Well

I tell everyone about this sooner or later, so maybe it's important. This is one of my favourite songs—which is a rare thing, since I'm not generally one for favourites.

I don't know when I got this album, but I remember when I started really liking the song. In Air Cadets, we had a long squadron trip, usually in March Break, for the first few years I was in. Two years we went down to NAS Oceania in Virginia. The trips were fun - on one occasion we'd hardly got off the bus and formed up when a prototype of the F-35 flew overhead. Pretty cool.

To get to Virginia/Maryland we piled onto two coach buses, 80 or so cadets all in full dress uniform, and drove nonstop for about 14 hours. Needless to say we watched Top Gun about a billion times, and had some interesting rest stops - including Dale City ("If you lived in Dale City, you'd be home right now"), a drive-through beer store and one Denny's that at 2 AM seemed to be entirely filled with non-humans. The atmosphere on the bus was typical of cadets in close quarters—hormonal, noisy, but sufficiently orderly to avoid discipline from the officers.

Anyway, the point is the song. At one point, on the way south on one of the trips, I was sitting listening to music with my forehead leaned against the window. It was around midnight, and nearly everyone else was asleep. The internal lights and TVs on the coach were off. I don't remember exactly what I was looking at. I think the stars were out, and there was a bit of a berm by the road flashing by, and beyond dark fields or woods, and maybe some lights from a town or scattered houses.

I don't know if I felt or thought it, but the song released me, and for a little while I felt bodiless, flying in these wide, glorious arcs over the fields and the lights and up into the sky. The world spread out beneath me to the horizon, shadowy and dark blue and lit with points of bluish-white lights, and I was easy and free in the night air, spinning about just beneath a sky filled with stars. It was a sort of a waking dream, the coach being so still and dark that no sensation distracted me from the feeling of drifting through space.

…

Clearly I've got some work to do on describing it. It was a glorious feeling, and I still get a bit of it every time I hear the song. I've listened to a lot of trance since then, and some of it has that freeing quality, but it tends to be a bit too energetic. The original was more relaxed - not sleepy relaxed, but wonderfully aware. If you've ever slept naked with the windows open on a breezy night, you'll have a sense of what I mean - except it wasn't at all physical. I felt like pure consciousness.

Now Playing: Matthew Good Band - Underdogs - 09 - The Inescapable Us

The day I met you Decay will let you Learn to bend We are better butterflies Meek we get the end It makes me sick It makes me laugh when I shouldn't Kill what I came to keep alive Your turn to spill Now that's fate Looking our way Sparkling Spot hasn't caught on That's fate Stealing away Your sparkling Spot hasn't caught on Hasn't caught on The day we met up It's hard to get up And live it down We are smaller maybe Than what we can't get around It makes me sick It makes me laugh when I look at you Clap while it's kicking us around And what it spills and what it spills And what it spills is Fate Looking our way Sparkling Spot hasn't caught on That's fate Stealing away Your sparkling Spot hasn't caught on Hasn't caught on