She's Eclectic

This song could come out today and hit the top of the charts. It's from 1964.

I have made peace with my ambivalence about Michael Jackson. In my opinion it's OK to absolutely love someone's art and the imagination and emotion behind it, while being disturbed and repelled by the behavior of the human who brought it forth. Somebody who does great things while possessing deep flaws, we call them a "tortured soul." I don't think his soul was tortured. I think it shone through, pure and exquisite, in his creative output. Everything else is the shit that often happens when stuck in a body, in a family, on planet Earth. Doesn't excuse it. But also doesn't negate the reality of the beauty that exists alongside it.

Damn. Sooooooo beautiful.

1000 miles in your car
We’re halfway to LA today
The ones I love know who they are
And the rest all just slip away

I wanna burn the circus tents
I wanna crash your party dress
I want it all to make some sense
But it’s cool if it never does
I wanna be with you on this ride
Rub these wounds and make them shine
I want it all to work out fine
But it’s cool if it never does

Take your hands off the wheel
And throw our clothes out of the window
This is how I want to feel
Is the coast clear
Shifting gear

In a little while we’ll be able to rest
Draw the motel blinds, feel your hands on my chest
And I feel the sweet sound of chains
That fall around my feet

I have felt sheepish about loving this song. His persona is "slightly skeevy rock star who thinks a little too well of himself." But not knowing anything about the performer, the song is heartfelt and sad and lovely. This interview mitigates a bit.

Watching the jets high up sparkle like the stars
We live under a dome that keeps space and earth apart
You were sucked into a cloud and I thought that you drowned
Into the light pollution and never found a way out

Watching the cars paint the highway red and white
My eyes are filled with comets burning warm and bright
In the middle of this commotion I hope that you found
Your way through the light pollution, far away from us

Watching the fog gently take over the street
Penetrating kindly through buildings and me
You were seeking for answers, seeking for anything
Above the light pollution you found a new meaning

Sad that I can't find a video. I love the way this song builds. It came on one night as I was driving out of the Badlands onto Moonlight Rim. The valley lay below, the city's light-jewels spreading out behind dark hills and half obscured in mist.

9/4/2021: Here it is.

This is one of those songs I don't understand why it isn't playing everywhere all the time. I have felt alone in my appreciation of it. It samples little clips of movie dialog throughout the last half. It's so beautiful and tender and emotional. If my name were Violet and my love composed this song I would never get off my pedestal.

I was in living in Miami when this first came out and it's inextricable from my memory of being there. I made myself a wonderful gauzy, drape-y white curtain for the sliding glass door in my bedroom. For some reason it comes to mind when I hear this. The video is terribly cheesy. Maybe I'm jaded from watching Sons of Anarchy, but you can tell his landing was not fatal.

Besides, the song is obviously not about someone who died, but someone who left her.

This is another of those earnest anthems that I buy into wholeheartedly. I'm not much for watching the Olympics, especially in the summer, so I didn't know until recently that it was the closing theme for the 1996 games in Atlanta. 

I feel a surge of hope every time I hear this song. May it be.

Entertainment writer Rashod Ollison described "Bad Weather" as "an obscure Stevie Wonder song [that] boasts a bouncy cosmopolitan production, zipping horns and all, that’s very 1978 but charmingly so." It takes me right back to my early twenties as a woman in a new city, Mary Richards-style. (The city was Minneapolis, even.)

A few years ago, this song played on my iPod at the end of a long drive home from a canoe trip I'd been on with my brother and my nieblings. Canoe trips are wonderful and problematic with my brother, who is very different from me even though we have points of connection that only make those differences that much more painful. The kids, though, are an uncomplicated joy, and they made the trip worth it. As my brother drove into the metro area west of Chicago, a huge thunderstorm started up, and this song came on. I'll never forget the late afternoon sun shining golden beneath the clouds, and the crazy joy I felt at the synchronicity on so many levels.