Beginning with a sincere and serious PSA...This comes straight from someone who spends a whole lot of time in a Pediatric ICU: If you have the opportunity to be vaccinated against H1N1, please do it. It's not only your own health and life that could be at stake - this one is killing children. Do it for them too.
Back to the regularly scheduled programming...
Dream Out Loud (Doyle/Lamb)
That I'm too afraid to tell.
It's the same old story,
I've come to know it all too well.
I tiptoe down the hallway
Where the deepest hopes reside;
I quietly conceal them all the while
They're the moments you can picture
But we oh so seldom see;
They're the dreams so dear
That we can barely let ourselves believe
That all that we desire
Could be all that we deserve.
But these quiet dreams
So often go unheard.
Y'ou know that wishes can't be whispered
O'er the roaring of the crowd,
So break the silence
And dream out loud.
Amongst a million faces
It's so hard to find a smile,
A line that you can cling to
And hold fast for the night.
And down here among the wreckage
Is no place for the faint of heart,
Where hushed and humbled longings fall apart.
No, wishes can't be whispered
O'er the roaring of the crowd,
So break the silence
And dream out loud.
Where did all the courage go
When I needed it the most?
And the prayer I barely spoke,
It counts for nothing, I suppose.
I should have known...
That wishes can't be whispered
O'er the roaring of the crowd,
So break the silence
And dream...
No, wishes can't be whispered
O'er the roaring of the crowd,
So you break the silence
And dream - you dream out loud.
Oh, dream out loud.
I love this song; I love it with passion and respect, with admiration and pride. If this were the very first song of Alan's I had just stumbled across on some present-day Songwriters' Circle, then everything I thought I was hearing in his songs and all that I believed was true about him back in 2001 would be so much less a matter of thinking and believing and so much more a matter of knowing for sure.
It's been a tumultuous and eventful time recently, so much so that it's still difficult to write around it or through it or even about it. Not that this will stop me from trying.
I found the courage to do something I've longed with all my heart to do for years...twice. It didn't go at all the way I had hoped it would...twice. Though what happened the first time was a walk in the park compared to the result the second time.
I wrestled with and chose between scary medical options - not that it's anything all that huge; I tend to scare easily. Slipping into Lemur Mode again.
I got hurt, bad, the dogged and determined kind of hurt that keeps on coming back at you every time you think you've chased it away for good; just as you get one aspect of it worked through and accepted, another aspect rises up and sinks its teeth into you and the process begins all over again.
I was struck by a lightning-bolt realisation that there actually is a way to write what I want to write without causing a bit of grief to anyone else - liked or loved, disliked or dismissed - a daunting dilemma I've been struggling fruitlessly to resolve for the past five frigging years. It is a brilliant solution that came into crystal-clear focus literally between one footfall and the next, right outside the old CBC Building on a rainy afternoon's walk in St. John's - coming so bloody suddenly and wiildly unexpectedly that I was terrified I'd lose the idea if I went back inside and so I walked and walked and walked in the rain until I got the details sorted out (and got soaking wet too).I said "I understand" to several different people when they went through their individual variations of "I really like you but I can't act like I do when I'm with the friends who've told me they won't let me be part of The Group (whichever of a number of groups it is they see as being The Group...though I suspect the Established Members of each Group are even more convinced that the adjectival article is theirs and theirs alone, that being the rule by which nearly all such Groups operate...not to be judgemental, of course, or rude) if I'm friendly with you and then I'll lose my chance to 'hang with the guys'". Wondering each time with somewhat ironic bemusement why it is so many people unhesitatingly equate "understand" with such substantially different concepts as "agree," "approve," "accept," or "respect." But what else am I supposed to say? I do understand, all too well, sometimes better than they do. It makes me sad and I feel sorry for them, but I also understand.
Oh yes, and I made a decision, a big one. More than a decision, actually, if still somewhat less than a vow. I don't do vows, not really; I believe far too much in free and continuing choice - yet another manifestation of the reciprocity of magic, as far as I am concerned - to be much of a vower or a vowee. So let's call it a promise, then, though I also do not make promises lightly; I don't make them unless I intend to keep them. True for this one as well - it is not made one bit lightly. I have a promise to keep.
Definitely a tumultuous and eventful past month or so. And from the first moment I heard it - at just about midpoint of both tumult and event - Dream Out Loud has been the soundtrack for this time of my life, but not in the accustomed sense of that expression. Usually, we call a piece of music a Life Soundtrack when it makes us think about all that is happening in our own lives as it plays. Not this time, not for me.
I've been playing Dream Out Loud regularly, at the darkest times, the most thoughtful times, the times that have hurt the most - and each of those times I hear it, it makes me think about the Songwriter. Which means I'm not thinking about my own aches and pains. There are times - tumultuous and eventful times, likely as not - when what's best for your own bruised heart, what has the greatest chance of healing your own hurts, is to be thinking about - and sending non-whispered wishes for out-loud dreams to - somebody else instead of yourself.
More photos from the Westhampton Beach Great Big Sea show, these from the latter part of the first set. Again, these aren't the best pictures from this tour leg, but this show was important to me, for all sorts of dogged and determined reasons that don't need to be gone into here.
Starting off with Sean's Mermaid Song ("A sad, sad song" as he has been introducing it of late). I'm going to have to hand Sean the victory here - I have a whole slew of awfully blurry "Mermaid Dance" photos because Sean dances faster than I or my camera can keep up, especially on such a dark stage; if I want to catch what Sean's doing during The Mermaid, I have to resort to video., which I did not do this time. Next time, perhaps. Until then, here are a few photos that did come out fairly well during this persistent crowd-pleaser of a song.
One more note about Sean: He was a real charmer at this show in that spiffy sweater and with the windswept-hairstyle; he looked like the one really sweet guy over at the frat house, the cute fellow all the girls are carrying a torch for, and then he goes and marries some gorgeous, independent-minded gal from another country.
"When I was a lad in a fishing town..."
"I did not like the tail."
Dances With Fish.
"Cause that's how I get my tail."
In many ways, River Driver is the perfect trad song for GBS: The song is solidly rooted iin the tradition of their home, its West-Central-logging-camps origin exposes Mainlanders to a breadth of of Newfoundland folk music beyond songs of the sea, the a cappella nature of the song plays perfectly into the strength and power of GBS's vocal harmonies, and the inclusion of this "rare Newfoundland love song" is a welcome one in a band set list where the presence of such love songs tends to be equally rare . But most of all, River Driver suits them so beautifully because River Driver is them - apt metaphor for their own wandering ways and poignant analogy for their own wistful freedoms. The facts of the lives may differ, but the Truth of River Driver lives on in those who perform it so well.
Featurimg a first view of the most-welcome return of the Beautiful (and much-missed) Belly.
I like ending here, with "Messianic Alan" holding that last note of "Home" as long as he possibly can, Murray's bass rumbling along, the rest of the harmonies rising up on high like a heartfelt benediction, Kris solemnly beating the drum. It's a good place to stop for now. Stop writing, that is. I've every intention of listening to Dream Out Loud again before I head out into today. Such stuff as dreams so dear are made on.
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