Lyrics have always been secondary to me---you can have the smartest or most heart-felt words in the world, but if the music sucks I’m not gonna fucking listen to it (the opposite isn’t true, and in fact there is plenty of great music containing no lyrics at all); frankly, before I started writing this blog, I didn’t know some of the specific lines to a number of tunes I loved. That said, incredible writing can certainly catapult a song into one’s memory in a way that instrumental stuff can’t, particularly if the words connect to a certain feeling, situation, or moment in time that links up with your own life or mindset. Often times it’s some short & basic phrase which winds up revealing itself to be a broader existential truth, as is the case with this slice of indie rock heaven from Cleveland mainstays My Dad Is Dead (essentially the work of Mark Edwards, yet another Ohioan working-class hero), laying at our feet a stunningly real declaration of belief in the form of a rhetorical proposition, “…I could spend my whole life figuring out what’s important to me; I could spend my whole life thinking about what matters to me; I could spend my whole life worrying about what's gonna happen to me; I could waste my whole life thinking about just what it is my life means… sometimes what matters doesn't really matter at all, sometimes it doesn't fit inside the big picture; sometimes I need to be just where I am, sometimes I need to know that right here is good enough…” It reminds me of that parable about the three monks huddling around a half-full bucket of water, contemplating the meaning of life: the Confucian monk argues about the bucket being full, filling your life with stuff & accomplishments while the Buddhist monk argues for the paramount worth of said bucket’s emptiness… the Taoist monk, having become annoyed with their endless prattle, kicks the bucket over and walks away laughing. I’m sure I adulterated the finer nuances of this fable, but you get the idea: the moment we stop trying to figure it all out, we actually figure it out…
