on the road soundtracks the way I feel underneath a calm exterior.
Okay, so for some reason lately I've had two common threads in my music listening:
1) Connecting songs to others, either through a title (see yesterday's post) or some other common element.
2) Configuring my understanding of a piece of music through my mental state (shown in a way two days ago).
Today's Senior Year Soundtrack selection fuses the above, colored by both an artist I'd previously discussed in this space and my feelings about returning to Berkeley for the final weeks of my time in college.
I'll lead into today's pick with the first point. A few days ago, I wrote about Jim Croce's "Time in a Bottle." I had heard that song and a couple others from Croce while listening to the 70s XM station on drives during my spring break — one of the others being "I Got a Name," which was tragically released the day after his death in a plane crash. There's a riff at the end of each of the choruses that I thought I'd heard somewhere else, and after coming home that day and thinking about it, I realized I'd heard it in "Interstate Love Song," by Stone Temple Pilots.
Interestingly, neither Croce nor anyone associated with him is credited on "Interstate Love Song," and this could be a legitimate case for a copyright lawsuit to be brought by Jim Croce's estate. One way or another, my remembering STP's song led me to listening to it and realizing the story it told somewhat fits the way I currently think about my life. This mental state in which I find myself is especially pervasive on the day I head back to Berkeley, signaling the end of my last break as a student.
The late Scott Weiland penned "Interstate Love Song" while on the road with Stone Temple Pilots, as a way to get out his feelings about lying to his then-wife about staying off drugs. The talk of "what I've read between the lines / Your lies" is his envisioning of his wife's point of view, as if she knows he's broken the promise he made to her. While I'm not a drug user in any way, I relate to Weiland's lyrics about "promises of what I seemed to be" because I often conceal how I'm feeling to my family, in order for them to not worry about me as much. The result is a clear disconnect between my inward behavior and my outward interactions, and that can end up being quite unhealthy, because without me openly acknowledging how I feel I can't get the help I need from anyone. Like the song does through its steady backing from brothers Dean (guitar) and Robert DeLeo (bass / backing vocals) and drummer Eric Kretz, I may keep moving along like nothing's wrong, but all the while something keeps building up inside me, until it inevitably becomes too much to bear and I lash out.
Getting out my feelings about music in this space allows for me to process my feelings a lot more healthily than I may otherwise. With how important music has been and continues to be in all aspects of my life, using my selected listening to help me understand the way I'm thinking is as logical as it is helpful. I hope that sharing my thoughts with you may open up mental doors for you to think similarly about what musical choices you make — they may seem somewhat passive or just on a whim, but there's often something greater behind them, and there's value from figuring out what that something is.