The wife and I saw The Decemberists in concert at the Ryman on Sunday night. The timing could not have been better as every time I go see a good concert I inevitably listen to the band on heavy rotation for the next few weeks. And the very day that they played their show the first true day of Autumn decided to sweep into Tennessee.
So I’m at work right now, storyboarding for a new video that I conceptualized, helped write, and am now animating, and who should be providing the soundtrack in my headphones but The Decemberists. I put on The Crane Wife, their album of a few years ago that was pretty excellent. I listened to 9 of the 11 songs before I really paid attention, but as soon as track 10 came on – The Crane Wife 1 & 2 – I had to stop and be a little sentimental.
There are songs attached to memories, song attached to emotions, songs attached to periods in our life or times when we were erasing the preceding period of our life. But this song is something else. As this digital copy of a recording of Colin Meloy’s voice begins to play, I am transported to an unknown place and time in a very concrete season.
The acoustic guitar is the lapping of a bonfire, and as the organ slowly rises in the background I feel the heat from the cup of hot chocolate I’m holding and the fire on my legs. The lyrics are small at first; so is the circle nearby that the fire illuminates and as the lalala’s build at the end I see all the stars above and the blackness around. But most of all, the rhythm of the song, the slow, melancholy tone that it is sung in makes me feel the cold of winter, the dead of the world as it hibernates and holds still for a season.
The return of the crisp, cool air in the evenings this week has been wonderful. Sunday after the concert we walked with some friends to the Walking Bridge and took in downtown Nashville. Last night we sat on our deck with good friends and drank hot chocolate and smoked pipes and enjoyed that we were chilly, reveling in the way the night air actually caused us to shiver and bundle and appreciate the warmth of the house.
After the new year, a few months from now, the winter chill will be at its worst and the grayness of the world will be crushing and every breath will be cut short because of the way your lungs freeze. Then we will once again long for spring, for warmth, for specks of green in a world of browns, and sometime after that those things will arrive.
But this week, right now, there is the first arrival of Autumn and after the lethargy of late summer and the monsoons of the past few weeks the cool air in my lungs is more entrancing than the very best fireworks display on our national birthday. And the Decemberists are doing their part to excite me about the impending chills.