You're Old Enough to Know Well...

Picking the song of the week isn't as easy as I thought it would be, I'm always looking for a song in my collection that holds some great truth that the world needs to know. It's not always easy to find, every song has it's own perception of the truth, some songs don't tell the truth at all. One of the reasons I started collecting music is that I thought at some point I would find a record that would say everything that needed to be said. Twenty years on, I haven't found it. I'm not sure this is what Dawes is getting at with this song, but it sounds that way to me, "as if something that's written should be taken as true". I love the idea that you have to break something else to make something new. It reminds me of the line from the Alejandro Escovedo song Down in the Bowery, "I hope you live long enough to forget all the stuff I taught you, 'cause when it's all said & done I hope you got your own set of rules to hang onto". Music is an incredible growing organism in this way, nothing is completely unique, it all builds on from what's been done before. "You can judge the whole world by the sparkle that you think it lacks..." That line makes the song for me. People complain about all matter of things, one of my biggest pet peeves at work is when someone will complain about something that they could fix in the amount of time it took them to complain about it. I think that's what the song gets at. There's nothing more dull than the guy that points out how dull everything is. I like the ambiguity of what "When my time comes" means. When my time comes to die? When my time comes to make the world sparkle a little bit more? I don't think it comes to a conclusion & it certainly doesn't have an answer. It's more interesting that way. That's the way life is, the answers don't usually come easy, if they ever come at all. There were moments of dreams I was offered to save I live less like a workhorse more like a slave I thought that one quick moment that was noble or brave Would be worth the most of my life. So I pointed my fingers and shout a few quotes I knew As if something that´s written should be taken as true But every path I have taken and conclusion I drew Would put truth back under the knife. And now the only piece of advice that continues to help: Is anyone that´s making anything new only breaks something else. When my time comes Ohhhhh oh oh oh. When my times comes Ohhhhh oh oh oh. So I took what I wanted and put it out of my reach I wanted to pay for my successes with all my defeats And if heaven was all that was promised to me Why don´t I pray for death? And now it seems like the unraveling has started too soon Now I´m sleeping in hallways and I´m drinking perfume And I´m speaking to mirrors and I´m howling at moons While the worst and the worst that it gets. Oh you can judge all the world on the sparkle that you think it lacks. Yes you can stare into the abyss but it´s staring right back. When my time comes Ohhhhh oh oh oh. When my time comes Ohhhhh oh oh oh. Oh you can judge all the world on the sparkle that you think it lacks. Yes you can stare into the abyss but it´s staring right back. When my time comes Ohhhhh oh oh oh. When my time comes Ohhhhh oh oh oh. I did a lot of hiking in Kauai. There's a lot of mountains & it gets kind of addicting because you want to keep going to see what might be around the bend. The farther up you go, the better the view. Pictures don't do it justice. It makes me wonder why I didn't do more hiking when I was younger, when I had more time. Then again, I never had the chance to be at a place like Kauai when I was younger. I knew at every turn that I'd probably never see anything like it ever again. The song On Up the Mountain by Jakob Dylan kept popping in to my head. "You're old enough to know well, the better things are all uphill. Bitter songs are never sung in the highlands where you belong." I love the way the song starts "you're old enough to know well". Whatever follows that phrase won't be easy to say & it won't be easy to hear, but it desperately needs to be heard & said. It sounds like a father talking to his child at a time when he knows that life won't be as innocent for them as it once was. It's about the journey being more important than the destination. When you're a kid you have a sense of permanence about things, an expectation that maybe things will be the way you want them to be for a long period of time.