Thursday, September 9, 2010

Sunny Came Home

Ok... so I "scheduled" this to post last week, and just found it in the drafts folder... so here it is, better late than never.  

No matter how far you travel, the one thing you can't run away from is yourself.

I did not feel like learning my song today.  I had other things on my mind, like family members' medical results and undeserving menfolk and other anxiety-inducing stuff.  And I'm on vacation, so add to that a dose of resentment that I was feeling this way.  Yesterday was grand - I drank in the desert-rain-and-juniper-scented air, I drank tea.  I daydreamed about dividing my time between an ultra-modern flat in New York and a light-filled home on the edge of the forest in New Mexico (a home I actually found for sale during the time I idled away on the internet yesterday). 

At least I scheduled an easy song for today, I thought.  "Sunny Came Home" is innocuous enough, form-wise, and it's described as "folk-rock", so the groove isn't going to make me as crazy/inadequate as a Stevie Wonder song would.  So imagine my crankiness when I realized that the chords are slightly different on each verse (conforming to a variation in the melody she sings), and that there are a lot of what traditional harmony would call non-harmonic tones, especially in the bridge. 

Well, I survived, and I did not burn the house down like the protagonist in the song.  I think it's interesting how this song oscillates between B minor on the verse, and its relative major key (D) on the chorus, and heads into murky tonal territory on the bridge.  I wouldn't say any part of this song is particularly cheerful, but neither is it exactly angry, considering it's a song about a woman committing arson.  It muddles through, she muddles through, I muddle through - there's some happy, some sad, some downright confusing, and sometimes I just want to make a huge bonfire of it all and start over. 

Start over tomorrow, post-good sleep, sans bonfire.

1 comment:

  1. I really like this song, so I was keen to see what you wrote about it (given that your posts often use the song as a jumping-off point more than a subject).

    "I drank in the desert-rain-and-juniper-scented air"
    "a light-filled home on the edge of the forest in New Mexico"

    Having lived my entire life (happily) as a city mouse, those senses aroused just by those two sentences have never made me feel quite so inadequately urban.

    Perhaps someday I'll make a trip to see how green that other grass is...

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